GALATEA RESURRECTS, #1 (A Poetry Review)

ISSUE NO. 1

2006-03-15T07:12:00.000-08:00

March 15, 2006

[N.B. You can scroll down for all articles or click on highlighted names or titles to go directly to referenced article.]

CONTENTS:

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
From Eileen Tabios

NEW REVIEWS
Ernesto Priego reviews HOLIDAY IN TIKRIT by Keith Tuma and jUStin!katKO

Barry Schwabsky reviews GODLIKE by Richard Hell

Thomas Fink reviews BIRD & FOREST by Brent Cunningham

Heather Nagami reviews UNNECESSARY ROUGHNESS by Shin Yu Pai

Mary Jo Malo reviews IMPROVISATIONS by Vernon Frazer

Leny M. Strobel reviews ALCHEMIES OF DISTANCE by Carolina Sinavaina-Gabbard

Yvonne Hortillo reviews THE FIRST HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, Eds. Jean Vengua & Mark Young

Fionna Doney Simmonds reviews A SOLITARY PINE TREE IN SUSSEX by Tim Beech

Jennifer Bartlett reviews LIKE THE WIND LOVES A WINDOW by Andrea Baker

Abigail Licad reviews PINOY POETICS: A COLLECTION OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL WRITINGS ON FILIPINO AND FILIPINO-AMERICAN POETICS, Ed. Nick Carbo

Sueyeun Juliette Lee reviews RED JUICE by Hoa Nguyen

Jesse Glass reviews 4 videos by Ralph Lichtensteiger: “Homing Crows” Ishikawa Jozan; “Sudden Shower” Ishikawa Jozan; “Dancing Ears” Ned Rorem; and “Trace of the Formless” Plotinus.

Tom Beckett reviews 3 books by Linh Dinh: FAKE HOUSE, AMERICAN TATTS and BORDERLESS BODIES

Bill Marsh reviews BABELLEBAB by Heriberto Yepez

Corinne Robins reviews MORAINE by Joanna Fuhrman

Yvonne Hortillo reviews KATIPUNERA AND OTHER POEMS by Elsa Martinez Coscolluela

Laurel Johnson reviews THE OBEDIENT DOOR by Sean Finney

Barry Dordick reviews AFTER TAXES by Thomas Fink

Eileen Tabios reviews TRANSITORY by Jane Augustine

Rochita Loenen Ruiz reviews TRILL AND MORDENT by Luisa A. Igloria

Cati Porter reviews WINTERGREEN by Charles Bennett

Michael A. Wells reviews ATLAS by Katrina Vandenberg

William Allegrezza reviews SKINNY EIGHTH AVENUE by Stephen Paul Miller

Ann E. Michael reviews SNAKESKIN STILETTOS by Moyra Donaldson

Ann E. Michael reviews OPEN FIRE by Aaren Yeatts Perry

FEATURED POETS
Guillermo Juan Parra presents Martha Kornblith

kari edwards presents Rob Halpern

Eileen Tabios presents Carl Gottesman

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS
Rusty Morrison reviews THE AREA OF SOUND CALLED THE SUBTONE by Noah Eli Gordon

Steffi Drewes reviews THE BABIES by Sabrina Orah Mark

Laura Stamps reviews MEMPHIS JACK by Harvey Goldner

Steve Potter reviews TREMBLE & SHINE by Todd Colby

Steve Potter reviews CONCRETE MOVIES by Nico Vassilakis

Allen Gaborro reviews 60 lv bo(e)mbs by Paolo Javier

Anna Eyre reviews VERSO by Pattie McCarthy

Yvonne Hortillo reviews MUSEUM OF ABSENCES by Luis H. Francia

Allen Gaborro reviews A BOOK OF HER OWN: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan by Leny Mendoza Strobel

Laurel Johnson reviews KIOT: SELECTED EARLY POEMS 1963-1977 by Charles Potts

FROM THE EDITOR

2006-03-10T20:03:00.000-08:00

GALATEA RESURRECTS (GR) synthesizes some thoughts as regards poetry, the internet, poetry publishing, and cultural activism. My intentions certainly need not be of concern to readers who may go directly to each review. But if you are interested in the background to originating this new journal, read on...

First, simply, I'd love for poetry to receive more attention within our culture. I hope GR helps facilitate such increased attention.

Second, I was interested in GR being specifically an online publication because online readership is often higher than for many poetry print publications. Relatedly, I wanted to add to the internet data base as regards poetry, given the widespread use of the internet for researching a variety of topics. Moreover, GR's addition to e-data would be accessible long after each issue's release date (I still get queries involving articles that were published in the internet many years ago). Thus, in addition to new reviews, GR is open to publishing commentary previously published in a print publication but unavailable within the internet.

Thirdly, poetry publishing offers a history -- an honorable history -- of poets finding the cheapest ways to publish poems and other poetry-related materials as poetry is rarely financially viable. I am particularly tickled by the example today of, amidst 21st century technology, a stapled, xeroxed publication called MIRAGE #4 (PERIODICAL) co-edited by Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy and often hand-distributed within the Bay Area, CA. In such manner, I consider GR to be my version of an e-xerox or e-mimeo project. Blogger (at least for now) doesn't charge fees (except for its advanced versions) which no doubt relates to why it's become a popular vehicle among contemporary poets. GR is situated within that tradition that, e-wise, also manifests itself in poetry publishers' increasing use of print-on-demand technology as well as various Blogger-hosted magazines. For the former, a favorite example is The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, a poetry anthology co-edited by Molly Arden and Reb Livingston; this book, published by self-described "housewives", is not reviewed in this issue but I consider it one of the most effective examples of an anthology successfully manifesting its expressed premise. For examples of Blogged journals, visit Duplications (Ed. Jonathan Mayhew) and LuzMag (Ed. Lars Palm). This aspect also relates to the "Do-It-Yourself" approach fabulously explored at Shanna Compton's DIY Pub Web Ring.

Fourthly, as regards cultural activism, I go back to the nature of the internet. My intent with GR is partly inspired by the existence of BagongPinay.com founded by Perla Daly and others. These Filipinas founded the site to offset how internet searches for "Filipina" usually comes up with negative myths, mail order bride sites which may be unsafe, porn sites, among other things. Similarly, I and other Filipina poets and scholars recently set up -- via Blogger -- Your Filipina Pen Pal to disrupt internet search results for various phrases related to Filipinas and/or pen pals. In this sense, I consider that boosting data content gratis for profit-making corporations is an acceptable price for longer-term benefits: in GR's case, more attention to poetry in all its forms, schools, approaches and other variety.

GR, therefore, while presenting mostly poetry reviews, is not just about offering a space for boosting sales of reviewed publications (not that there's anything wrong with that result either, of course!).

It's a premise, however, that also makes slippery the way in which I, as Editor, assess the "quality" of submitted reviews. For instance, I passed on one submission (not through the fault of the reviewer's critical or writing ability but because the reviewer was pressed for time to address the book more comprehensively) and confess that I've been considering whether I made a mistake. While the review text was really bare, it did accomplish presenting the existence of a (probably wonderful) book of poems involving horses. Did I miss an opportunity here to place GR within some internet search that would make an equestrian read a book of poems s/he might not otherwise know? I don't know. (I hope that reviewer gets some more free time in the future and we can revisit this issue.)

With its desire to enhance poetry discourse, GR also is open to relatively new critics as well as experienced reviewers whose CVs include such established publications as The Boston Review, Artforum, university press-published critical texts and so on. Basically, I don't want to pre-judge who is a "good" reader of poetry (particularly when I feel a poem can -- not always -- but can be read legitimately in parts). I am grateful to long-time critics who've volunteered their effort with this project, and I hope that this project also will encourage others to engage in more poetry (discourse) in the future.

HOUSEKEEPING DETAILS:
The deadline for submitting reviews for the next issue is May 5, 2006. You can review books you own or ask for review copies sent to us. GR also is open to all styles of reviewing. I accept all forms, though would suggest generally that it's a good idea to provide excerpts of poems to exemplify reviewers' assessments. For more information, go to Galatea's Purse here.

Finally, I am very grateful to all the participants. I honestly would have been happy to get just five reviews, thinking that such would suffice to put out a "publication." This issue inaugurates itself with 25 new reviews of 27 poetry publications and a poetry video, e-reprints of ten reviews previously published in print publications, and a section of three featured poets partly chosen by two guest editors. The gratifying response suggests this venture is a good idea, notwithstanding its sloppy birth during one of my bouts of insomnia -- or a better idea than I even anticipated.

Well then: Let's see! And party!

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
March 15, 2006

HOLIDAY IN TIKRIT by KEITH TUMA and JUSTIN!KATKO

2006-03-05T21:26:00.000-08:00

ERNESTO PRIEGO reviews

Holiday in Tikrit, by Keith Tuma & jUStin!katKO
(Critical Documents, Oxford, Ohio: 2005)
Also published as an uncensored html version in eratio #6.

Holiday in Tikrit, by Keith Tuma & jUStin!katKO, makes things happen. There is an uncanny, abject drive behind this long epic poem: it is as if it were powered by an electric current beyond human control. It works like a dangerous scientific experiment: the signatures behind this piece of work become a collective transfigured in the plural personal noun “we”, making it personal and impersonal at the same time, strange and empathetic in a single stroke.

The small-format chapbook, with a cover photograph of a U.S. soldier [we find out in the inside cover] making a high dive into one of Saddam Hussein’s pools as a Fourth of July celebration, can be described as an artifact, a metaphoric time-bomb if you will. The HTML version indicates Holiday in Tikrit was written “after Bern Porter”, the scientist involved in the development of the atomic bomb later turned artist and poet, but the paper version also includes “after Antonin Artaud/ After François Villon”. A triad of very evocative names, acknowledged as spectral engines propelling this Enola Gay of a poem, a howl for the George W. Bush America, a big, sound, emphatic “fuck you” to the world in the age of post-late capitalism.

The chapbook, as an object, is stranger, more difficult, than the Internet edition, where the poem becomes more “readable” in a traditional sense. As printed matter, both typographic design and the photographs included help give the poem a subversive aura, a more “punk” attitude, where the D.I.Y feel of the edition adds up to a possible intertextuality with the Holiday in Cambodia of the Dead Kennedys. As read on paper, Holiday in Tikrit seems more evidently political, but the self-censorship black bars covering unwanted words and phrases [put there “in deference to the many fine institutions, financial or otherwise, whose monologues blow the long winds of our global theatrics”] make it be something else, almost a different poem, if by poem we not only understand the words –as type- composing it, but the whole process and result of that complex textual circuitry. Because it’s not only the several “fucks” that have been censored, but words like “downloaded”, fact that only comes to light if one compares both versions. The chapbook version of this Holiday in global war-zone is then a continuation of the eratio Holiday, a sort of side-project, a post [but also intra and meta] institutional, public variation of the same theme where what is deleted is still there, as a black block: the celebration of negation; its affirmation as the becoming-meaningful of the denied word.

Differences between the printed and the HTML versions aside, Holiday in Tikrit appears before us unexpectedly, without warning, yelling with silent pain, maybe not unlike the muted loudness coming out of the image of one naked Vietnamese girl. The poem is structured mainly in quartets that are suddenly but fluently broken by a single line. This pattern is used throughout the poem until the final movement, in which all the tension [a very high electric tension, one could say] explodes into a downslide of words, an apparently unstoppable current of words that become known references that become something else. The poem opens:

after the acting up and backing off and the brushing up on
the calling for and calming down and the carrying off
after the clamming up and the chipping in and the coming across
after the coming up against and the counting on and the crossing out

there was nothing left to do but to tell them all to fuck off

A similar pattern will be sampled and remixed all throughout the poem, anaphorically repeating first words of every line [in the quote, the preposition “after”; in later stanzas, the personal pronoun “we”] and using phrasal and two-word verbs in gerund-form as nouns, preceded by the definite article “the”. The obsessive-obsessed usage of the preposition [as the particle that gives special –i.e, metaphoric and idiomatic, signification to a verb] builds the ground for the forceful, reinforcing, long closing off stanza, as well as of those in the middle of the poem, where verbs will defy referentiality to become something else, both political and aesthetic, getting shape from semantic metaphors but also from a very dense, marked alliteration:

we incited the soundtrack to explode in the alleys
we witnessed the street rending open before us
we beefed up and charged in and set it on fire
we chained ourselves to train-tracks in protest of commerce

The poem evolves, grows, warms up globally. The poem becomes, through a repetitive rhythm, a march of death, not with the grave seriousness of the passing trains one could listen in Paul Celan’s poetry, but, in this case, with the smile that becomes a sad grin, the revelation of the ridicule through very subtle irony.

Postmodern in the most positive of senses, Holiday in Tikrit reconciles the poetic and the political from the standpoint of a very acute consciousness of our inability to interfere, to intercede, to interact with and against the situation of the world. There is a sadness here, but also a cynicism, maybe the secret wish for a poetic revolution that would finally pay respect to the likes of Villon and Artaud, that would at last make of poetry a thing that happens, a ticking time-bomb that would not kill but wake from slumber. The poem, then, grows, out of the page, out of its framed stanzas, and by now, towards the end, it has become a nuclear mushroom of phrases, beautiful in its ominous, yet horrifying nature:

fuck us for not being Villon Artaud or Porter
fuck us for a buck and a half if you're lucky
fuck us for being Bubba's liberal rejects not abject enough
fuck us for pawning our dictionaries to rent a cheap hookah
fuck us for seeking safe harbor in fricative mouthwash babble
and fuck you motherless turds for bothering to read this
fuck you fuck you fuck it fuck them fuck us fuck it all

Probably the most used transitive verb in the English language, with a multitude of meanings depending on the preposition used after it, “fuck” is the sign of an emotion, the simplest, yet more complex, reaction to the state of the world after all we have done. But Holiday in Tikrit is more than a big “fuck you”: it wails like an alarm call, a machinery of loaded words, mainly verbs of action, inserting itself in our skin like the sharp spears of an expanding bullet we never saw coming towards us.

*****

Ernesto Priego was born in Mexico City. He holds a BA in English Literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and an MA in Cultural Studies from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. He is a teacher, essayist and poet.

GODLIKE by RICHARD HELL

2006-03-05T21:21:00.000-08:00

BARRY SCHWABSKY reviews

Godlike by Richard Hell
(Akashic Books, 2005)

“In the future,” one reads early on in Godlike, “all poetry will be translation”—a line that, itself, sounds suspiciously like a translation or at least a quotation of or allusion to a text that already exists somewhere (though perhaps not in the work of Mallarmé, whom Hell’s narrator has just been discussing). Even this fact of having a narrator—something that in most writers’ hands is just a blandly self-evident fact of conventional technique—turns out to be something like a fact of translation: Narrator and author paraphrase or reinterpret each other between the lines. This “novel”—Richard Hell’s second, following Go Now, 1996, and the 2001 collection of prose pieces and poetry, Hot and Cold—is hardly written the way a novelist would write it. It is altogether a poet’s work.

What a poet’s novel needn’t be, thankfully, is “well-written.” Nothing here of that neurotic polishing of sentences into bland smoothness that characterizes most of what the publishing industry calls “literary fiction.” This prose, like poetry, moves at the speed of thought and just as awkwardly. Its jangly, nervous, unpredictable music, slipping abruptly between the first person of memoir and a storyteller’s more distanced third person, is thrillingly thin-skinned. Anyone who ever doubted that Hell could achieve with words along something as compelling as what he’s done with words and music together (Blank Generation, 1977; Destiny Street, 1982; Dim Stars, 1992; Time, 2002; Spurts, 2005) will have to think again.

To put it bluntly, Hell has translated the story—maybe it would be better to say, the legend—of Paul Verlaine’s affair with Arthur Rimbaud starting in 1871 into the idiom of scuzzy Manhattan in 1971. The 16-year-old provincial hothead—here called Randall Terence Wode, familiarly “T.”—who arrives in the big city knowing that “to give offense was his mission, his meaning” inevitably recalls the Richard Meyers, as he still called himself then, who turned up in New York at about the same age a few years earlier. But as much as the author of Godlike might have been tempted to see his younger self in the teenaged poet invading the metropolis, he gives the story’s telling (and the reader’s empathy) over to the older married poet, Paul Vaughan, the perplexed witness of this manipulative and unkempt meteor.

“I may be in the loony bin but I am not an unreliable narrator,” Paul insists. His seemingly self-contradictory statement is worth taking seriously. For one thing, the book doesn’t have enough plot to make any tricky narrative devices necessary. The book is compulsively readable but what moves it forward is the urgency of rumination on a series of encounters, most notably of course the fateful one between T. and Paul but not only that one: Figures emerge out of the background and then disappear, their advent being without particular narrative consequence yet of enigmatic spiritual significance. In fact, the question of whether a life-transforming encounter really has any upshot is one that lurks behind the entire book. That eventually T. will have to get bored with Paul, and Paul will shoot his young lover, is a result, not so much of Hell’s formal decision to echo the Rimbaud/Verlaine story, as of internal necessity the lovers have to short-circuit a self-contained dyad that can only keep leaking away emotion as it feeds only on itself. Boredom, in so many words, though articulated with such insistence as to feel deeply sexy.

Yet always there is the possibility that this monotony will flare up with some illumination. “Most of the time we are only a little alive, like a book in an obscure language,” T. tells Paul.” To love someone is to translate them and thereby kindle their life again for a while. Which must be why, as Paul declares, no longer couching his recognition as a prediction for the future but as a present fact, “All poetry is translation!” And Hell has practiced what Paul preaches. When T. tells his anomic friend Catherine that she looks like she’s been out in the sun, “you could almost be someone else, the way your face is like switched on so the…freckles are highlighted,” and she responds, “I am someone else,” the reader must know that Rimbaud’s famous words are being filtered through hers, and hers through his. Likewise, when Paul’s buddy Ted shows him a new poem he’s written, one instantly recognizes it as a transposition of Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster,” as if the fictional poet were unknowingly translating an American poem into another American poem. The whole novel is a tissue of citations, renderings, transpositions, versions. Every life is woven from bits of lives that were lived before. Does this make them less real, or does their reality consist just in this?

*****

Barry Schwabsky is an American poet and art critic living in London. His most recent publication is the chapbook Tephra, from Black Square Editions.

BIRD & FOREST by BRENT CUNNINGHAM

2006-03-05T21:19:00.000-08:00

THOMAS FINK reviews:

Bird & Forest by Brent Cunningham
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005)

The first two-thirds of Brent Cunningham’s debut volume Bird & Forest are occupied by two long, ambitious sequences, the prose-poem “The Orations of Trillius Patronius” and the book’s title-text (including prose-poetry and verse). Cunningham’s unindented paragraphs tend to be short--generally two or three sentences of short and medium length. The single line of white space between paragraphs can be said to function like a stanza/strophe break in poetry or, when successive paragraphs are very brief, like an unenjambed line break. Although I will focus entirely on these two pieces, I should note that the last third of the book includes such successful prose-poems as “The Jellyfish,” “The Future,” and “The Cake,” as well as the concluding single-strophe poem, “The Troubling Volume.”

“The Orations of Trillius Patronius” presents a classical Roman orator who never existed and who sometimes miraculously quotes non-Roman modern writers. If such oratory, at different times, is supposed to dispense philosophical wisdom, call for ethical conduct, including sacrifice during crises, condemn current social tendencies, and present a self (whether through confession or self-justification) to promote virtue, argue for a political position, or gain, regain, or consolidate power, Cunningham brings conflicting aspects of these aims into play in nearly all of the twelve “Orations.” Bakhtinian heteroglossia, including a bevy of double-voiced discourses, results.

Trillius Patronius can trill patronizingly, sing sincerity and authenticity like Columbia critic Lionel Trilling, and (ironically or shrilly) remind his auditors of his and their own patronage. Is he just like a duplicitous DC politician? Unlike them, he can never sustain self-serving rhetoric for long, often moving to a meta-rhetorical gesture: “There is no surprise left in these words. You know the conventions will speak first, and my opinions in the anterior. Furthermore you know I also know these limitations. We know as much as the other knows, which makes it all shameful” (31). But Cunningham’s juxtapositions of moods and rhetorical elements do keep “surprise. . . in these words.” Part of the delight in reading Trillius’ meta-statements is to imagine a Bush or Cheney suddenly ignoring the teleprompter, reaching into the unconscious, and attaining such reckless candor. Also, whereas politicians generally expose their shortcomings to maximize voter sympathy, indicate humility, and stress their positive transformations, Trillius in the “Tenth Oration” does none of this:

My friends, I can hear you whispering. In the halls of this building, buying your steaming piles of beef, I can hear rumors as if they were my own conscience.

Let’s therefore speak directly and plainly, O my community. I will confess to everything tonight, for I have nothing against facing myself.

As you say, I am a hard goat of a man, as tight and unnatural as an apple core. My speeches have never taken anyone by the hand. Especially, they have never invited the stranger to sit by their fire, but are pleased to stand above the audience in robes of impenetrable charm.

Would it kill me to simply say: I have never understood others, my father was in management, and it is 5:15 in the evening? (28)

The “as if” in the second sentence involves a teasing ambiguity: does Trillius take the audience’s “rumors” as proof of his own guilt, or is he complaining about their unwarranted affront to his sensitivity? “An apple core,” though “tight,” is not “unnatural”; the simile tells us nothing about the speaker’s psychic “core.” Trillius’ language may be relatively “direct and plain” enough, but he simultaneously flaunts and criticizes his “speeches’” “impenetrable charm.” If politicians deprecate their own speaking ability to suggest their possession of virtues that are more important for governing, Trillius emphasizes, as no one hoping to overcome disapproval would, his inability to empathize with his fellow citizens, his “solitude” (to the extent that he might dream “of being the village idiot”), and a “self-absorption” and “arrogance” that, evidently, persists. His “father” being “in management” seems an odd excuse for his apartness, especially when a politico could put a positive spin on inheritance of management abilities.

To counterbalance his weaknesses, Trillius offers no redemptive program—only maxims, when, at the end, he mentions “the poet Nicolai Umperto, . . . who did not fear the incoherent as I do,” but “cherished the glint of the ocean as much as the wine in his glass” and “used to say of language that there was finally not much to it” (29). Appreciation of tiniest manifestations of beauty and skepticism about language’s communicative power are valid concepts for an orator to support, but here, the concepts are an after-thought. This confessional oration scores him no points with the audience of “dear friends, malicious enemies, and fellow senators” (12), except for the possible “charm” of elusiveness. Perhaps he uses the backdrop of an audience to soothe himself with complex layers of self-justification, including the final aesthetic “program.”

Various passages in the prose-poem suggest Trillius trying to achieve goals different from mere self-acceptance. In some, venting of a general loathing for humanity seems the aim. Trillius in “First Oration” first accords his audience conventional respect, but soon, “my friends” and “noble listeners” give way to the attitude expressed in the speech’s linguistically plural, rhyming subtitle, “Buenas Nochas, Roaches”: “I have already answered the most despicable of my accusers”; “But it is late, and I must take my leave of you narcissists, bad businessmen, and unsavory actresses-lovers” (11). In “Sixth Oration,” the coda represents cynicism about human relationships’ ethical possibilities: “And so, let me conclude by saying that no person loves except in exchange for love. . . . What do we have, my friends, except the question: Who stood to gain?” (21-22).

Nevertheless, Trillius, who frequently refers to military dangers facing his nation but continually defers consideration of them, is occasionally depicted as suspending exigencies of personal gain, self-absorption, and misanthropy enough to speculate on possibilities of sustaining democracy, a theme currently of great import in the U.S. In “Fourth Oration (On Democracy),” an aura of fatalism, mixed with cynicism and bloviated overgeneralization, impedes his attempt “to reason together” with his listeners about this issue, yet the melioristic dream remains. For him, “immortality is the great obsession of democracy,” because “it knows very well how things can turn out” and “knows you”—the “citizens”—“are the most compromised and calculating of beings” (17), susceptible to tyranny’s lures. Admitting that many social matters were solved by superstitious procedures before democracy’s advent, Trillius tacitly acknowledges rationality as a very imperfect improvement:

Before our empire was founded, decisions were being made using the lightning, swords, and birds of the natural surroundings. A rock was wrapped in a cloth, and hurled into the canyon.

Things are different now. But how are they different? We find that the rock is now covered with mirrors.

My friends, the individual falls with her country. Isn’t it true that she can see power falling alongside her, in its most murderous and noble intentions, and meanwhile cannot see herself fall?

Democracy only pities itself. . . .

Today democracy bleeds, cries, and expands itself. Every day of its young life it declares itself more scientific than the last, its instruments the very genetic instruments it so deplores.

Nevertheless the ballots are distributed. Calm, in a gentle rain of numbers, pervades the voting area. . . .

And so we find, shall we say, that a system without flaws is not a system. The mind can see democracy lying to itself. And it can feel the feelings of pleasure and superiority. (17-18)

The trope of the “rock . . . covered with mirrors” suggests that people’s narcissism can dilute or even smother democracy, but, along with the repeated personification of the concept, it also reflects the speaker’s strange way of splitting a political idea from its origin in human minds. How could a conceptual “rock” exist outside its representability in terms of human interactions? Only individuals with democratic ideals could be “obsessed” with the “immortality” of democratic praxis.

And yet, the personification raises the idea that human beings can design a version of democracy that serves relatively few and oppresses many. In mentioning “our empire,” Trillius reminds us that Rome’s prosperity was based on conquest and enslavement; U.S. democracy’s economic success can be tied, not only to slavery and patriarchal domination, but to imperialist practices. Thus, democracy’s self-expansion through war and commerce is not always a good thing, or not entirely so; its “scientific. . . instruments” may serve domination. As in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, the “calm” of “voting” masks how “democracy” can be “lying to itself.” However, included in Trillius’ discourse is the possibility of “the mind” uncovering this lie and, rather than feeling “pleasure and superiority,” combating the tendency and working out some of the “system’s” “flaws” by expanding access to its benefits. Realization of “pure,” limitless, “flawless” democracy seems impossible to conceive, but Trillius’ rhetoric here provides a choice of whether to embrace fatalism and cynical individualism or to try to make democratic collectivity steadily more inclusive.

The acute self-awareness characterizing “The Orations of Trillius Patronius” is given even greater play in “Bird & Forest,” since the latter text is nine pages (or 1 ½ times) longer. The title-text begins with “Truth is the Flaw,” an enigmatic, four-couplet lyric about a warning bell “daily rung by idiotes” and featuring mangled spelling and syntax. This concentration on the interplay of accuracy and error is followed by “Preface to the Bird & Forest,” which establishes, in a deadpan tone, a fundamental dramatic situation, the image that mysteriously came to obsess the speaker in the midst of a boring day:

We presume there is something to understand. If we understand it, we say, we will be satisfied.

The date was November 24, 2001. A warm, bright day. Seeing how everyone is asked to do something, I was doing something. Around me, rows of people walked through a massive, windowless building, without air or light, between displays of books. It was difficult to stay awake.

During the early afternoon, there appeared to me the image of a bird approaching a forest, then flying into it. In front of and behind the bird, a crooked, faint, illuminated shaft marked the path of its flight.

Later, I determined there were three components to this image: the forest, the bird, and the route of its movement.

What was there to understand about this image? Wasn’t it like every other one to appear in the history of images? Nevertheless I remembered it.

At least a month passed. Time was moving along. I had drawn a few pictures of birds flying through trees. If there was something to understand, I was happier not to perform that task. (38)

“November 24, 2001,” which might be the day that Cunningham began the poem, was a little over two months after 9/11; it was also the day that “two fast-moving coronal mass ejections (CMEs) struck Earth’s magnetic field” and spawned “Northern Lights” in the U.S. and “Southern Lights” “in New Zealand and Australia (http://www.spaceweather.com /aurora/gallery_24 nov01.html). In addition, a tornado killed people and destroyed homes in Mississippi and Alabama on that day (http://www.tornadoproject.com/past/pastts01.htm). Indeed, the image of the bird’s flight could be interpreted either as an occasion for the aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty or a violent act or an existential gesture or many other things. The desire “not to perform [the] task” of understanding—which does not stop Cunningham from producing an eighteen-section text with such blatantly hermeneutic (Wallace Stevens-influenced?) section-titles as “Principle of the Forest,” “Principle of the Bird,” “Notes on the Two Principles,” “Part 2: The Exact, Exact Bird,” “5 Maxims of the Bird & Forest” (And Forest),” “5 Axioms of the Bird & Forest,” and “Footnote to the Abdication”—may be rooted in the sense that our presumption that “there is something to understand” is fatuous, because severe overdetermination attends every conversion of image into trope or image into narrative frame: “The bird is everything! The forest is everything! Your [feeling] is what is nothing! Your [religion] is what is nothing!. . . Your theory [itself] is nothing of itself!” (58).

When the image is a depiction of an action, overdetermination also haunts the tracing of that action to a motive. The situation’s instability is underscored by the fact that three successive sections, each termed “Description,” displace some of the particulars of the opening narrative with a different setting, the most extreme being “a ditch” in which the speaker awakens (42). Obsession, of course, is not going to be deterred by awareness that interpretive action is futile: “In its cruelty the mind demands two contradictory things: to hear itself and to escape itself” (50). “Abdication,” in fact, uses an elaborately formal set of assertions to parody the supposition that one can achieve total detachment from one’s vital concerns, and especially from the will to interpretation: “I abdicate my bird, my forest,/ my right to speak of it/ my right to know it is mine/ my right to be known by it/ and to see its implications” (64).

Instead of “abdication,” and alongside allegory about the orphaning of the signifier from the signified and about a tortured, self-conscious inability to shake free of nostalgia for stable symbolic meaning, in “Bird & Forest,” conjectural play with multiple narrative/interpretive possibilities (that one knows are fictions) permits some investigation of the complexities of desire, will, and response to environmental conditions. “Principle of the Forest” begins: “The forest has no principle to begin with. If we decide to have our bird stand for human speech, the forest will grow an auditory canal, a middle ear, a cochlea. If we prefer our bird to be the soul, the forest will leaden and concretize itself” (43).

“Bird & Forest” features relatively few images of war or violence, often juxtaposed with very different images or abstractions, but, because the date of “November 24, 2001” appears near the beginning, and because the notion of haunting is central to the work, a reader would naturally consider these passages in the context of 9/11: “Meanwhile the government defends itself” (47); “It was blood and phlegm that came from that dilapidation, more than their economy, contained in their actual bleeding and being put into actual vehicles, at all hours” (52-53). In a single section, a few paragraphs apart but separated by a meditation on artistic production and language, are a passage that could refer to the terrorists’ suicidal collision with the Twin Towers (and new suicide bombers ready to take their place) and one that strengthens the tropological link between bird and airplane: “In short, I understood: the bird had died in its flight, while another had taken its place. . . . My bird, my forest. How they sickened and excited me. Then a new set of concerns came along, new technologies, a new lease on life. Metal sides, rubber wheels, metal feathers, glass windows, bridges, roads, floats, tunnels. The flyer entered a forest mechanical” (54). Even if the bird’s death could mean the inability to hold a precise image in mind for long and “new technologies” could indicate a positive force, not a reference to WMDs, it is difficult not to think of the lethal airplanes as a referent for “metal feathers.” Also, “bridges, roads,” and “tunnels” are obvious targets for a terrorist attack. Direct reference to 9/11, again, interspersed with different concepts and images, occurs in the text’s very last section, “Epilogue to the Bird & Forest”:

A wife leaves her husband. A plane flies into a building. A belief enters a state of doubt. A person tries to know something. A person climbs from a ditch. An empire invades its ruins. A madness goes through a sphere of order. An order goes through a sphere of madness. A husband leaves his wife. A woman finds herself in a forest of phalluses. A person is lost. A person sees glimpses of light. Images fly through images. A creature flies through the woods.

We are taught: experience, then emotion, then thought. But what do we practice?

The day was July 28, 2003. A warm, bright day. (67)

The text’s “action” announces its enclosure within a less than two year interval, a time of war, beginning and ending, ironically, with “a warm, bright day.” In the first two of the simple, declarative sentences in the long paragraph above, a jarring juxtaposition of domestic departure and terrorist arrival sets a tone for disjunction that also invites the making of connections. One “belief” entering “doubt” is the illusion of U.S. invulnerability. “Bird”-citizens have entered a “forest” of insecurity; this is reinforced by the interchangeability of directions of change in the binary “madness/order.” Alluding to the Beckettian place from which, in one version, the speaker first saw the bird’s flight, “the ditch” may signify not only paralyzing doubt from which someone strives to “climb” but also Ground Zero’s ditch, once the destruction was cleared away. The strange reference to “empire” and “ruins” is multiply legible: the U.S. administration plunders (capitalizes on) 9/11’s devastation to justify an imperialist project (beyond legitimately fighting terrorism); it seeks to make persuasive media “images fly through images.” Islamic fundamentalist leaders, whose patriarchal ideology puts women “in a forest of phalluses,” ransacks the fact of many Moslems’ economic “ruins” to expand their antidemocratic “empire.” The arrow from “experience” to “emotion” to “thought” may be logical, but Cunningham’s speaker is right to wonder “what. . . we practice,” because “Bird & Forest,” like the book in general, continually questions bases for articulating what constitutes “experience,” “thought,” and their complex interplay.

*****

Thomas Fink, Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia, is the author of two books of criticism, including A DIFFERENT SENSE OF POWER (2001), and three books of poetry, most recently AFTER TAXES (Marsh Hawk, 2004). His work has appeared in JACKET, VERSE, TALISMAN, CHICAGO REVIEW, DENVER QUARTERLY, x-Stream, MORIA, MILK, AUGHT, OCTOPUS, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE, AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, and numerous other journals and ezines. Fink's paintings hang in various collections.

UNNECESSARY ROUGHNESS by SHIN YU PAI

2006-03-05T00:29:00.001-08:00

HEATHER NAGAMI reviews

Unnecessary Roughness by Shin Yu Pai
(xPress(ed), 2005, available through lulu.com)

Playful, technical, deadpan, grave, precise, dynamic, daring—these are all words that came to my mind while reading Shin Yu Pai’s chapbook, Unnecessary Roughness. From playground dodgeball to bodybuilding, Unnecessary Roughness is a unique exploration of how physical activities shape our roles in society, our senses of self, and our sexualities. A skilled poet and visual artist, Shin Yu Pai utilizes her creative faculties to their fullest.

What struck me in the opening pages of Unnecessary Roughness was Pai’s recognition of the book’s physicality—its own identity as a work on paper—not just ideas, but a self-conscious visual creation. The first two pages offer diagrams of two familiar sites: four square and dodge ball. Each is partially a diagram (four squares, a circle), and partially a written poem. The former conjures feelings of both familiarity and disorientation (i.e. “Yes, I remember this,” and “What, I’m in a poem?”) with the added benefit of Pai’s embellishments, which include two concentric circles in the dodge ball diagram, instead of just one, eerily resembling a bull’s-eye. The latter, the words on the diagram, are an interesting mix of familiar playground put-downs (e.g. “scaredycat” and “baby”) and the more obviously consequential “fag” and “pussy” (7). These are mappings of hierarchies, the origin of names, and the nature of childhood socialization.

Pai commands great precision over her words and also her word processing software. In “square it up,” words and phrases trickle down the page diagonally, backward, and forward, resembling trails where a child might have run during a four square game. As a four square alumnus myself, this all looked too familiar, until I read the text, “bobbling,” “chicken feet,” and “serving bitch,” which I only later found (through some research on Google) to actually be technical Four Square terminology (6). Did Pai remember these terms from grammar school? Or is she, too, a Google researcher? I had to wonder. However, no matter how she might answer, this alien language pointed to a community that was more complex and intricate than I knew. This feeling resonated with Pai’s remapping of my own childhood memories.

While Pai uses her word processor’s palette freely, she also demonstrates the limitations of such a palette. Exclamation marks separate the vertical lanes in a swimming pool diagram in the poem, “wet area.” Judging by the imprecise spacing, I do not think that Pai used tabs; so I imagined her typing something like this: exclamation point, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, exclamation point, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, two-character word, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, space bar, exclamation point. This is a hands-on, laborious piece that speaks to the boundaries created within a societal system that stunts and discourages personal growth and creativity.

In Unnecessary Roughness, Shin Yu Pai exposes the grim realities that await us under the guise of children’s games and sports. The three poems I have discussed represent only a small portion of what I found in this truly unique chapbook. Pai uses a full and diverse range of poetic devices that, along with the integrated visuals, demonstrates her devotion to the arts. This is the first piece I’ve read by Pai, and I’m hooked.

*****

Heather Nagami's first book, Hostile, was published by Chax Press in 2005. Heather earned her B.A. in Literature/Creative Writing at U.C. Santa Cruz and an M.F.A. at University of Arizona, where she also taught poetry and edited Sonora Review. Her work has appeared in Antennae, Rattle, Shifter, and Xcp (Cross-Cultural Poetics). Along with her fiancé, Bryan, Heather runs overhere press, a small press that published chapbooks by people of color and other underrepresented voices.

IMPROVISATIONS by VERNON FRAZER

2006-03-05T00:28:00.000-08:00

MARY JO MALO reviews

IMPROVISATIONS by Vernon Frazer
(Beneath the Underground Press, 2005)

SAY WHAT

I've encountered many poetics pedagogues, but the bottom line is always subjective. We enjoy what moves us, not what we think should move us. Vernon Frazer’s IMPROVISATIONS is my new outlaw book of poetry. It violates every misconception of what poetry and language are -- a deluge of sound and fury, signifying nothing. IMPROVISATIONS, as a narrative of self, other, and being, seems to be meant more for reading than hearing. If you're familiar with his voice, however, you can hear him reading it to you. But, in which order, and with whom? That is the point. Is he speaking in an unknown language, using words that we only thought we understood? I get caught up in his gentle grip, questioning everything, loving the ambiguity and the absurdity.

Phenomenology, epistemology, and the post-modern view of language and self, permeate much of the work of poet Vernon Frazer. Deconstruction of language itself, for the purpose of enabling communication between the poet and audience, only seems oxymoronic.

Projective verse and philosophy of language are a natural fit, and when Frazer so utterly and fearlessly puts forth, he is a forerunner, not of any particular post-modern literature, but as an example of how he, individually, approaches the quagmire of "meaning" in a poetic form. His essence and existence continually outrun one another for primacy. His projective verse subverts my attempt to create any meaning. Follow his flow to the end and see the state of communication, not a state of the union. Has language become a forerunner of meaning? Which style, which medium, font, form or technology is relevant?

What Frazer seems to have discovered for himself is that language whether spoken as spontaneous prosody, or its polar opposite, usually fails as transitive communication. Frazer holds interesting and provocative words as shades of color. What does color mean? His life experience has been deeply contemplated. When he begins to paint with his words, like say Jackson Pollock, he runs ahead of himself, or is that alongside himself? Words are subliminally brought forth from the living museum of his own unique mind. So which comes first? What is essence or existence? Is there potential wholeness of being? Are there any categories, or even relevant questions? Does the manifestation of any collection of words and images have to mean anything at all to anyone? What is the point of communication through art? Is a human being anything other than an instrument of expression? Expression of what?

Even seeing his glossolalia is to grasp the moebius of communication. And then, I'm rendered nearly speechless, an effect of reading aloud his many words: I fade into a numb silence. He understands the futility of most of what passes for talking and writing. The body, the tongue as instruments? The point of poetry? The point of speaking? The point of communication? Everything and nothing.

Spontaneous, obviously. Simultaneity, hoped for. Subcutaneous, definitely.

For me life as art (or art as life, life as life, or art as art) is the body expressing a mind full of words and images, provided by others and projected back into the world of others, each of whom has a mind full of other words and images. Connections are rare and transitory. We behold individual bodies, but we refuse to accept that individual minds are entangled in those individual bodies. We hope we can communicate ideas as if they could transubstantiate into water, earth, air and fire. It only seems that words can take us out of our bodies, into an imagined place of collective understanding. When words become as substantial as the body from which they're uttered, well then, I might believe anything is possible. Strange though, words do sustain me from time to time, almost as if they are bread and roses.

For me, Frazer's work is the improvisation of his life. Many poets are afraid to improvise, afraid to reveal themselves to themselves, let alone to the world. Many poets simply dabble. I feel that in the short span of one's existence, one doesn't have time to dabble.

*****
Vernon Frazer has published eight books of poetry and three books of fiction. His most recent works are the long poems Avenue Noir and IMPROVISATIONS, the now-completed work which he introduced in his 2001 reading at the Poetry Project.

*****

Mary Jo Malo describes herself as a continuing undergrad in the School of Hard Knocks. Her C.V. is that she was born in 1949; in and out of foster homes for 18 years; newly separated from husband of nearly 40 years; proud mother of seven; extensive researcher of world religions and philosophy. She worked as a sales, marketing and advertising coordinator for a manufacturer of large electrical power apparatus. In 1993 she was disabled in an auto accident in the Rocky Mts. of Colorado. Never fully recovered and forced into early retirement, she’s had an abundance of time to pursue her favorites, poetry and philosophy, cosmology and evolution. These days as novice to modern and post-modern poetry, she’s been delighted to discover the Beat and post-Beat writers, among many others. While hoping she has miles to go in her adventure,and appreciating every poet and critic who takes time to talk with her as she seeks to better express her own voice, Mary Jo Malo finds now herself in good company. She is also the host and moderator of Company of Poets, a poetics mailing list/discussion group.

ALCHEMIES OF DISTANCE by CAROLINE SINAVAIANA-GABBARD

2006-03-05T00:27:00.000-08:00

LENY MENDOZA STROBEL reviews

ALCHEMIES OF DISTANCE by Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard
(Honolulu,Hawaii: Subpress/Tinfish / Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, 2001)

It was in the midst of big sky, open space, and the dead of winter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming that I first became aware that I am an Island Girl. In that place the dark mood and unknown fear that enveloped me was inexplicable. How can this natural beauty be emotionally devastating?

Looking at a map years later, I stare at the small space that My Islands inhabit compared to the size of the North American continent. The Islands are shaped like a gura in a kali pose or perhaps even a dancer in mid-air as she jumps over clapping bamboos. Did I really come from one of those 7,100 islands?

As a child, I wasn’t taught to think of myself as living on an island. Words like “archipelago,” “islands,” didn’t mean much to a child whose perception of the sky is as limitless as her imagination. As I lay on my back watching the clouds, I made up stories while the clouds shift-shaped in slow motion. In that stillness, I felt the Earth move and melted into the mystery of it all.

As an adult hearing words like “island fever,” the apologetic tone of folks who said they are “from the Islands,” and the patronizing gaze of the one who exclaimed: I just love the Philippine Islands! didn’t make sense to me until I sat in the shadow of the Grand Tetons wondering why I missed My Islands.

Alchemies of Distance by Samoan American poet Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, came to me as a gift at a time when I was reflecting on the awareness of distances, accidents of geography, and the latitudes and longitudes of emotions as they are stretched by the postcolonial experience.

Poetry as Oxygen.

Gabbard is also an Island Girl who traverses maps and terrains of all kinds. Through Poetry she discovers the alchemical consequences of distances traveled: islands to continent, past into present into a possible future. She writes of the “moving line of poetry” which captures the voices, the breaths, songs that are capable of compensating for the losses under colonialism. Poetry as a lifeline. Plus “Polynesian navigator DNA genes plus a few stray from the European side.” Colonialism and its partner, patriarchy, is the ocean on which her lifeboat must remain stable and safe. Poetry keeps her from falling off the boat.

“…distances -- of the space, time, or heart – can be transformed by poetry (via the breath) into deeper proximities, other ways of being connected” (12).

I am interested in these “other ways of being connected” and I find affirmation in Gabbard’s acknowledgement that in spite of her literary/academic credentials her first mentors remain her parents and the talk story traditions of the Samoan culture. Samoan epistomelogy crisscrosses with her inspiration from other favorite poets like Charles Olson, T.S. Eliot, Bob Dylan, Seymour Glass plus lessons from Tibetan Buddhism -- all demonstrate the possibility of a writer’s life for colored girls (18).

Departure

The first four poems in this section give soft glimpses into an Island girl’s life: In “Granny,” her Samoan Granny who married an American sailor raises three kids by herself without a widow’s pension from the US Navy because he had a wife and kids in Oklahoma. But we all turned out okay anyway, Granny, thanks to you and the good man you raised up as a son and the woman he married (34).

Island Girl grows up: In paradise rejected (35), she rejects her white, middle class, suburban existence when she realizes that the real action is /just across beale street from the colored folks’ houses/where zora neale might have consorted w/high john de conquer & john henry/where I needed to be (36). In the next poem, untitled (37), her sorrow is palpable as the mossy boulders of marriage threaten to keep her boat from moving on; she does anyway with a cloud trail, a banyan and sage for road signs. She discovers the Buddhist principle of No Expectations in pilgrim’s progress (38)

Farewell, Expectations and False Hope!
on second thought, don’t fare well. fare badly. fall
& break your wily neck.
…
maybe i’ll be someone else entire/& entire?
whose exact nature eludes; some hybrid beast?…

Perhaps it is the familiarity of these themes in my own life that makes me admire Gabbard’s poems. As a postcolonial subject, I know the unmooring that begins in the psyche much earlier than the actual geographic displacement from island to continent, from a bland suburban existence to impossible dreams of return. Distances that elude firm grasp of the hope of a lasting embrace. I need not belabor the colonial history of My Islands here; suffice it to say that we share a map of the evening sky with other Pacific Islander navigators.

Malaga/Traveling Party

All of the poems, but one, in this section were all written in Samoa during the late 1980s and early 90s. Many of the poems reference indigenous Samoan figures including the invocation of the powers of Nafanua, the warrior goddess and heroine in Samoan legend and Tina/Mother in Sa Nafanua (43)

your heart moves our blood
your hand steers our boat
and plants us like seeds in the new
land/sing for us Tina.

The Samoan word for family ghosts is aitu; in Filipino the word for ancestral spirits is anitu/o. In the poem, Afiafi (47)

and then, only aitu afoot now
their favorite hour & mine
for marginal beings to patrol our borders,
leaving all others to cluster
indoors, to pray/to wash/to feed
& beckon us hurry into lamplight.

…reminds me of the stories I heard in childhood about anitos and other ghosts trawling at dusk for children who refuse to come in from an afternoon of play. I am the little girl of six folding to sit at grandpa’s legs for evening prayer in ianeta’s dance (49).

Even War news (50) travels to the remote Samoan island and disturbs a congress of chickens and a brown hen teaching wee chicks the art of pecking coconuts from the half-shell…

LAST NIGHT, AN AMERICAN WARSHIP SHOT DOWN
A PASSENGER AIRLINER OVER THE PERSIAN GULF.

290 PEOPLE DEAD. PRESIDENT REAGAN DECLINES TO COMMENT, VICE
PRESIDENT BUSH DECLINES TO ISSUE APOLOGY.

As if needing reprieve from the news of war, may your sleep be blessed (52) is a prayer for her warrior sisters* and married to the moment (54) values the need to surrender to the moment.

According to theories of travel**, traveling can either be playful and unplayful depending on the direction of one’s travel. North to South is playful. South to North is unplayful. In an/other way, however, Gabbard invokes a sense of rootedness that allows her to travel in a Buddhist-sort of manner of no expectations -- in which case, playful or not, travel just is. Nonetheless, such non-expectation is often what opens up the world to us, including the unexplored realm of Memory: of names, places, and events that are rooted in the Land. Island. Island of Lamentations.

Tagi/Lament

maybe you died of disgust, uncle/
the sight of all this expensively-crafted trash:
decorator throw pillows in slick island motifs/
the colors of vomit.(60)

The poems in this section are elegies for the psychic and physical destruction visited upon the land and its peoples: clumps of pathos/fake tapa & Hawaiian deities air-brushed on tanks & tees (59); the tyrant’s hand imprinted there/on your dagger & gown (61); suicide at 20 (63). Yet, the poet does not surrender easily; she raises a fist of protest in rewriting the “star strangled banner” in the most recently-written (presidents’ day 2001) poem in the book, on form & content, or: slouching toward texas (65).

o say can you see that the
ramparts we watch are so
gallantly streaming/with
the blood of children/their
small offshore fingers weaving
color in the garment factories
….
w/ the blood of our own
children in lockup/in the
hood/or on the corner/ in
….
o say can you see
the bright dance of Kali
in the dawn’s early light?

Alchemies of Distance wouldn’t be the gift that it is if it had ended on Lament. Indeed, it ends with Reunion -- four poems celebrating other indigenous peoples: Maori, Haitians and Cubans, Hawaiians. Felicity. Endurance. Survival. Hope. For seven generations and more.

Nowadays I can sit on the slope of a mountain in Aspen enjoying the wild columbine and visit with my mother in the Islands all in the same moment. Wittgenstein’s lesson on epochal change calls for this return to alchemy where we let go of the mind’s language games -- thinking, understanding, perceiving, and other mental processes -- so that we may recover and renew the inner life that calls to us via ritual. Poetry as a Ritual of traveling across and through perceived borders could indeed be the lifeline for an Island Girl like me.

----

* This poem is dedicated to “Ria and the African-German sisterhood”
** See Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” in Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (pp.390-402) (Aunt Lute Books, 1990).

*****

Leny Mendoza Strobel is Assistant Professor of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University. She is the author of Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans (2001, Giraffe Books) and A Book of Her Own: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan (2005, Tiboli Press). Her scholarly work and creative nonfiction essays appear in various books, academic journals, and online ezines. She welcomes comments here: strobel@sonoma.edu.

THE FIRST HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, Ed. by JEAN VENGUA & MARK YOUNG

2006-03-05T00:24:00.000-08:00

YVONNE HORTILLO reviews

THE FIRST HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, Edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young
(Meritage Press, 2005)

Spaces and the things they occupy:
Reading "The First Hay(na)ku Anthology"

Sometimes when there's so much going on in one's mind, there is a tendency to be brief and curt but well-meaning in one's speech.

You
and I
should get together.

Maybe
we will
fall in love.
(Tom Beckett, "Dear Reader,")

Being succinct takes courage -- one's skill in communication is tested by conveying entire messages and landmark life stories in ten nanoseconds or less. This skill is handy in busy offices, big cities and harvest season. One has to be skilled in counting time and picking details.

my mother tells
me i
suffer

because i'm not
plain like
her ...

she can hide
from evil
but

i can't i
try i
really

try but i
see my
neighbor

watching me story
of my
life.
(Nicholas Downing, "because")

All great stories are the result of great obssessions -- like the form hay(na)ku by Eileen Tabios. To celebrate the 2003 Philippine Independence Day, she decided to use a passing fixation on counting and her recent reading of Jack Kerouac's opinion on American haiku to invent the Pinoy Haiku. She announced it on her Winepoetics blog and many poets responded.

Fellow poet Vince Gotera wanted to bring out that a Filipina had invented the "one-two-three" word tercet form; he suggested that instead of alluding to the haiku, the form be renamed to reference the very Filipino expression, "hay, naku" used to convey elation, dismay, and other contexts. Tabios agreed.

The form has attracted poets around the world, with the majority of contributors to The First Hay(na)ku Anthology being non-Filipino. In any event, all use the form to grasp that elusive entity called Poetry.

Nothing
adds up.
Love isn't math.
(Dan Waber, untitled)

*****

Yvonne Hortillo is an editorial assistant for The Associated Press. She has never owned a business card in her life. She has crossed the Chicago River countless times, and is fated to cross it untold times more. She adores truth in all forms.

LIKE THE WIND LOVES A WINDOW by ANDREA BAKER

2006-03-05T00:23:00.001-08:00

JENNIFER BARTLETT reviews

like the wind loves a window by Andrea Baker
(Slope Editions, 2005)

Andrea Baker is shopping around for a new reading style. This would be a mistake. When some people hear Baker read, I suppose they might worry that her voice is too quiet. One must focus carefully in order to grasp her intonations. Yet, the way Baker reads her poems is completely keeping with the spirit in which the work was written: a sparse, lyrical dreamstate.

While Baker’s poems do have a narrative, as with all excellent poetry, it’s not one that comes easily. The language is not only quiet, but insists that the reader/listener be quiet enough to assign meaning to it. Baker’s “topics” -- a term I use very loosely here – are ones which effect readers at one time or another: the ideas of various kinds of love, loss, and home. To these things, Baker lends her particular voice.

What works best in Baker’s poems is a heightened sense of imagery. Sometimes, as with “House,” which is partially composed of drawings, the imagery is quiet literal. Other times, it is Baker’s finely tuned sense of seeing: she sees a “historical blue/machine gun sky,” “a human head composed of leaves,” and “a rabid cat ran from a rabid dog, laughing.” While Baker does, at times, rely on the surreal, she is not trapped in “hipness” of it. Her images, while odd, are in no way oblique; we can see them, and perhaps we have.

From a personal standpoint, I relate to Baker’s ambivalence regarding marriage and motherhood. The poet has a desire to buy the artichoke because she wants “that type of intimacy.” Her “house” is one that is warm and safe, but like all ours, is not without complications. It is a place where “the center room was surrounded/by other rooms/so it had nowhere to go.” An exact, literal description of Baker’s apartment, but also a seemingly good metaphor for the comfortable, but oft trapped feeling that we refer to as family. Something to which, “the surrender is immeasurable.” She has a desire to expand the definition of motherhood, and to question it.

In the current poetic climate where lyrical is a four letter word, Baker dares to be just that. I find that many of the new generation of poets, and their publishers, often veer away from any true lyricism in their work at the risk of being labeled sentimental. Baker takes such a risk.

*****
Jennifer Bartlett’s work has appeared in How2, Ratapallax, smallspiralnotebook, and First Intensity. She is a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She is co-editor of Saint Elizabeth Street. Her first collection of poetry, Derivative of the Moving Image, is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press.

A SOLITARY PINE TREE IN SUSSEX by TIM BEECH

2006-03-05T00:23:00.000-08:00

FIONNA DONEY SIMMONDS reviews

A Solitary Pine Tree in Sussex by Tim Beech
(Pighog, 2005. PO Box 145, Brighton, BN1 6YU, UK)

Skating warily between the often conflicting religious feelings of modern society, A Solitary Pine Tree in Sussex links spirituality with nature as Tim Beech searches, ponders and questions their relationship in his poetry. Breathing life into poetry resonant with meaning, he gently questions what is important to us in this day and age.

By disguising spirituality as nature, Beech has mastered a method of subtly raising awareness about our modern beliefs. In "The Praise Singer," a humble holly bush becomes a religious symbol. Emphasizing the battle between nature and machinery the poem illuminates the struggle religion has had to adjust itself, to redefine its message as the world has progressed and other concerns have vied for equal or greater importance:

Dark leaves glazed with sweat and difficult,
Berries the hard-won blood of forgiveness
Pointing towards grace or the idea of grace.

Memory, part-recovered, part-revealed
Of forged iron, wood and the struggle for meaning.

The line, "Of forged iron, wood and the struggle for meaning" suggests a period of industry, factories and blinding consumerism, while "Dark leaves glazed with sweat and difficult, / Berries the hard-won blood of forgiveness" offers one explanation as to the jaded nature of people towards a sense of absolution. "Berries" is a clever suggestion of ‘buries’ and turns the line from berries emphasising the colour of blood/wine and symbolising Christ’s Last Supper to aurally burying the words of forgiveness for which Christ sacrificed himself for humanity. The final lines "From the black-rainbow reflection of sump oil / To dead leaves at the foot of the holly / Shaping precisely the edge-tool of words." lead us back to the image of the Praise Singer, the Prophet or Priest whose struggle to remind us of our need for redemption and duty of Christian Charity falls upon deaf ears, like the leaves of the holly bush that bloom then fade to become dust beneath our feet. It is a simple analogy but one that reveals deeper meaning the more it is discussed.

Beech exposes human frailty in his clever sonnet sequence entitled "Winter" that uses a rigid eight and six line form to great effect. Moving through the seasons from October to March, the months of darkness are evocatively portrayed:

The world grows cold; a stark and bitter place
Devoid of feeling. The vixen on the road
Turns quietly away. Her time has gone.

Along the lane the owl, death’s pretty face,
begins to hunt. Her talons fix my soul;
This man who fears to walk the night along.
- I – October

The animals are at home in the night, at home in the darkness that makes them rely on instinct and higher senses. We are afraid of our intuition, we are afraid of the dark because we question what is out there. The vixen "Turns quietly away", she feels the world has become too cold a place for her and so we are left with the owl, "death’s pretty face," who haunts us and feasts on our corpse-like bodies that no longer live with the vitality of a spiritual life to enflame the soul and make the world a warmer place for the vixen to live in. Humanity’s preoccupation with the self is continued in December when the poet immerses himself in Nature’s bounty to praise the beauty and magic of Christmas Day, until:

The moment passes; carried through the air
The noise of traffic on the nearby road
Dissolves the magic, turns the world once more
To Mammon and to plunder; greed and gold.

Was it the breeze, no louder than a sigh
That made me think I heard a baby cry?
- III – December

The final lines mourn for us, they mourn the spiritual death we suffer and the vapid consumerism we have tried to replace the void with. Beech’s mastery of poetic technique is apparent throughout this collection. He uses form sensitively and playfully -- often to devastating effect. Take his cunning twist on courtroom-style judgement in "The Prophet," as Beech questions the sentence upon a crow of execution by stoning:

Curious, I sought to know the offence.
Was it, I asked, that he had picked an eye
From a lamb not yet dead or plucked the tasty
Strings of gut through a blood raw back-end?
It was neither; for such are not accounted crimes,
They are the ways of crows and crows must eat.

The shocking answer becomes one of Society’s guilt and embarrassment:

The lone voice crying in the wilderness,
The shrieking, screaming madman on the street
Who dares to stand alone before the mob
And level-eyed berate them for their lies:

The "errant" crow may represent an Apostle; "They beat his brains to pulp before my eyes", suggesting the public stoning of the Christian martyr Stephen. On a more modern level, the crow may represent the Christians that stand in the middle of busy shopping thoroughfares on Saturday mornings proclaiming the word of God until their voices are hoarse; hostile glares and jeers bouncing off their divine armour.

There is not room to discuss the remainder of the collection in as much depth as I would like to. They touch on his life as an Estate Worker, and on his memories. They are as deep and thoughtful as I found his spiritual poetry to be, although the abyss that separates them makes it a little hard to appreciate his more conventional subjects. I must confess to not liking this collection upon my first reading, but the more I read it, the more I respond. His poetry is pure art: clever, precise and beautiful. You read A Solitary Pine Tree in Sussex with excitement and pleasure enhanced by the beautiful imagery and lines it contains.

*****

Passionately committed to poetry and raising its profile, Fionna Doney Simmonds is the Poetry Editor for Moondance.org and has had reviews published at Moondance.org, parametermagazine.org.uk, as well as in the journals Avocado and Reader's Review. She can be contacted at fdsimmonds@tiscali.co.uk

PINOY POETICS Ed. by NICK CARBO

2006-03-05T00:22:00.001-08:00

ABIGAIL LICAD reviews

Pinoy Poetics, A Collection of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino-American Poetics Edited by Nick Carbo
(Meritage Press, 2004)

In the introduction to Pinoy Poetics, editor Nick Carbó observes that “When one sees himself/herself in a respected work of literature, it is a powerful and validating moment.” Given the paradox between the few and sporadic appearances of Filipino authors in mainstream U.S. publications on the one hand, and the far-reaching and enduring interlock of Philippine history with American history on the other, where then do Filipino poets turn for inspiration in the paucity of such powerful and validating moments? In many ways, the essays in Pinoy Poetics provide different approaches to this question, and yield illuminating and often surprising insights on Filipino experience.

For those seeking an introduction to Filipino literature, the anthology serves as a good starting point from which to discover writers across the diaspora past and present and further explore the themes that animate and haunt the effort to deliver onto the printed page the variegated experiences of Filipinos. The reader, for example, learns about the formation of a Filipino-American writing movement through Oscar Peñaranda’s account of the initial endeavors by Mango generation, Flips, and Liwanag writers in “The Filipino American Sensibility in Literature.” Alfred A. Yuson in “Taking the Litmus Test” surveys the developments arising from up-and-coming poets in the Philippines. Eileen R. Tabios in “A Poetics of “Everything, Everything, Everything”” provides a peek into the current Filipino-American activist scene and the written collaborations taking place among Filipino poets across the Pacific.

While these essays establish the existence of a rich Filipino literary heritage, the process of self-identifying as a Filipino poet remains on occasion a process fraught with ambivalence. In discussing its initial strangeness, Patrick Pardo in “On Being a Filipino Poet” says: “I never wore my ethnicity on my sleeve… being a Filipino American is to be aware of my cultural determinants and at the same time know that I am not beholden to them.” Catalina Cariaga in “A Poetics of E Pluribus Karaoke (Out of Many, Minus One)” admits that thinking of herself as a regional poet “sidesteps [her] having to explain [her] parents’ immigration to the United States, the history of U.S. and Philippine relations, and the development of discourse on diasporic writers and writings, Asian American literature… etc.” She goes on to express a frustration common among cultural minority writers:

In my first year of graduate work, I felt I was constantly in the position of having to explicate my work, and give historical, cultural and social context and commentary to each piece I offered in workshop. I noticed my white colleagues did not have to do this – because their social/cultural context was not only assumed, but a given.

Interestingly, Alfred A. Yuson attributes what he views as the greater maturity and depth of writing from U.S.-based poets to the difficulties of “rootlessness,” an aspect of which is described above. However, the reader remains ill-equipped to judge Yuson’s statement as the anthology is disappointingly tilted toward Filipino-American writers, with only six of the forty contributors being based in the Philippines. And while almost all of the writers have had the experience of either growing up or living in the Philippines, the question of promoting a uniquely Filipino expression takes a more complicated turn when use of the English language is taken into consideration. Lani T. Montreal in “Poetry and Bonesetting” stands out as the only writer in the anthology to claim Tagalog as her language of choice while at the other end of the spectrum, Ricardo M. de Ungria in “An English Apart” makes the rather discomfiting claim that Tagalog “has not yet proven its worth… as a literary language.” Claiming that “[w]riting well in English is [his] best revenge against English,” De Ungria searches the various polemics that surround the English debate:

But why do I want to take revenge at the English language?
… Because it taught me, among other things, to think poorly of my native language and exclude this from the discourse of my deepest needs and joys and aspirations? … Because it foisted upon me a rich heritage of writing that I could never be a part of nor even closely relate to…? Because it left me inside a wonderful labyrinth of a symbolic world whose exquisite emblems and implements only heighten my sense of helplessness and futility at being understood…? Because it has opened me up to a fascinating world where I am condemned forever to live as a stranger?

While it remains to be seen whether the creation of a decolonized literature must necessarily occur through a non-English language, several poets offer hope in building a unique expression through subversive uses of English. Kristin Naca in “The Cult of Language in Pinoy Poetry” bends English to Tagalog intonations and rhythms. Other poets such as Paolo Javier in “Marginalia” reject the use of narrative form to undermine any totalizing effects of the English language. He explains: “… narrative reflected (for me) how colonialism spread through English as the tool for communication.” Leny Mendoza Strobel in “A New Twist on Decolonization: Eileen Tabios’ Poetry” discusses the poet’s use of abstraction, surrealism, and collaging of “”found words” from other texts” to deflect the reader’s reliance upon narrative and authorial intent, thereby insisting that she engage with the poem not just through language but through the totality of her frameworks and histories. Luis H. Francia in “Meditation #1 & 2” suggests the inevitable re-appropriation of the English language by those writing from the margins:

I, ravisher, thief of language’s virtue, denier of its chastity yet stalwart defender of its inviolability. I need to be faithful to my infidelities. Count on me then to betray you. In the morning I expect to be bemedalled. In the morning I expect to be shot.

Whatever the outcome will be for the negotiations and efforts described in the anthology, whether Filipino literature will move from remotest peripheries and transform mainstream literature, whether writers will continually find new ways to reconcile their conflicting estrangements from both Filipino and American forms, the reader will surely derive a current grasp of Filipino poetry from this collection.

Even the most desultory reading of the anthology will certainly come to remark upon the range and originality of the forty essays. Contributors consist of writers across all walks of life, as varied as ex-Communist Party member and anti-Marcus dictatorship protest poet Clarita Roja (Mila D. Aguilar, “The Poetics of Clarita Roja”), National Endowment for the Arts recipient Rick Barot (“The Nightingale and the Grackles”), assistant professor Oliver de la Paz (My Unwritten Book: A Poem Disguised as a Narrative on Process, But Not Cleverly Disguised”), acupuncturist and herbalist Rene J. Navarro (“After the Shih Hua: Poetics”), and hip-hop enthusiast Patrick Rosal (“A Pinoy Needle in a B-Boy Groove: Notes on Poetry and Cross-Genre Influence in the Generation of Hip-Hop”). The anthology contains ample examples of the poets’ work, biographical information, and a selected bibliography which serve as useful springboards for further study or research.

The only way I found the anthology wanting was through the additional explanatory force that visual aids would have provided. For example, Timothy Yu’s brilliant essay “Asian/American Modernisms: José Garcia Villa’s Transnational Politics,” which explores the ideological and political tensions surrounding Garcia Villa’s problematic inclusion into the modernist and/or Asian-American canon/s, leaves the reader’s curiosity hanging over the repeatedly referenced photograph taken in 1948 of the Filipino poet alongside other literary luminaries such as W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Tennesee Williams. The photograph in its metaphoric significance would have spoken to the condition of many Filipino poets writing today whose great potential withstand the threat of being silenced by orientalist determinations that beset the publishing industry. It would have also been nice to see stills from video creations described in Eric Gamalinda’s “Language, Light, and the Language of Light” or photographs from productions mentioned in Remé-Antonia Grefalda’s “Lyricism and Poetic Vision in Playwriting.”

These are admittedly frivolous asides, however, and one can’t really complain about not having more than enough of a stimulating read in Pinoy Poetics. Carbó chooses wisely in arranging the essays in alphabetical order of authors’ names, resisting the imposition of thematic or geographical groupings and allowing the essays speak for themselves. The result showcases a breadth of talent and promise rather than endorsing any unifying aesthetic, echoing more loudly the cries against Filipino invisibility expressed by Carbó in the introduction.

Sadly, Carbó’s sentiments in the introduction are nothing new and have been expressed by many other cultural minority writers before him. While momentous and hope-inspiring, the publication of Pinoy Poetics slides into a kind of second-place finish, not because of the achievement it reflects, but because its very appearance lags behind the relatively established critical acceptance of the postcolonial and ethnic studies movements, chasing still after repeated exclusions by contemporary anthologies of “world poetry.” Carbó painfully details in the introduction what increasingly appears to be the undeniably systematized invisibility of Filipino literature. The historical timeline provided after the introduction, a CV of sorts outlining the basics of Filipino history and accompanying literary accomplishments, further serves in its very usefulness as a stark reminder of pervasive ignorance. Perhaps aware of the irony resulting from the need to yet again reformulate sentiments first said some forty years ago, and the impinging awareness that this by now should hardly bear repeating, Carbó takes up an arch tone:

Can we fairly asset that the problem of invisibility lies not on the Filipinos but in the Americans who continually refuse to even look in our direction? Undoubtedly there are many readers out there who innocently believe that this essay is another manifestation of a minority group’s paranoid reaction against a supposedly oppressive white dominant majority.

Carbó’s use of the word “paranoid” likely anticipates the view that Filipino writers should take solace in the publication of several other cultural minority writers, as though this signified the end of certain prejudices and were the exact same thing as partaking of their success. But doing do would only repeat the same homogenizing transgression inflicted upon Filipino culture. How indeed very sad that after all the historical and literary triumphs that should have secured mainstream exposure at the very least, Filipino writers are still hard at work in asserting the very legitimacy of their expression.

It comes as no surprise that amid the cries of cultural invisibility and historical amnesia, the theme of recognition – its elusive and hidden faces, its tangled processes, its narrow paths and its enemies – emerges as the anthology’s overarching preoccupation. Whether private or public, treated as catalyst or objective in the creation of poetry, the difficulties and joys attending recognition largely shapes Filipino poetics in the anthology. That there are Filipinos who embark on poetic careers at all and persist amid invisibility becomes something of an heroic accomplishment considering the tiring impositions of a Western publishing apparatus which largely subscribes to exoticizing assumptions, as described by Joel B. Tan in “Brown Faggot Poet: Notes on Zip File Poetry, Cultural Nomadism, and the Politics of Publishing.” Before the decision to embark on a poetic career or even to write the very first poem, many poets recall feeling immediately stymied by having “few sources to reference from.” It is rare that poets in the anthology speak of having had the kind of seamless instant of validation described by Mike Maniquiz in “The Essence of Us” when reading José Garcia Villa as a college freshman in the Philippines (“I’d like to say there was illumination, as if someone broke all the windows in my mind and let the light flood in… a moment of clarity.”). More common was the experience of having had lukewarm reactions to available role models, mostly Asian American writers, whose voices did not quite resonate fully with the experiences of aspiring Filipino poets. This reality, coupled with the legacy of assimilation after the Philippines’ repeated colonizations by Spain and the U.S., opened Filipino poets to diverse influences, but also had the counterproductive effect of appending them to scattered cultural movements, thereby erasing the very uniqueness and autonomy they strive for. Carbó captures the difficulty in seeking literary predecessors from other movements in saying simply: “They did not embody the culture I carried in my blood.”

In the absence of direct references, many of the writers look to the past, to different historical, familial, and cultural origins to connect with the culture they carry in their blood. Vince Gotera in “Love and War, Contrapuntal: A Self-Interview” expounds upon the crucial, “experiential moment” of a poem-in-progress, the horror of war in his poem “Guard Duty,” by tracing its appearances through several generations of U.S. military service in his family. Bino A. Realuyo in “Dear Warrior” sees his efforts as a continuation of his war hero father’s ideals, as “a daily task of accomplishing missions, dreams, moments to capture...” Eugene Gloria in “On Memoir and Poetry” juxtaposes stories of his parents’ ritual outings in the Philippines with his own visits to the homeland in search of emotional truths behind his inherited sense of nostalgia.

Many who find their poetic beginnings in the confluence of American and Filipino histories also discover that this confluence informs the relationship between content and style in their writing. Moved by the Vietnam War’s effects on her family, Cristina Querrer in “Volcanic Laughter, Pacific Words” realizes upon beginning poetry: “…to my amazement, my writing shared a tone similar to other Filipino writers from all over the world.” Joseph O. Legaspi in “Boys in Skirts and Other Subjects that Matter” evokes the storytelling of his elders by writing in narrative free verse because “[p]resenting the basic nature and beauty of a foreign culture to the Western world is an effective way of immersion into the larger society.” In deliberate and aggressive contrast, Barbara J. Pulmano Reyes in “The Building of the “Anthropologic”” discusses how the openly political intent of her work to reveal shameful moments in American history resists narrative forms and translations to better engage an unsettled reader into a confrontation with their own assumptions. In re-writing history, in tracing Filipino participation in America’s past, and in insisting upon a continuity between the past and the present moment, these writers forward promote a sense of cultural agency capable of changing society at large.

Some of the most enjoyable essays to read in the anthology come from poets who root their work within indigenous Filipino structures and sources. These works aim to fill in gaps in the current cultural awareness of Filipino traditions and histories, and effect a collective self-examination. Jean Vengua in “Abilidad and Flux: Notes on a Filipino American Poetics” figures the impulse to write poetry as “messages from the dead”:

What do I, as a Filipino-American, bring with me into this life? I think I bring the dead, especially where old family, historical and political issues are unresolved and have been suppressed. In this sense, I draw from the traditions of the babaylan or catalonan, someone who mediates between the spirit world and the material world.

J. Neil C. Garcia in “Of Legends and Poetry” re-writes childhood legends and folktales in verse form and in doing so, re-examines Filipino values:

What fascinates me about the idea of retelling legends, indeed of any story already well-known (whose truth otherwise lies beyond question), is that it lays bare elements in the narrative that had been smoothed over, elided, in their traditional tellings… in retelling the many tales I’d heard as a child, I came face to face with the systems of valuation, the unquestioned principles, the cognitive and affectional home in which I was raised, and which had come to determine who and what I was.

The review and reformulation of the past in Remé-Antonia Grefalda’s “Lyricism and Poetic Vision in Playwriting” turns a similarly critical eye to the present, as an anachronous confrontation between José Rizal and modern everyman Fredo suggests a rupture and discontinuity between revolutionary Filipino history and current consumption-driven values. Efren Noblefranca Padilla in “Binalaybay: Soul of the Island” reminds us of the transformative values of poverty and grief in Hiligaynon verses which he views as the foundation of Filipino creativity. The recognition of parallel and intersecting themes across generations allows the poets to appraise the collective decision-making that informs the ever-changing nature of Filipino tradition and suggest new directions it could take.

Successful recovery of the past often finally seeks its final destination in the way of connecting with readers. Paramount among the types of recognition sought by the poets is the recognition infused by the reader into poem’s meaning. Michelle Macaraeg Bautista for example in “Kali Poetics” draws upon the Filipino notion of kapwa or the capacity “to be like the other” to characterize the gesturing and anticipatory techniques she deploys her poems. For many Filipino poets who began writing in a state of starvation for validating moments, the desire to provide opportunities for readers to recognize fragments of themselves and their experiences in the poets’ works proves an all-important task. The following passages emphasize different aspects of the ongoing reciprocal recognition with their readers that Filipino poets strive for:

… my poems become lyrical letters to others, or letter to myself about others and the way I see them. (Ruel S. De Vera, “Otherworldly”)

I write to offer possibility to those looking for a home. I write to build a home between borrowed language and silence, in the movement of moments. (Leslieann Hobayan, “Mo(ve)ments in Silence: Constructing “Home” in the Gap through Poetry and Letters”)

For me, it has always been the attempt at a union… between what the reader knows of the world and the world of the poem, as influenced by the poet. (Jon Pineda, “At the Fence of the Experience”)

I would much rather think of the relationship between poet and reader as a transactive, dialogic one, therefore one that has the potential to unlock its various capacities for expansiveness of meaning and relevance. The poet, it seems to me, proposes a journey: proposes that the reader come along on a journey, explore a point of view, open himself or herself up to an experience that the poet wishes to share. (Luisa A. Igloria, “Considering [A Poem’s] History: Sources and Point of View in “The Incredible tale of the Ice Cream Cone Dog””)

… the task of the poet is to create space between words where the poet and reader/listener can have an emotional engagement of some sort. (Leny Mendoza Strobel, “A New Twist on Decolonization: Eileen Tabios’Poetry”)

Rather than facile mirroring, the reciprocal recognition sought by the writers involves first and foremost a destabilization of existing identifications by both poet and reader before finally finding the coordinates that link both. This process is carried out in several ways. In his poem “Isla Del Fuego,” De Vera voices objections by an unwilling reader while at the same time already blurring first- and second-person distinctions that separate them through repetitive use of the same pronouns:

You are afraid that, once joined,
we can no longer be sundered,
can no longer tell who is who,
what is what, whose is whose.

Hobayan seizes upon conceits of liminality to embrace the shared ability for empathy in her poem “I Am”:

I am a woman
dancing a path she makes up as she goes along
maps burned, pavement broken
I am the click in the lock
I am the sky divided by telephone wire
by sunset and moonlight
I am a woman who knows
exactly who I am:
a collection of this.

The ubiquitous quality given to the poem’s “I,” its interchangeability with aspects of its surroundings and its move from subject to object in the penultimate line above follows the elliptical movement of reciprocal recognition that continually multiplies in meaning according to the reader’s contexts. In the same vein, Pineda begins “Memory in the Shape of a Swimming Lesson” with a metaphor for the closely personal narration to follow:

If anything, it is like water. Taking the shape of what surrounds it.
A concrete pool, or even walls of a throat…

In using commonplace objects that effect a movement from the reader’s external environment (water, pool) to inside his body (throat), Pineda solicits the reader’s familiarity, warming him up to the potentially not-so-familiar Filipino references to follow. In “The Incredible Tale of the Ice Cream Cone Dog,” Igloria’s (presumably) suburban poet-narrator draws associations between the distinct historical moments of the immediate present, the 1904 Missouri World’s Fair, and the invention of the “all-American” ice cream cone by an immigrant named Doumar. The poem is representative of many others in the anthology which, in an effort to open readers up to the overlapping exchange of experience, unsettles and breaks down the supposed impermeable distinctions normalized by homogenizing assumptions. Finally, the plenitude in Tabios’s poems which employ fits of seemingly indiscriminate cataloging and collaging invoke an expansive inclusiveness that negate any passive engagement with the poems’ meaning. In their demand of various types of recognition by readers, the writers enable the work of cultural and historical recovery to unfold beyond written completion of the poem.

After going through the ways in which Filipino poets look to history, to indigenous sources, and to readers in asserting themselves against cultural invisibility, the question remains – why desire recognition? What drives the poetics which revolves around its absence, burden or incompleteness? Why this importance placed on feeling validated? What does validation contribute anyway? And perhaps most importantly, validation by whom? Again, we can only piece together tentative answers from the essays. It appears that validation counteracts the paralysis brought on by the endless vacillations of rootlessness or by the apathetic inducements of assimilation. The process of writing, of giving voice to the particularities of one’s journeys, of posing one’s questions, becomes for many of the writers a cathartic experience. As R. Zamora Linmark conveys in “Big Trouble,” there is just something freeing and glorious in for once being able to operate from within one’s given frameworks, without needing to borrow presumptions, shift one’s aesthetic, bend one’s viewpoints, or, as it were, “stretch your imagination all the way to Williams’s South or Albee’s New England.”

Of course, these efforts are inherent responsibilities in today’s globalized world and certainly lend an integral dimension to poems by Filipino authors. However, the poets in the anthology seek a fair balance in the chance to demonstrate that their backgrounds and realities have shaped society at large just as much as it has shaped them. They seek not only the chance to freely reference from their contexts, but also to impart that these contexts have already been shared from the start. The readership seems therefore open to all those willing to broaden their perspective, or perhaps more accurately, diminish their ignorance. In writing, poets not only recover their origins, their cultures, and their contexts, but also goad readers into viewing themselves as active participants in the recovery of a collective inheritance. It is within this continuous process that a sense of community is strengthened. And as witnessed by writers in the anthology who owe the success of their first published works to the support of grassroots organizing and small press publications, more can be done through communal effort than by any individual alone. And so now a return to the question – why desire recognition? Above all, because recognition and validation spawn new possibilities and unmask hidden potentialities that marginalization otherwise prevents. Sarah Gambito puts it another way in her poem “Scene: A Loom” (from “Essay 2356 on Poems”):

Children are the imminent sojourn
A maybe of love.
Brilliant persuasion from the stands.

The products engendered by the contributors’ labors present the possibility of eliminating social rifts and historical lacunae through mobilization from the stands, someday leading to (what else but) “love” – an equal, profound, reciprocal regard with society at large. It is fitting, too, that such a call should take place through poetry, “the common denominator of the world community,” according to Tony Robles in “A Poetics of the Common Man(ong).” For indeed, unlike fiction or prose which both require a room of one’s own and costly reams of paper, poetry surpasses class differences for it can happen at any moment and requires little raw material. As such, the anthology’s broad appeal, its urge to transform a fundamentally shared experience into a widely shared effort, is what finally earns the informal endearment of “Pinoy” in the title.

So apparent are the vitality and dynamism in the essays that they render more inexplicable the pervasive invisibility of Filipino poets. If Gemino H. Abad is correct in claiming that the remarkable quality in a poem involves “a moment that is lived, an insight into our humanity, a new use of language,” then society at large would be remiss in obscuring such crucial contributions from Filipino poets. “Imagine all the possibilities,” says Aimee Nezhukumatathil in “The Ocean at Night: An Inside Look at the Poetry Process,” “in poems, in language, in colors we have yet to see exist.” While Carbó certainly succeeds in forcing the literary mainstream to confront its longstanding exclusion of Filipino authors, perhaps the greater bulk of anthology’s achievement lies in its power to galvanize members of the community to take part in the task of cultural and political recovery. As Marlon Unas Esguerra in his essay “The Poetry of Rebolusyon” more eloquently states:

There is that moment when you realize that this is all connected. That the six degrees of separation among Filipinos is really just two degrees. That in the end you do have a story to tell that is worth telling. Somewhere between your identity politic and consciousness, your contradiction and critical analysis is poetry.

The publication of Pinoy Poetics is exactly “that moment.” The anthology promotes a formation of cultural memory and literary history, a critique and reformulation of traditions, and a connection with cultures and histories that have shaped the Filipino diaspora. There lies in each essay a validating moment to spark a host of changes which one hopes will soon render the cry of invisibility obsolete.

*****

Abigail Licad grew up in Antipolo, Rizal and immigrated with her family to California at age fourteen. She received a B.A. from UC Berkeley and an M.Phil from Pembroke College at Oxford University, both in literature. This is her first time writing on Filipino authors.

RED JUICE by HOA NGUYEN

2006-03-05T00:22:00.000-08:00

SUEYEUN JULIETTE LEE reviews

Red Juice by Hoa Nguyen
(Effing Press, 2005)

Red Juice is muscularly delicate. With a messy precision, these new poems balance Nguyen’s concerns as a citizen, mother, writer, and woman with her art. They dare to matter with the same quiet integrity that colors the everyday her meditations inhabit.

I had this idea                stubbornly
Dog still barking

Write something “new” about the national tragedy

These poems are a response to the uncertain and violent political climate we all currently live in. The way Nguyen’s poem states this is significant--it’s an imperative. We must respond, and that response must be fresh, “new,” even in the midst of the interruptions and distractions that make up life. But how can one respond to such a thing? If the “national tragedy” refers to 9/11, I’d request that nobody write another word. Mostly because a lot of what I’ve seen seems too eager to capitalize on the sentiments that the attack stirred up, whether its the stiff-upper-lip, never-forgive patriotism of some or the angsty, pre-fabricated dissidence of others. What do these new poems have to offer on the matter?

Up Nursing                then make tea

The word war is far
                                “Furry”
says my boy                about the cat

Aside from the headlines and news clips, many Americans scarcely think about the fact that the nation is still entrenched in a conflict that daily takes new lives. Compared with the exigencies of new motherhood, for example, war is far. Many of us, myself included, probably think about and experience national conflict this way. To notice and acknowledge this, on Nguyen’s part, is significant, and a small aspect of what makes these particular poems “new.”

I think anthrax
               & small pox vax

Pour hot water on dried nettles
Filter more water for the kettle

Why try
to revive the lyric

After acknowledging how embedded we are in our everyday lives, one could read those last lines from this poem as hitting a skeptical or even defeated note. What can poetry possibly accomplish in times like this, with lives and subjectivities like ours? It seems to me that Nguyen’s willingness to feel disconnected is what actually enables poetry to matter in this context. The act of brewing dried nettles stands alongside concerns about biological warfare. One could read this a variety of ways--I see it as another example of the abstract and far imbuing and coloring the concrete and near. The two are connected because Nguyen recognizes that they are. So “Why try / to revive the lyric”? Because doing so is one means of furthering this awareness. Because lyric, with its ecstatic logic and pregnant spaces, might help turn the dichotomous us/them mentality at work today.

And I do think it’s true that men stole
the magical instruments of women

& we were too busy
with ordinary life
to worry about this

Red Juice is interested in gender, which isn’t actually all that separable from Nguyen’s interest in political engagement or civics. Through simple observations and the lyric rendering of her daily activities and thoughts, Nguyen persuasively makes the case for a type of feminine poetics, one that refuses to separate her consciousness from her gender. For example, “A Lily Mother” begins with an abstracted, disembodied sensual dizziness: “A lily mother                gaping is a chasm / no that’s chaos                a swirl hole.” The poem coalesces and turns suddenly on the line “When talk is dirty and we do it.” The I of the poem then appears, now fully enfleshed, combining herself with the floral allusions from the first half of the piece.

I am vine-like with small white flowers
I’m eating breast milk (goat cheese) Leaves
and fruit hanging down

Nguyen’s poems express a connection between creativity and womanhood. “I am a weaver” she quotes in “The Secrecy of Arms at Dawn.” “I spun the baby out of you and me.” Nguyen tempers the I’s stance, however, complicating the standard woman/creator-via-childbirth sentiment: “I am she who unknots the cord / and lashes us                boatless.” What fascinated me about this particular poem was the use of the word “lashes.” I kept vaccilating between reading it as “tying down” and as “whipping.” Regardless how you read that word, the poem ends with an assertion of the speaker’s power.

As for whether one should read “we were too busy / with ordinary life / to worry about this,” “this” meaning the theft of their magical instruments, as a condemnation against women—I offer the following thought: Red Juice insists upon the daily ordinary and its connection to the universal, even the sacred (“It’s chaos & love               Big / Old”). When “ordinary life” is as beautiful and engaged as Red Juice presents it, what was really lost? If men did steal the magical instruments, perhaps they missed the skill and knowledge that powered them.

Maybe my baby
whitens me
Turtles and blue eyes

Red Juice explores ethnicity. What are the boundaries for claiming an ethnic identity? What gets left behind, and what gets passed on? Nguyen allows the flexibility and messy precision of translation to speak to these complexities of these questions.

Ma = horse
Ma = rice seedling
Ma = graveyard
Ma = mother

In the end, Nguyen’s poem suggests, there are no answers, only life. The poem ends with her considering her son, and responding to his (here unvoiced) queries.

To return to Nguyen’s interest in writing something “new” about the national tragedy—I’d like to suggest that 9/11 is the farthest thing from Nguyen’s mind. Perhaps the true national tragedy is our misrecognizing the small details and moments of life as distractions from the business at hand rather than being the business at hand.

*****

Sueyeun Juliette Lee currently lives in Northampton, MA and is completing an MFA degree in poetry and a certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She edits Corollary Press and her chapbook “Trespass Slightly In” is available online at Coconut Press (www.coconutpoetry.org). She can be contacted at s.juliette.lee@gmail.com. She also wants you to know that Hoa Nguyen is also the author of Your Ancient See Through (Subpress).

4 VIDEOS BY RALPH LICHTENSTEIGER

2006-03-05T00:21:00.000-08:00

JESSE GLASS reviews

4 Videos by Ralph Lichtensteiger (2005):
“Homing Crows” Ishikawa Jozan.
“Sudden Shower” Ishikawa Jozan.
“Dancing Ears” Ned Rorem.
“Trace of the Formless” Plotinus.
(Available on DVD from the artist at Ludwigshafenerstrasse 36,65929 Frankfurt, Germany. For more information: lichtconlon@t-online.de)

4 Videos by the experimentalist Ralph Lichtensteiger is a compelling visual and aural realization of two poems by the 17th century Kyoto polymath Ishikawa Jozan (in translations by Burton Watson), a statement by Ned Rorem, and an excerpt from Plotinus.

I would like to talk specifically in this brief review about the second video “Sudden Shower,” which I consider to be the most perfectly realized piece in this collection. I also consider this video to be the most fascinating of the four from the point of view of a long-term inhabitant of Japan, who has considered the differences between Eastern and Western sensibilities in his own modest manner.

Sudden Shower*

Darkness and light divide the tall sky,
the rumble of thunder passes over distant mountains.
The evening is cool, and beyond the slackening rain,
through broken clouds, a moon immaculate.

Ostensibly a visual realization of the above poem, Ralph Lichtensteiger’s “Sudden Shower” immediately moves us into territory more familiar to the Western, Hermetic tradition. Instead of the expected yin-yang binarities that Watson’s translation holds intact from the original, we are treated to the vision of a fossil nautilus shell (Nautilis pompilius) moving on its apparent base as if it were a clockwork automaton switched on within a small box, or an insect pushing for egress–a lurching, abrupt movement. This interesting icon appears throughout the six minutes and six second duration of the video in a kind of tape-loop collaged against a back-drop of brush paintings.

This image is incredibly suggestive. The most obvious feature of course is the gnomonic spiral of the fossil: a form that one finds both in nature and in man-made objects often associated with the transcendent and the divine. Indeed some commentators see the accumulative growth of the spiral as the natural embodiment of the extension of time into space and matter. Moreover, the fact that the spiral is part of a fossil life form is suggestive both of the eternal nature of this form, and of entropy, which aids and abets the transformative processes of sublunary things. Furthermore, as we examine the image (or icon) closely, we notice that the fossil appears to be undergoing some electrolysis-like process in which the viewer plainly sees a red solution moving and swirling about the borders of the shell. What is this liquid? It appears, through its texture, to be blood separating into serum and hemoglobin as it circulates. Of course, this in itself carries a range of potent associations.

The aggregative power of the icon therefore, is of a “dead” object–the fossil nautilis--immersed (or appearing to be so) in a blood-like, actively circulating solution, in which it moves in a recurring pattern as if it were being endowed with some very basic kind of sentience and life. Both enigmatic and strangely familiar, how are we to “read” this image?

The golden color of the shell perhaps gives us a clue. We have encapsulated in this icon the visual expression of a Hermetic process–perhaps even a tipping of the hand towards the age old dream of the alchemists: the creation of the homunculus, a form of artificial life untainted by the flesh.

This golden, moving icon appears juxtaposed against a series of “Zen” brush paintings, whose fractal forms are more suggestive of the “Agony of Matter” intuited by the mystic Jacob Boehme, than of the radical void of Zen. In fact the low “m” in one of the shots, which appears more like the hips of a mother giving birth, is not a form that occurs in classical Zen brush painting at all.

In conclusion, this fascinating series of images, unrolling before our eyes against an aural background of slow bamboo flutes, bird noises, chimes, and muted drums (created also by the amazing Lichtensteiger), delivers a message far more Western than both Jozan’s poem and the imagery of the video would (at first blush) lead us to believe.

Interestingly enough, “Sudden Shower” is dedicated to the philosopher Derrida, a man who fashioned a book about the Japanese from an experience that lasted less than a month.

*”Sudden Shower c. 2006 by Burton Watson, all rights reserved.

*****

Jesse Glass lives near Tokyo Disneyland with his wife and kids. New work scheduled to appear in Angel Exhaust (UK) and Golden Handcuffs (USA). Described recently on the book page of the Yomiuri Shimbun as "...loquacious, avuncular and with a ready chuckle..." Glass stares into the mirror and is amazed at what the passage of time can do to to erode one's public image.

FAKE HOUSE, AMERICAN TATTS and BORDERLESS BODIES by LINH DINH

2006-03-05T00:18:00.000-08:00

TOM BECKETT reviews

Fake House: Stories by Linh Dinh
(Seven Stories Press, 2000)

American Tatts by Linh Dinh
(Chax Press, 2005)

Borderless Bodies by Linh Dinh
(Factory School, 2006)

Seams, Semes, Memes, Meat, Booze, Blood, Tears and Semen: Some Marginal Notes on 3 Books

I've been reading and re-reading these texts for the last couple of weeks: one book of stories, two books of poems. There are overlapping concerns between the three volumes, a felt matrix of connections, but I pair Fake House with American Tatts for the ways in which voices carry the weight of the work. Borderless Bodies, on the other hand, strikes me as a more ruthlessly clinical (but no less affecting) effort.

My admiration for this body of work is unreserved.

Linh Dinh might be the site of a collision of forces (national-international-linguistic-existential-interpersonal-sexual) that has manifested in something like the constellation of nouns that titles this review: seams, semes, memes, meat, booze, blood, tears, and semen.

I wish Fielding Dawson were still alive. I'd have wanted to write/talk to him about this writing. I'm confident that he, Fee, would have loved it.

American Tatts and Fake House limn the USA's psycho-sexual, noirish undercarriage from Linh Dinh's border crossing perspective. Voices, as I remarked earlier, are what drive these books. Consider

Church is never as bad as I thought it would be
although it went on half an hour longer than usual.
This old lady came from Cleveland to lecture us about homeless kids.
Very boring.

After church we went to some garage sales
and Dad bought me a turkey sub from Tubby's.
The guy behind the counter wanted to get into my pants.
I could see how his grinning eyes were skimming over my body.
I felt so uncomfortable so I stood behind my Dad.
I felt voilated. So nakid.

("You Don't Know What's Inside Of Me Yet," Am. Tatts, p.25)

Consider:

If I could be anywhere at the moment?
I'd be some place that's not rainy.
I wish I were in the next room
So I could lie on my couch

I can't live without
My toothbrush
Or my pit bull
Or my hair straightener
Or my chess set.

I like any sort of food, actually,
But mostly Chinese and cheesesteaks.

In my bedroom, you'll find clothes and a bed,
Some pictures of Brad, and maybe about
847356893174568137456 pairs of underwear.
Why should you get to know me?
I dunno, do what you want…
But I tell you what
I am not looking for, though,
Is any man
With a teenie dick.

("Dewey in Bucks County," Am. Tatts, pp.28-29)

Consider:

Now that you've heard my little confession, tell me: What is the connection between a man cutting his trigger finger off because he did not want to get his balls blown off in a war he did not care about and a man hacking his penis off for no apparent reason during peacetime?

("Val," Fake House, p.57)

Linh Dinh's writing goes through the body and what is the body but meat? In Borderless Bodies it becomes more than explicit:

Menu

Talcum powdered meat.
Meat arrayed with trinkets.
Meat back lit by red strobe lights.
Meat photographed from below.
Meat admiring self, photographed from below.
Touched up meat universally applauded.
Free ranging meat suddenly subdued.
Meat marinated in old sweat.
Meat stewed in own bile.
Meat spat on, kicked, then set on fire.
Meat blown up for profit.
Meat obscured by legends or slanders.
Meat impatient under a satin sheet.
Meat wrapped in an old, nappy blanket.
Meat smuggled in and out of paradise.
Meat cloistered, sacred and unseen.
Meat coiled on the sidewalk, dusted by Spring snow.
Meat covered by fresh newspapers.
Meat dressed in all the wrong colors.
Chopped meat as spectacle.
Bleeding meat as entertainment.
Meat washed, then tucked into the ground.
Meat protruding a little.
Meat angling into space.

("Menu," Borderless Bodies, p.38)

For a while it was a vogue among certain urban "body artists" to have skin flaps created on their torsos that could be held open like a superhero's secret identity shirt to reveal a crucifix, say, or some other emblem of high personal importance nestled amongst scar tissue. Linh Dinh's texts strike me as the verbal correlatives of such art. Read them.

*****

Tom Beckett publishes interviews with poets at http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com
His chapbook Vanishing Points of Resemblance is available from Generator Press. He lives in Kent, Ohio.

BABELLEBAB by HERIBERTO YEPEZ

2006-03-04T16:54:00.000-08:00

BILL MARSH reviews by offering a reading through

BABELLEBAB (Non-Poetry on the End of Translation)by Heriberto Yépez
(Duration Press, 2003)

Information on the Leading Suspects

Yép ez no poet. Es the activity of poetry escaping poetry. Is a kind of document technician and says so later. Given information systems becoming their very own climates, the need for related performances in the rain, smog, and swelter. Acts and activities of compression, inversion, spots of knotty fluctuation. All business hereafter through speeds and spaces information lives in.

The person dissipates, activities congeal, requiring language beyond multiple languages. What remains is Virilio’s omnipolitical nomad. Ascendance of virtual viability climates rewriting/-naming borders and greater-metro areas. Cross-purposes. A dream, a perspective, a flattened agenda, and marking a much-needed move from flighty dislocation to concerted locability via new economies of citydad.

1.
Escape poetry. Document building. What the reader is about to confront is three long poems or three essays done as poetry. Devices in Prose. Writing As a Way to Design with Meaning I or Draw I with Letters. In Babel (first congress on the issue of translation), the lab of able-bodied babble. So really? Let’s give the Internet the Role we Use to Give to Voice? One imagines what gets woven through the palindrome. The project would offend the fence-mongers.

To J. Rothenberg, of San Diego, not Tijuana, From Yépez, of Tijuana, not San Diego. Of Tio Diega and Tia Diego. Not Juana Diego. Sans de ego. K? Changes in the City become “Avant-Gardes.” / But Please don’t Avant-Gard too much. I.e., Operation Gate Copper. This duration book’s a keeper.

And there is also the question of the lyrical voice of this poem wanting to know which day is going to be tomorrow but paradoxically referring to the future (“tomorrow”) using “was” (the Past).

To translate I should draw I not write. Si! Si!

So read the palindrome back and forth, up and down, along an x-mex and a y-try axis. The U.S. is as Ex as is us.

The document technician’s credo: O / What / If / Instead / Of / “Writing” / “Our” / “Poems” / We / Would / Translate / Everything / We / Think? Composition, in short, not writing. Form not as fixture but activity. Thinking, a rhythm of attention. Compoetics of scrutiny, a medium of strangeness. Knowing episodically, in the event. Aesthetic discovery = social discovery. Barbarian as Border Babel (Lebab). Each day is drawn to its scene or scene to its day the image already underway.

Language is the late stage of translation (and maybe vice versa), but not Language Poetry.

It’s a primer of sorts. A rhetoric riding through and underneath all this: tangent, ellipsis, allusion, reflection, and perhaps just one error: (Am I writing or sampling?). And perhaps another: a poem is just an efficient collection of lines. Really? Prove it.

“H” is laughter. Hahaha. (bpNichol). Jerome has a beard. (H.Y.)

English is an ironic language…?

For composition of poem and essay, we must remember that Voice: (is) / A project of translation. The pedagogical aim of the document technician is thus to bring into composition the translation project of 20th century poetics. For Literature is just remarks, and The future of poetry will be publi city. (For more information, see our website: tiodiega.com). Advert, or post-pomo promo.

Experimental poetry will have to change Philosophy’s face. But with all respect due Bernstein and Perloff, fuck that. D.T.’s are sociologists, not philosophers. And not, al(i)as, poets.

And so, one central issue and perhaps the key claim of this document: English, my way of Translating America.

Welcome to the Tijuana Poetry Scene.

2.
An Encyclopedia of Lost Thoughts
is a writing through incorporation. I wouldn’t say “to collect disperse meanings” but rather to disperse collected meanings. In escaping poetry, one befriends the technical. The document, as a possible teaching device, a record or evidence of an event, a transcript, is equal to the decision to engineer or reverse-engineer a moment. Once the author is dead, only Email remains, and so all documents seek distribution. Distribution is, in fact, the goal of documentation. The document is authored but remains authorless or multiply authored. This is not a poststructuralist argument so much as a strategy for survival.

To assume intertextuality we need to acquire a mechanical view of language. If we consider language a flux, then the encyclopedic possibilities of language are not fulfilled: in an uninterrupted flux the verbal mass couldn’t stop to reabsorb itself, couldn’t recycle its own body in order to digest its fragments. In other words, All we do is to look after the opinions and learning of others; we ought to make them our own…. What use is it to us to have a belly full of meat if we do not digest it, if we do not transmute it into ourselves?

So yes, language returns to itself, but does that mean it becomes fragmented? Sure, We write thinking we are gonna be quoted, but speak for myself!

Throughout, wherever you see “discourse-designer” read “document technician.” One example of a fully embodied (digested and digestable) document is, of course, the Encyclopedia.

The original text. A hoax! A hoax! Since every word is already a quote, one can quote one’s Barthes and eat it too. Para Yép es no problem.

The problem, in fact, is the computer:
Writing Back and forth through the text.
Which is only possible in a computer.
The Computer Age of Literature.
A text written writing all over but which is going to be still read from beginning to end.
Read as in computers.

Or rather, read Amato and weep: the screen as a region of passions like any other in which textuality is permitted to bump up against the real. And/Or: an author: a text: a discursive intersection: a situation: a set of circumstances: an invitation: an other. And/Or finally: that a modified mind / is decidedly in the cards…

So, to translate, to translate America, to quote language, to quote it before it all dies. Is a translation is a quote which hides the comment (of the one who quotes) inside the quote itself. Translations are misleading citations. Or algebraically:

write = translate (translate [quote (comment)])

or, the essence of incorporation as appropriation, the starting point of sociopoetics: appropriation of its (kn)own pasts: texts in which we can see the visible bleeding of discourse and tradition (¿a royal disease?) and the de-formation caused by incorporating sources (¿sorcerers?) and by putting into question that incorporation.

This is the Dawning of the Age of Assembly

3.
In closing, please note that every single text [here] was written especially for this occasion. A poem beginning I [Here] I can be interrupted at any I . POINT . I

I words I words I words I

And if the next step needs to be taken in prose, please inform the Leading Suspects. Poetry is Now Information. And Punctuation is Punk.

_______

Other Works Incorporated:
Amato. Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self. SUNY Press, 1997.
Hejinian. The Language of Inquiry. UC Press, 2000.
Montaigne. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Tr. M.A. Screech. Penguin, 1991.
Virilio. Open Sky. Tr. Julie Rose. Verso, 1997.

*****

Bill Marsh lives and works in Chicago and Ottawa, Illinois. He is co-designer of Factory School (factoryschool.org) and edits the Heretical Texts poetry series. His poetry books include Tao Drops, I Change, co-authored with Steve Carll (Subpress 2003), Artificial Cinnamon Nation (Meow 2000), and Making Flutes (Potes & Poets 1998). His monograph on plagiarism detection software is on hold at SUNY Press. Write to: bmarsh[at]factoryschool.org

KATIPUNERA AND OTHER POEMS by ELSA MARTINEZ COSCOLLUELA

2006-03-04T16:53:00.006-08:00

YVONNE HORTILLO reviews

Katipunera and Other Poems by Elsa Martinez Coscolluela
(Anvil Publishing, Inc., 1998)

Kassandra and Other Heroines

The poems in this collection were written between 1965 and 1973, overlapping Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos' declaration of martial law in 1972 by only one year. Historians claim this period in Philippine history is the country's most prosperous. When Marcos declared martial law, all forms of expression were suppressed -- newspapers were shut down, publishing almost ground to a halt. Stories of writers, labor and student leaders disappearing have entered into the Philippines' history pages and mythology.

During that time, Elsa Martinez Coscolluela pursued graduate degrees in Siliman University and De La Salle University and tried her hand at playwriting. When she tookp up poetry again in 1993, she would create collections that would win awards -- Katipunera and Other Poems won first place in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, a national writing contest, in 1995. This collection along with new poems appeared in book form in 1998.

"Katipunera" reflects the prosperity shortly before martial law that the Philippines would have pursued had writers not been diverted from craft to survival. Coscolluela draws from the Philippines' relationship with China and Spain in telling about a recently-passed grandmother in "Camphor Chest":

The men say you always knew your place, standing
By Grandfather at every feast...
The women praise your tidy
Home, your upright sons...
Your honoring the head of your house.

(They do not speak of your absent daughter.)...

And though the hour is late, it's too early yet
To sort out all the tokens fixed and sealed
In you precious camphor chest...
Carefully crafted by your mother in China
When she sent you off across the sea....

And here, more precious than all these, a stack
Of letters from your daughter: frayed and stored
And ribboned, and now I know what I always
Thought I knew with inner knowing. As I unfold
The letters, one by one, the vague aching
Spaces in my heart are filled with love.

Though you could not send her off with woman--
Things in a camphor chest, I know she brought
With her your silent blessings, knowing
Perhaps all mothers know she had to break
Her vows to be. And so you set her free,
And secretly sent her off across the sea.

(Father does not care to remember.)

This poem features most of Coscolluela's themes in this book, her first. She highlights gender differences in favor of the female almost to a fault -- intuition, deferrence to her partner, the infinite secrets that the female supposedly keeps, the taking sides of your own as opposed to your son-in-law, the need for space. She renders these themes beautifully throughout the book.

Coscolluela also uses Greek myths and heorines and turns them into Filipinas --

O knowledge known too soon for faith! Prophecies
Die at her throat, and as her irides cup
The colors of scorched earth, she weeps
For living twice the sight.
("Kassandra")

With the dominance of social realist works in Philippine literature in the last 20 years, one quite forgets that the writer is Filipino. And yet Coscolluela doesn't betray her realist roots with a fixation on Western figures. "Kassandra" is the calculating Gabriela Silang, the brave Tandang Sora, the worrying nurse thinking of her troubled spouse and children in Manila, in Dumaguete, in Surigao.

A new generation of readers might scoff at the social traditions etched in Coscolluela's collection, but if they remember how painful it still is to have a daughter or wife leave for overseas to work because there are no jobs for the men, the collection turns priceless.

In a society where expression is rarely seen or taken for its value alone, writing is a luxury and writers, messengers. Coscolluela offers an alternative to families straining under the weight of earning a living from across continents.

*****

Yvonne Hortillo is an editorial assistant for The Associated Press. She has never owned a business card in her life. She has crossed the Chicago River countless times, and is fated to cross it untold times more. She adores truth in all forms.

AFTER TAXES by THOMAS FINK

2006-03-04T16:53:00.005-08:00

BARRY DORDICK reviews

AFTER TAXES by Thomas Fink
(Marsh Hawk Press, 2004)

Thomas Fink’s audacious new collection of verse, AFTER TAXES, bristles with startling wit and shoots its barbs into the side of a society gone awry with recklessness, greed, and mismanagement. Tax is toxic, and its effects are everywhere. In life, the popular saying goes, we are left with two certainties: death and taxes. After death, we’re not sure what will happen; but after taxes, we can be sure of one thing: more taxes.

Building on the success achieved by his first two books, SURPRISE VISIT (1993) and GOSSIP (2001), Fink presents us with a language and landscape of imagery which is clearly original. His poems are infused with startling twists and turns as he works to create different levels of meaning both broadly humorous and curiously profound. “We are all like stairs. We just line up differently” (25). His poetry, which is elusive, allusive, and deftly enigmatic, does not yield to easy explanations as it radiates out and across a canvass of linguistic and imagistic complexity, and yet it always seems to yield a pleasurable result.

Images of financial woe and economic folly where debts “crank on” (57) and “a nation frowns. Our own/ rendered alien” (74) are most clearly rendered in poems like "Dented Reprise I" and "Frowzy Cabal Roving For." Also, there is “aggregate gaping” in a poem like "My Dear Bank" in which ”we tour the caviar/ mirage/ until it’s hacked./ Squamous greenhouse/ breathing debt.” (76)

Alan Greenspan, whose Midas touch can’t be trusted, is playfully mocked in "Rice-", a poem about fiduciary bungling, and “structural engineers” are taken to task and lambasted in "Those Indecent," as we see them “…burrowing/ in their gray pancakes when/ an apple collapses/ a pocket is sprained…” (79)

The humor in AFTER TAXES is subtle and often contains searing ironies. Puns abound, as do sardonic questions like: “YOUR TONGS/ have style, but do/ they sabotage distinct pleasure?” (89) and “Can a fine/ ax liberate harassed/ vector’s pure egg?” (31) We also find cosmic and comic explosiveness running rampant in lines like “seismic bazookas running wad/ gyrate Reebok hernias (77) and “Grade/ skull poesie’s// grim pious thwack./ It’s a schlumpy gestalt, Jethro. And you haven’t laid one/ good slogan yet.” (96) And we are pleasantly surprised by sharply blunt oxymorons like “Lackluster dynamite/ makes one shutter.” (96)

In the book’s final poem, where all the various themes of social, economic, psychological and moral decay are brought together ("Trillion Urges: Manufacturers"), we make a Dantean descent into hell and back while encountering dark humor, wry puns, and a host of expectations dismantled and overturned at every corner. Just relish the language here, vigorous and apt: “Feel a scrunch when some crook or hook of honor// thrills prodigious/ to military inflation/ dangled from democracy//demo.” And “Everybody owns no//one’s/modest parachute.” At the poem’s conclusion we are left in a dangerous place some call home, with trouble lurking in a “suitcase marked eventually,” (100) culminating similarly where the poem "Violet Bulb" begins:

on flood coverup.
Blackguard chem’s

big mire syndication?
Calibrated to big wand fashion. (80)

Fink’s language is infused with vivacity and verve, a rawness and vitality, which recalls the language of the surrealists, and one may even detect a hint of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the sprung rhythms and rich sound patterns which appear in lines like: “maximum crease roams ruthless” and “Cuts merge./ Riot moon’s// mood rubble is idiom relentlessly/ mown incandescent.” (93)

In the poem "Volcano Interruption," a humorous play on volcanic eruptions, we are left with some of the book’s wittiest lines: “I think cake/ should be the next
president./ Let Dad have it; he// doesn’t care how fat he gets.” (37)

Other poems notable for their inventive titles and memorable first lines include:

DO DAYGLO NIGHTS DEFILE// that gaggle of hinterlands, your willow/ campus? (9)

I CAN ROW THROUGH THE ONE // tingle I have lotion over. Sand grows/ behind
excess. (23)

YOUR HANDBARROW// sucks roses in Barbados. (29)

"In Memoriam" contains a warm and touching portrait of a grandfather speaking to his grandchildren and in the "Yinglish Strophes," the author displays a keenness and facility for capturing the nuances of Yiddish and English speech. These poems unveil many clever lines filled with wry puns and double entendres. “The closet is desperate./ And the gallery should hang him good./ Turn out the guess.” (45) And there are various images which might be interpreted in several different ways. For example, “Always a ladder hard to read” could be viewed as either a letter hard to read or a ladder hard to reach, giving resonance and depth to the language. There are plenty of wonderful sayings in these poems replete with comic irony and two of my favorites are: “Will taste it how it tastes” (45) and “Do you stop ever eating?” (49)

*****

Barry Dordick is the author of 2 humorous books of poems for both children and adults: Macaroni on the Moon (2003) and Dear Cow, Not Now, I'm Busy! (2004). He is now working on a third book, temporarily titled, A Squirrel Leaped Into Mom's Grand Piano. He resides in New York City.

TRANSITORY by JANE AUGUSTINE

2006-03-04T16:53:00.004-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS reviews

TRANSITORY by Jane Augustine
(Spuyten Duyvil, New York City, 2002)

Spacing. Space

Space. Pace.

Pacing as suggested by line breaks, caesuras and punctuation marks that, in the case of Jane Augustine’s TRANSITORY, aid the reader to continue reading past grief.

Break down once. Okay, more than once.

That’s okay--embedded in the poems are spaces in which the overwhelmed reader can pause, pause to grieve, pause to consider, and from there move onward.

TRANSITORY is Augustine’s meditation over her daughter-in-law’s death at age 20. Equally significant for what TRANSITORY shares, Michelle was a girl who met the poet’s son, Tom, just in time: “He badly needed someone to love him, appreciate, shore him up. This time he was lucky. Her funny enthusiastic adoration of him, her energy and determination to succeed, these were overwhelming. How could there not be a good outcome?”

But then the poem bears news of a world as it tilts and begins to crack:

“Michelle is very sick--
........cancer of the colon--

........they operated--cut some away
................but it’s--it’s
........................completely incurable, they say--

It’s almost petty to pause to note the particular effectiveness of that line “but it’s--it’s” with its M-dash-facilitated stutter. (Due to blogger format, M-dashes are presented as double dashes.) I note it because the parent is also a poet who’s clearly mastered her craft. And on each of the M-dashes I paused my read for relief, before going on to learn of the son’s “wish to have been kinder, steadier,/ not a junkie to add to her pain.”

Is not regret--its acid--among the most harrowing of feelings?

You, Reader, can imagine the rest of the story without me having to quote more excerpts. It’s not as if reading all of the poems in the book would ever reveal the “total story.” How, for instance, the story of Michelle--Michelle is her name--is logically linked to, say, the Gulf War. From a “Three Day Weekend”:

Warriors say, “The War is going as expected.”
[…]
A mother writes a son--let’s talk.
[…]
Cold wind.
Tick of a dry leaf
like a loosened safety catch.

In “Epilogue: the Ghosts of Memory,” Augustine asks,

“If there were release, an antidote, however momentary, to stand against suffering and death, could it be the poem,

some blunt-edged saying of the unsayable, these long-lined transient streamers in the wind?

In Augustine’s hands, deft enough to write poems that manifest light--its searing illuminations--she shows how poetry can “stand against suffering and death.” For TRANSITORY is about suffering and death but in a way--and a path--that clarifies yet again the importance for a poet to “cultivate vast mind.”

For such a “vast mind,” details matter. In “A Tomb For Michelle,” the poet shares the incident at the hospice when Michelle’s family first learns of her disease (and in reading about it, the reader might need the relief offered by the pauses in reading as facilitated by the M-dashes):

Evening: her father from Houston and cousins fill the room with their dark shapes, heads surrounding the bed. They crowd flowers--daisies, yellow chrysanthemums--onto the corner chest, the table, the small shrine with its candles and crucifix. They talk with her, turn away weepy-eyed. She wakes up. Her voice is strong, speaking in Vietnamese, now telling them--their eyes tell them--she is sick. She hadn’t told them before. We don’t know what she tells them now; this Our Lady of Good Counsel Free Cancer home. Now they know--something. She is chattering as if--as if--

A dish of sherbet melts untouched under the chrysanthemum leaves. She is past eating. Her father in his gray suit comes out into the hall and holds his handkerchief to his eyes.

And a “vast mind” matters, too, to be able to situate an individual within the vastness that is history. Michelle, born Phuong Vu, was a child survivor of the war in Vietnam. And at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., the poet’s gaze drops from the wall of names to “where foot-scuffed dust met verge of grass. No Michelle Vu among the 55,000 // ghostnames written on the wall.”

........................................What of their dead?
........Have they a shrine in Saigon draped in orange for the death agent?

........It’s still in the soil, grows tainted vegetables and mutilates the fetus in the womb--

Michelle is alive in these pages of Augustine’s poetry--there is that much. That much. In “Notes For a Tombstone,” Augustine asks: “What evidence, however, proves/ that continuity prevails,/ that dying and being born/ are in one package?” TRANSITORY shows Michelle living past death,

The break--was it
umbilical? I won’t sever.
I hold her in mind
(from “They Journey to Lourdes”)

and through poetry this gift can be shared now with others, poetry readers--enabling Michelle’s life to be extended through, indeed, the eternity of poetry’s existence.

And the son, Tom, who became husband who became widower? From “Tom Says Goodbye to the Apartment at 761 North Snelling, Saint Paul,”--

The door closes. He turns the key
in the lock. He walks down
the twenty-two steep wooden stairs
as he’d carried her wheelchair
and her black-robed misshapen
dying self watching him.
Silent eyes.
[…]
He gives the key to the landlady
in the hardware store
as he’d lifted the casket
into the hearse. Gets into
his dark red car,
packed with his life’s remnants,
shuts the door,
........................starts--
because there is no choice--
another journey.

A PERSONAL P.S.
As I write this review, my father is suffering from cancer. My younger brother died a few months ago at age 43; he didn’t die from drugs as he’d been clean for nearly 2 decades, but, once, he did have a drug problem that wreaked havoc on my parents. I have not been able to address either in my own poems. With TRANSITORY, I am more than glad to see another poet show how such topics may be addressed without being reductive as regards grief. I am not just glad but relieved. For if a poet would have written poems on these matters without the benefit of a “vast mind” which depends so much, I believe, on compassion, I would have loathed the existence of this poem, this book, and for that long moment detested my avocation. Instead, Augustine affirms poetry’s redemptive powers--its space filled with how lucidity may be guided by a warm, loving light.

*****

Eileen Tabios has released 10 poetry collections, a collection of art essays and a short story book. She also edited/co-edited five books of poetry, fiction and essays. In 2006, she releases a new poetry collection, The Secret Lives of Punctuations, Vol. I (xPressed, Espoo). She performs the poetics blog “The Chatelaine’s Poetics” while steering Meritage Press. More of her e-presence here and here.

MORAINE by JOANNA FUHRMAN

2006-03-04T16:53:00.002-08:00

CORINNE ROBINS reviews

MORAINE by Joanna Fuhrman
(Hanging Loose Press, 2006)

"Moraine" is a word Joanna Fuhrman found in a geologic dictionary and made into a propelling force for her new collection of poems. "Moraine", she explains, is a mound or ridge, ground deposited by the melting away of a glacier. For the book’s cover, she has painted a landscape of blue and purple stones to represent moraine. Meanwhile, pages bearing a small black and white photograph of a pile of stones provide a respite between her groups of poems that poet Denise Duhamel celebrates as “a sifting through the debris of modern day life in order to achieve landforms just as layered and organic as those alluded to in the title.”

The poems are nowhere as literal as Fuhrman’s cover painting. You cannot pin down moraine. You cannot pin down Fuhrman’s piles of cascading images. There is too much of a much ness -- too much of a mixing of objects and images. A brick “looking like a beautiful tear,” “music as the mosaic of air along tarred rooftops,” while rain banging against windows, she blends together “the partnerships of a joke and a tear." In these poems, Fuhrman is at liberty to enjoy the drama in feeling things from the outside in. In "ROOM TEMPERATURE, A MORE PERSONAL MORAINE," in one of the few directly autobiographical poems, she writes, “David says only the young or really immature can write exciting poetry. He keeps forgetting I’m over thirty now. Not as young as he thinks” she says, in a book that is nevertheless full of youthful élan. full of fresh discoveries.

Joanna Fuhrman is smart and funny. From the opening poem "ARCHITECTURE MORAINE," when she celebrates a chosen couple: “She like a man/invisible when/opening a checkbook” “He, like a woman/invisible when/taking off his clothes," the wit is only an occasional stand-in in for autobiography as we happily follow her into “a room “wearing a trench coat.” Fuhrman is poet in charge of her world around her, for whom part of the adventure is she “can’t say where the ocean might end and a filled thimble begin”. Even when assuming the role of audience, she is absorbing new information so you don’t know what you expect to happen, or what life might be like, what new kind of loving will happen diving into the bath tub of a Brooklyn efficiency apartment. Meanwhile, the idea of thinking, of taking the metaphor out of sex, and playing with “the nowhere of a photograph of a star” becomes part of the pleasure of leafing through Fuhrman’s myriad Moraine poems.

A new young poet, a poet with a unique voice, means an enlargement of the world of poetry, opening us up to new ways of seeing. Joanna Fuhrman‘s books are such an enlargement. Beginning with her first, with FREUD IN BROOKLYN, she maps out for the reader geography of funny, sad and challenging poems, poems that are travelogues of the states of Florida, Texas, Connecticut, and Seattle and the town and county of Missouri. Born in New York, she has taught writing on many levels and served as a reading coordinator for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. With MORAINE, she is still at the beginning of her books. I can only look forward to her explorations of new terrains.

*****

Corinne Robins, poet, art historian, teaches art criticism at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, runs the reading series POETS FOR CHOICE (Ceres Gallery) and is author of three poetry collections, most recently ONE THOUSAND YEARS (2004) from Marsh Hawk Press.

THE OBEDIENT DOOR by SEAN TUMOANA FINNEY

2006-03-04T16:53:00.000-08:00

LAUREL JOHNSON reviews

The Obedient Door by Sean Finney
(Meritage Press, 2005)

Sean Finney is a journalist, copywriter, and poet who lives and works in San Francisco. The Obedient Door is his debut collection. Finney's influences include Japanese, Chinese, and Islamic writers. Adding drama to Finney's poetry are original drawings by Ward Schumaker.

Finney is modern man, sharing life poetically in fragments of perceived reality. In "Along the River", for example, we share his vision:

Surface where boats will sport the nerves and crannies
undoing the vine
lurch the summer months
is thin the veneer
where boats will lurch

mouths gone, and the sparkle
of leaves caught in the air.

Under a grouping he calls "The Rimbaud Poems," I read and re-read the following excerpt from "Innuendo Feces" because the haunting words brought memories of an often-destructive work world:

The vampire that rends us gently
commands that we amuse ourselves
and forget every receptionist.

And in "Veillees" verse II, Finney reveals shadow worlds that are not always what they seem. He gives us fragments, surreal images, and allows readers to reach their own conclusions:

The two extremes of the room, other décor of the conquest,
trapped beyond judgment. The carved wall
is a succession of psychological blows, snobberies,
the cold air of geological accident –
rapid and intense dream of sentimental groups
constructed from white ash.

In "Job Titles", the poet's descriptive words feel like they read. The reader experiences the lot of a dishwasher, a jazz musician, and a Chinese poet. I chose the Chinese poet in excerpt:

…this grief has no pine
no bamboo, no thousand
grasses weeping with dew.
It's barefoot, a giant
record in a cave.

"I Can't Stand the City as I Saw it That Day" is lyrical, rolls soft off the tongue when read aloud. Finney blends ancient and modern life into a troubling whole:

How hard the adamantine doors
one must scratch to escape
and so be borne on a sea of blood,
unknown to the knuckles,
whose jealousy was of a higher sort.

* * *

I peer into the regions of perpetual mist
without much success. These rigors
are sustained by a whole class of people
working at our behest. Would that it snow
more freely, and the plastic wrapped
nudge each other in despair.

An engine and a siren
in an obscure academy…

One critic describes Finney's poems as "scraps he has so eloquently assembled for us." These scraps are what I call images, fragments of life, vestiges of emotion, and snatches of poetic impressions. Finney's poetry inspires curiosity and self-searching as they lead us in and out of time into surreal circumstance. If you enjoy modern poetry, consider reading The Obedient Door.

*****

Laurel Johnson is a Retired Registered Nurse and the author of four books. She is Senior Reviewer for Midwest Book Review; Review Editor for New Works Review; Staff Reviewer for Shadow Poetry Quill Quarterly Review; and occasional submitting reviewer for The Wandering Hermit Review and Irish News and Entertainment. Her poetry and prose can be found online in various literary e-zines. She lives in Nebraska with her husband of forty years.

TRILL AND MORDENT by LUISA A. IGLORIA

2006-03-04T16:52:00.000-08:00

ROCHITA LOENEN-RUIZ reviews

Trill And Mordent by Luisa A. Igloria
(WordTech Communications, 2005)

For lovers of poetry and literature, Luisa Igloria, who also wrote under the name Luisa Aguilar-Carino, is one of the few Filipino poets who have made it to the Carlos Palanca Hall of Fame. A poet and writer recognized in the Philippines, she's also crafted poems acclaimed in international circles.

Trill and Mordent is an enchanting collection that captures the imagination and touches the soul of the reader. Here we see the poet revealed in words, in portraits and images that inspire us to think beautiful thoughts. The poetry is reflective of the spirit of the times. It is poetry that feeds the soul with its lines that are almost mythical as well as lyrical.

Carried along by the voice of the poet, we wander through the territory of the poet’s words and come awake to a call that arouses memories of a land left behind.

Trill and Mordent contains thirty-nine poems, most of which were written in the post 9/11 climate. The collection celebrates beauty and hope. Moving from the somber closing lines in “Regarding History”, each poem that follows serves to remind us of the fragility of life and the interconnectedness of things.

It makes us

aware of how the slightest motion could set the whole transparent shelf to ringing.
--from "If the Poem were Glass"

This sense of interconnectedness and loss haunts the reader throughout the collection. These poems have the power to wake images that linger in the mind, as is revealed in the title poem, "Trill and Mordent":

without error, the composer made these precise marks on sheets of music. They bristle like little reports, like explosions

From the snout of a rifle angled through the window of a van,
Aimed at any head smooth as the next one

Further on:

Now the news everyday is filled with how little
It takes to ignite the blunt wick of fear.

In the space of a few words, Igloria is able to capture the atmosphere of terror and fear left behind by the events of 9/11. Nevertheless, the poet does not linger in that moment of terror.

She moves on to evoke images that transport the reader from the reign of fear to where beauty and the joy of life overcome what terror seeks to repress.

“I’m sure that by the end of the night they sit like me in
the shadow of a balcony or by a window, stung by the radiant rising
of the moon, by the ccuu-ccuu-rruu-ccuu-ccuu echoing through the gardens,”
--from "Stairway to Heaven"

To me, “Stairway to Heaven”, the final poem in this collection provides a fitting end to a collection that celebrates the triumph of life and beauty over terror and destruction.

*****

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is a Filipina writer living in the Netherlands where she writes speculative fiction and poetry. She writes a regular interview column for The Sword Review and the Authors and Books column for Munting Nayon, the Filipino-Dutch newspaper. Visit her at http://rcloenen-ruiz.blogspot.com

WINTERGREEN by CHARLES BENNETT

2006-03-04T16:51:00.000-08:00

CATI PORTER reviews

Wintergreen by Dr. Charles Bennett
(Headland Publications, 2002)

In my hand I hold a slim green volume of poetry. On the cover is an amazingly ethereal painting by Giovanni Segantini entitled “The Punishment of Lust” in which we see bare-breasted women floating through an icy channel against a backdrop of snow covered mountains. It is titled Wintergreen, by Dr. Charles Bennett.

Dr. Bennett lives and works in and about the U.K. where he runs the Ledbury Poetry Festival, “the best poetry festival in the country” according to Andrew Motion. Several years ago I was lucky enough to hear him read during Writers Week at the University of California, Riverside, near my home.

Throughout this debut, a collection of startlingly fresh lyric poems, Dr. Bennett employs language that is evocative, revelatory, and steeped in folklore that acts as mythical sinew, connecting these poems to the bone of a narrative structure that draws us through a landscape bristling with the mystery of the ordinary and the extraordinary.

The title poem evokes the bright flavor of wintergreen with crisp imagery, then seamlessly turns from the literal to the metaphorical beginning at the fourth couplet, ending the poem with:

Somewhere close at hand
you are hiding until I find you:

a remedy for solitude
a prickle of white in the wood.

These poems, saturated with a longing the reader can almost taste, seek to satiate that longing with searching. Most are oblique love poems, addressed to an un-named “you” as though letting us in on a private conversation. In “The Unicorn Diaries” the speaker claims:

I have put you together from pentagrams of sugar
and salt, from the bones of eleven mice

This invokes, in this reader’s mind, not just a snippet of pagan ritual, but the desire to create that which cannot easily be obtained. When the speaker says:

I wondered if the smell was viburnum
or phosphorus, if the feathers

were swans or doves, if the dimpled sheets
of your bed were the toad’s pale underbelly ,

or fallen hawthorn blossom,

the text seems imbued with a glow, a sweetness; a softness. The swans and doves and hawthorn blossoms, symbolic of monogamy and fidelity, are countered in the penultimate couplet by the unicorn’s slow dismembering of a wedding dress. She then runs off, leaving a bath full of milk, a trail of hoof-prints in the snow.

In another poem, “The Mermaid Room,” written in the voice of a mermaid, the speaker states:

I am the voyage you will make alone
in a small, unstable, open boat
for the rest of your life...

further reenforcing one of the major themes of this work: the deeply human quest for all that eludes us. We find ourselves adrift, almost floating from one page to the next, until we reach the final section: a series of linked poems titled “Lost.” Here, on a Wednesday night, we find the speaker wanting to learn how to spell abracadabra -- a conundrum, of course, because as he is spelling out this desire, he is spelling out the word.

This is the trick that is played as we read these simple and elegant and mysterious poems: in searching out a remedy for our own solitude, we find that we’ve had it in our hands all along.

*****
Cati Porter is poet, artist, freelance writer, and editor of the online literary journal, Poemeleon. Her poetry can be read on the web in the current issue of kaleidowhirl, and in past issues of Poetry Southeast, Sunspinner, Banyan Review, and Poetry Midwest. She lives in Riverside, California, with her husband and two young sons.

ATLAS by KATRINA VANDENBERG

2006-03-04T16:50:00.000-08:00

MICHAEL A. WELLS reviews

Atlas by Katrina Vandenberg
(Milkweed Editions, 2004)

Atlas – A Poetic Gift

It is only by taking a reader out of his or her seat and transforming their mental image of place and time that the collaborative between poet and reader can occur. Some writers never truly are able to bring the reader along but Katrina Vandenberg has achieved this with her first book, Atlas. Vandenberg writes with a marvelous mixture authority and tenderness. Her poems have been published in The Iowa Review, American Scholar and Poetry Northwest. She was a 1999-2000 Fulbright fellow to the Netherlands.

Atlas is a journey, Vanderberg's journey through a period of life that bridge unique tragedy and the commonality of day in and day out living. She’s a woman in a plaid shirt writing a poem about the mundane everyday existence we share. She is the grieving widow who finds enormous beauty in the heartbreak of loss, "but aren’t you sorry you will never see / a tulip that would make you offer all / you own for the layered, translucent promise // in its brown paper wrapper? Aren’t you sorry / you never saw John Keats in his dressing gown / scribbling an ode beneath his flowering plum, // will never know the ten thousand men with hemophilia / infected with HIV two decades ago, / and the purpose that briefly lit their brilliant veins?"

Vandenberg’s poetry touched me deeply one moment and brought me to laughter the next. In "Consuming Desire," she seems to speak for everyone. The lovely coed from the next table who touched John on the arm as though she wasn’t even there-- "Excuse me, sir, but what / is that naughty little desert? / And I knew from the way he glanced / at the frothy neckline of her blouse, / then immediately cast his eyes on his plate / before giving a fatherly answer, / he would have given up dessert three months / for the chance to feed this one to her, / I was stunned; John was hopeful; / but the girl was hitting on his cake." But Vandenberg in a voice of pure honesty finds the way to say just what we are all thinking, "You want a big piece / of this world. You would love to have the whole thing."

Atlas shows Katrina Vandenberg has enormous promise as a poet with a gift of bringing us all along on the Journey.

*****

Michael A. Wells is a native Missourian. He makes his home in Independence, Missouri with his wife Cathy where he has been writing poetry for several years now. Michael’s poetry has been published in three anthologies as well as the Park University Scribe and the Independence, Examiner. His poem “Coming Out” was the Missouri runner up in the 2005 Senior Poet Laureate contest. Michael currently serves as Vice President of the Kansas City Metro Verse (a chapter of the Missouri Poetry Society). His non-writing interests include baseball, reading, and wine. He is the Father of four, three of which are grown. He is an avid blogger, known as Stick Poet Superhero and his blog can be read at http://stickpoetsuperhero.blogspot.com.

SKINNY EIGHTH AVENUE by STEPHEN PAUL MILLER

2006-03-04T13:19:00.000-08:00

WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA reviews

Skinny Eighth Avenue by Stephen Paul Miller
(Marsh Hawk Press, 2005)

Stephen Paul Miller’s Skinny Eighth Avenue is a mix of the intellectual and the mundane. In his poetry, Miller reacts to his time and raises many questions for the reader—questions we often do not want to confront about religion, politics, and art. In this collection, he rants against George Bush, discusses the problems of tenure in academia, explores the idea of the Jewish imagination, and laments the U.S. lead war in Iraq. He does all of this within open forms that explore the page.

The playful movement of the poems over the page mirrors following the discussion within the text itself. Reading his work is like trying to walk beside him and follow his conversation as he moves, for in these pieces he shifts from topic to topic. At times, he shows us clear logical patterns, but at others he shows us connections that might usually be at play below our visual or perceptual range. The tone of these pieces is casual, such as in Frank O’Hara’s work, and that helps with his range of topics. Take, for example, these lines from “I’m Trying to Get My Phony Baloney Ideas about Metamodernism into a Poem”:

I phone my LA friend Ken Deifik who says he forgot
how articulate
the people they interview
in Woodstock are until seeing the new director’s cut.
Whatever the sixties is it melds
                              natural and
                               human concerns
                              unlike notions of
                               “human” and
                                           “natural” science
resembling Nazi laboratories and Utopias. (12)

In these pieces, he mixes personal life with major political/historical events, and often those events, as they do in this poem, push him to make connections with other major events.

Miller’s poetry in this collection is definitely poetry for current life, especially current activism. If there is any drawback to the book, it’s that several of the pieces, like “Pleasure” read like essays. On the one hand, these pieces can be seen as breaking the boundaries between essays and poetry; on the other hand, they can seen as pieces that would be better thrown into prose. That’s not to say they are not worth the read. Most of what Miller says in this collection is interesting, so if you have not already purchased your copy, you should.

*****

William Allegrezza teaches and writes from his base in Chicago. His poems, articles, and reviews have been published in several countries, including the U.S., Holland, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Australia, and are available in many online journals. Also, he is the editor of moria, a journal dedicated to experimental poetry and poetics, and the editor-in-chief of Cracked Slab Books. His books include The Vicious Bunny Translations, covering over, Temporal Nomads, Lingo, and Ladders in July.

SNAKESKIN STILLETTOS by MOYRA DONALDSON

2006-03-04T00:42:00.000-08:00

ANN E. MICHAEL reviews

Snakeskin Stilettos By Moyra Donaldson
(Cavankerry Press, Ltd., 2002)

I have a friend, a painter and printmaker, for whom shoes are a recurring motif; that’s the initial reason I picked up Moyra Donaldson’s book. “Great pair of shoes on the cover,” I thought, “Wonder if I should buy this for Annie?” Then I turned to the title poem, where “not for nothing/has your mother wrapped them in paper,/shut them into their box, set them/at the very back of the wardrobe./Forbidden.”

The eight-year-old child in this poem already understands that these shoes are waiting for “Something/you’ve never felt before.” These high heels, “live and dangerous,” are something to grow into and to slip out of, like a snake’s skin. Such transformations, the growing-into and slipping-out-of, appear in several of this collection’s strongest poems. Donaldson invokes the goddess Kali (who takes a serpent’s guise at times), evokes a restless child’s shape-shifting magic (“My Turn to Be the Horse”), or retells the seal-woman story with which Americans may be familiar through the movie “The Legend of Rowan Innish.”

Donaldson’s poetry is easy to read and rewarding to re-read, for her poems are layered; there are allusions, myths, places to which the inquisitive reader will return. She is deft with very brief poems (under ten lines) that are short but not slight. Only a few fall somewhat shy of excellence and even these are buoyed by considered placement in the collection.

Cavankerry Press reprinted this book, first published by Lagan Press of Belfast in Donaldson’s native Northern Ireland, for U.S. distribution. I commend Cavankerry for recognizing the sexy, scary, and familiar undertones of Donaldson’s work and for bringing Snakeskin Stilettos over to our side of the pond.

*****

Ann E. Michael is a poet, essayist and librettist whose work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. Her chapbook More Than Shelter (2004) is available from Spire Press, and she has two chapbooks forthcoming in 2006, one from FootHills Publishing and another from Finishing Line Press. She is a recipient of a PA Council on the Arts fellowship in poetry and currently teaches at DeSales University. Her website is www.annemichael.com

OPEN FIRE by AAREN YEATTS PERRY

2006-03-04T00:27:00.000-08:00

ANN E. MICHAEL reviews

Open Fire by Aaren Yeatts Perry
(Whirlwind Press, Camden NJ, 2004)

Positively Ambitious

In his well-known 1983 essay "Poetry and Ambition," Donald Hall writes, "Any remote place may be the site of poetry...but for almost every poet it is necessary to live in exile before returning home--an exile rich in conflict and confirmation. Central New Hampshire?...or Cincinnati or the soybean plains of western Minnesota...may shine at the center of our work and our lives; but if we never leave these places, we are not likely to grow up enough to do the work [of poetry]." Aaren Yeatts Perry's new book of poems is grounded in experiences of home and travel, exile and conflict. It is also ambitious work as Hall defines it: a desire to write poems that endure (and to take the risks that come with such an undertaking).

The risk is that the poet will fail to write enduring poems; but by being too modest in his or her aims, by taking risks only in craft or only in subject or--worst of all--taking no risks, the writer will get nowhere. In his book Open Fire, Perry faces conflicts, takes on cultural risks and craft risks, does not shy away from politics or compassion. He has left home (Indiana, the American Midwest) and traveled physically and emotionally far from these roots, observing carefully throughout his experiences. He has "grown up enough to do the work." He has also been reading, listening to music, walking through urban landscapes, enjoying art, and visiting with the dead, to judge from the scope of the poems in this book; and he knows about prosody, whether or not he bows to its demands. It is ambitious to write about abortion, racism, homelessness, Nicaragua, war, peace, The Big Ideas; it is difficult to write about such things without getting abstract or self-righteous and ranting. Perry usually manages to negotiate the difficulty.

In Perry's poems, free verse often feels like a form--which it should. He relies on rhythm (occasionally a nearly-strict meter, more often not) and internal rhyme, slanted end-rhyming, stanzaic patterns. There's even a villanelle, "Book of Matches." The prose poem is another form he successfully employs in Open Fire: "War Correspondent" reads like an informal press release and ends with a twist. Although Perry's written attempts at "sound effects" on the page are not always effective, these poems (which publisher Lamont Steptoe, in his introduction, exhorts us to read "ALOUD"), pulse with noise, sound, and wordplay. From "Conductor":

And someone headed homeless, smelling like a dead animal, just
woke up and missed his stop, but will ride the loop again and again.
We the seated, itching, inch across our town somewhere in history,
trying to save ourselves by making the five and dime by five.
Trying to find a sin to fit and regretting getting in at all.

There is also wordplay on literary allusions, such as to Whitman in the first few lines of "Grace Lifts Us": "How many battles won with only minor gunshot/Wounds to the body politic,/To the body. Electric, the armies of/human spirit survive." Perry's poem "Word Gets Out" is a clever, ironic commentary on modern poetics, cheerfully name-dropping contemporary literary lions, that wraps itself around the page the way newsprint "will wrap fresh monkfish." Although one may tire of tropes of "The Second Coming," Perry's poem "Lovers on Sand," a pseudo-erotic warning all the way through, reclaims its predecessor appropriately enough: "The nuclear winter will clear in 2525/And some Rough Beast, thinking he's in Bethlehem/Will find Franky's radioactive underwear..." Humor can be scary, and Perry takes that risk as well; he also writes poems that are downright hard to read (I am thinking of the brutal imagery in "Disclaimer").

The pieces that seem best-realized are often "enduring" in a more emotionally-risky way--"When It Fell," "We Chose," and "Cottonmouth" from the first section of memoir poems, "How Twisted Smoke," "When It Rains," and "Grace Lifts Us;" all of these pieces hold up to more than one reading. Perhaps Aaren Perry has not yet written his most enduring poems, but this book indicates that he has the ambition--in the most positive sense of the word--to do so.

*****

Ann E. Michael is a poet, essayist and librettist whose work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. Her chapbook More Than Shelter (2004) is available from Spire Press, and she has two chapbooks forthcoming in 2006, one from FootHills Publishing and another from Finishing Line Press. She is a recipient of a PA Council on the Arts fellowship in poetry and currently teaches at DeSales University. Her website is www.annemichael.com

FEATURED POET: MARTHA KORNBLITH

2006-03-02T17:30:00.000-08:00

PRESENTED BY GUILLERMO JUAN PARRA who offers an introductory essay. After the introduction are 14 poems by Martha Kornblith, then an interview and newspaper article respectively by Rafael Arráiz Lucca and Blanca Elena Pantin. All English translations are by Parra.

Guillermo Juan Parra was born in Cambridge, MA. He attended Boston University and now works as a teacher in that city. He is editing an anthology of XX century Venezuelan poetry in English translation. His poems and essays have appeared in Xcp, 6x6, CARVE and The CLR James Journal.

A Woman in a Country at War: The Poetry of Martha Kornblith
By Guillermo Juan Parra

Martha Kornblith (Lima, Peru 1959-Caracas, Venezuela 1997) is among the unfortunate group of poets whose suicides influence how their work is read. When she killed herself on May 29, 1997, Kornblith left behind one book and various poems scattered in anthologies and literary magazines. I first encountered her work the year she died, in an anthology of emerging Latin American poets, edited in Mexico by the Peruvian critic Julio Ortega (Antología de la poesía latinoamericana del siglo XXI: El turno y la transición, México DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1997). I eventually found a copy of her first book, Oraciones para un dios ausente (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1995), during a visit to Caracas in 2001. Two other books were published within months of her death, one a collection of work written in the 1980s, entitled El perdedor se lo lleva todo (Caracas: Fondo Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 1997) and a series of newer poems entitled Sesión de endodoncia (Caracas: Grupo Editorial Eclepsidra, 1997).

Many of Kornblith’s poems inevitably revolve around her early and tragic death, as though she could see its approach for years. Suicide and death recur throughout her work, quite often in an angry and resentful manner. Her final action seems to stand as a challenge to the reader, an inevitable moment that bleeds into her verses and seals a pact. In the hands of a lesser poet, this obsession with death could become a trite or derivative symptom. But Kornblith’s poems revolve around death in the same manner as the plays of Christopher Marlowe do, with an elegant and dark fierceness that fine-tunes their language to incredible feats. There are many moments in Kornblith’s poetry when she is able to reduce her gaze to the most elemental and vivid renderings of the city and life she inhabited.

When she observes a beautiful classmate and fellow poet drinking from a water fountain, she transports her reader to a stylized and honest moment of love and lust glimpsed from within daily routine. The setting for her poems is often a single room, where the poet writes against the city and against her own fears. Other writers and artists (Plath, Kristeva, Van Gogh, Gauguin) are invoked for company and sustenance as much as for spite. This spitefulness pulsing through much of her work might reflect the vicious postmodern tones of her adopted city, to which she arrived as a child from Lima:

Saturday is a day to hate
this city
to hate this city
and its poets
until death

Caracas in the early 1990s, when Kornblith was an active member of a collective of young poets and fiction writers named Eclepsidra, was a city beginning its descent into political and criminal violence, after a decade that witnessed the dissipation of promises offered by an oil boom in the 1960s and 1970s. Two major political events could be interpreted as influencing the dark mood of Kornblith’s poems. The first of these were the massive disturbances of February 27, 1989 (known as “El Caracazo”) that involved violent protests against a sudden increase of public transportation fares imposed by then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez. These protests began in impoverished neighborhoods encircling the central valley of Caracas and quickly spread throughout the capital and into other cities. The government temporarily suspended constitutional guarantees and sent in the armed forces to quell the wide-scale rioting and looting that ensued. After several chaotic days, close to two thousand civilians were dead or disappeared and Venezuela was left in a precarious position, forced to confront its extreme poverty and social inequalities, despite being one of the world’s most important oil producers.

On February 4, 1992 a group of leftist military officers staged a coup attempt against Carlos Andrés Pérez in various cities, including Caracas. This coup attempt was led by a then-unknown army Lieutenant Colonel. Although the coup was unsuccessful, it set the stage for the political disgrace of Pérez and Venezuela’s mainstream political parties. More importantly, the failed coup facilitated the eventual rise to power of that anonymous Lieutenant Colonel, who would go on to become one of the most controversial and militaristic leaders in Venezuelan history. Added to these political complications was the sharp rise in violent crime in Caracas, reflecting a trend in major cities throughout Latin America. I would suggest these political and social tensions are reflected in even the most esoteric and private of Kornblith’s poems. In her writing, she is filtering the daily violence of her city and attempting to counter it with a precise and hard style that can sustain and dispel such pressures. The “hate” Kornblith invokes against Caracas is one born of despair and defiance. It is a hatred that exists in any worthwhile poet who confronts the iniquities and violence of the late XX century in Latin America. One finds that same stance in the work of Rimbaud or Dickinson, two poets who share with Kornblith an affinity for the notion of the poet as a being engaged in a struggle against daily reality.

The Eclepsidra group was a collective of young writers centered around Venezuela’s oldest university, the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas. They were originally inspired to form their own collective after several of them participated in a writing workshop with the poet, historian and editor Rafael Arráiz Lucca, himself a member of previous collectives of young writers in the 1980s (centered around the Tráfico and Guaire groups) who made urban reality the focus of their poetics. Like their predecessors from the 1980s, many writers in the Eclepsidra group chose to include the vicious and contradictory nature of Caracas into their work, moving beyond surrealist or telluric approaches to poetic composition. Kornblith received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from UCV, where she studied at the Escuela de Letras. At the time of her death, the Eclepsidra collective had more or less dissolved but their legacy can be seen in the editorial venture they founded and which continues to publish poetry today. Among the Eclepsidra members are the novelist Israel Centeno* and the poet and editor Carmen Verde Arocha, two of Venezuela’s most influential contemporary writers.

Kornblith’s poetry is ultimately grounded in love as an ideal that exists but cannot be fully attained. Whether she is writing about a beautiful boy in one of her classes or lamenting her own fear within Venezuela’s unstable political landscape, Kornblith imbues her language with a precision and austerity that evoke a devotion to a poetics of love. This devotion was, unfortunately, not enough to sustain Kornblith. The act of writing poetry in a city as violent and convoluted as Caracas in the late XX century can be an absurd task. Reading and translating Kornblith in the decade after her death, I want to remain faithful to her fierce and implacable poetics that challenges the vicissitudes of the city. In that challenge, Kornblith’s poems glow with a love of language and a deep awareness of the futility of poetry in a struggle against economics, politics and the doubts that assail any poet who dares to look closely at the world. As she writes in one of her posthumous texts, the poem will exist within and despite the continuous assaults of daily existence. The poet assumes her place within imagination, building up a reservoir of silence, memory and love to sustain her amid the perpetual crisis that seems to characterize Latin America today:

I'll be a woman in a
country at war
thinking of you
habitually
—alone—

When reading Kornblith’s poetry, one gets the impression she never quite adjusted to the frantic and violent nature of Caracas. As a Peruvian-born, Jewish Venezuelan poet, her work is distinctly tied to a multiplicity of selves that is quite common to Latin America. The intense solitude and despair that inhabit many of her poems could perhaps be traced to cultural and historical aspects of her race, class and gender in Latin America. But to reduce Kornblith to her Jewishness, to her position among the middle class of Caracas, or to her being a female poet, would be simplistic. While translating Kornblith into English I have tried to listen as closely as possible to her voice on the page, to the Caracas rhythms of her Spanish, to the sharp tone of her anger and to the tender clarity of her laments. One can find a brave willingness to remain faithful to the ideal of the poem in Kornblith’s writing, no matter what losses or disappointments might be encountered.

I have translated fourteen of her poems into English, along with an interview with Kornblith published in 1994 by Rafael Arráiz Lucca (Caracas, 1959). I have also translated a newspaper article by the poet and editor Blanca Elena Pantin (Caracas, 1957), published several days after her death in the Caracas daily El Universal. I can only hope my English versions remain true to Martha Kornblith’s tough, beautiful verses.
—Boston, February 2006

(* Israel Centeno is one of several Venezuelan writers active in the blogosphere today. He can be read at http://israelcenteno.blogspot.com and http://citizenmurder.blogspot.com.)

*******************

14 Poems by Martha Kornblith

Prayers to an Absent God (selections)

That's why we dedicate our books
to the dead.
Because we carry the hopeless conviction
they listen to us.
We, accomplices to
less innocent careers,
believe we will be gods
in other worlds
because we think happiness
is the miracle's distance
when we dream of one word,
when we watch airplanes rising.

*

That's why I became a poet
because time passes slowly in solitude.
Isn’t it merely a dangerous moment
maintains our composure?
Doesn't madness depend
on our single, fragile chord?
Doesn't she lean on one term alone,
on the exact term,
that saves
or damns us?

*

The street is full
and there’s a woman
in the depths of her room
who weeps alone.

She loves a man
who writes theories.

She recalls the day
full of last goodbyes.

It’s nighttime,
and outside
it rains on me.

Because it’s Friday,
December
and you’re leaving.

*

This memory astride eternity's breadth,
that absent presence,
that memory that disrespects the body
(death leaves without saying goodbye).
This anguish of inability,
that asphyxiation.

*

At times
we must
come back to memories
to annul recollection,
annihilate vestiges,
other lives,
salute old bonds,
decapitate ancient papers,
founder anew,
so they might say again
and not have,
not possess anything.

*

That poet who stares at me.
Every night
he leaves class,
explains a verse,
shoos the flies away from the water fountain,
drinks a sip,
shakes off his blue jeans.
And he keeps doing this, always
sad,
concise.
Sometimes
the audience cheers,
and he searches his pockets,
sinking his forehead into the theater box
while I think:
Him
and the blank page.

*

I've seen a poet write
about poetry's uselessness.
They become, at the end of their lives,
chaotic and telluric,
they reflect on the cosmos,
they denigrate the poem, for the right reasons,
while their hands shake
over the glass of whisky
and they return to the initial torment
that expands now into our dedications.
They sleep over their book covers
but they no longer conspire, like others in the salons.
Good and visionary
they never confess their disaster,
they are above the end of the world.
They weep because the word has become stupid
and they wonder if the wait has been legitimate.

*

Today I finally learn
you don’t need
an intimate beginning alone,
the conclusive word
that will link
and tie it all together,
that to write a poem
(sweet and sated enclave)
you need to establish
in the stanzas
a place that might hold
our silences.
Nor are maxims enough,
final and belated gesture:
(this occupation, the most
innocent of all)
love must install
itself in slight embrace
and knot the words together
(nor does it go very far).
You must decipher
the exact measure, the needed link
where hypotheses arise,
enter the decisive point
where the verb crosses
the stare.

*

Inexorable
you finally open,
quick as a kiss
planted in the dark,
that way of anticipating
phrases that have to do
with time.
That sad knowledge converges within you
(I accuse a lone melancholy),
you have that illustrious manner of appearing
submerged within the intertext,
but it's crucial to delay
these verses of time,
you reached the end impeccably
(your discourse awaits, avid for hours).

*

I remain, staring at the word,
the ruins my first verse opened,
only things speaking themselves forever and never,
there will be no more talent emerging from the fragments,
only the others' letters announce a disaster.

(Translated from Oraciones para un dios ausente, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1995)

*

Family Saga

In all houses
there will always live a poet
with a sister (who isn’t a poet)
who will always tell her
to write a biography
of their family.
In all houses
there will live a poet
—crazy, by the way—
like those that sustain
their own despised biographies
amid dire suffering:
They sighted past autisms
women who speak gnarled words
jump at midnight.
In all houses
a distant cousin will exist
—who lives in a another country—
and who searches (in English)
the family’s genesis.
Years ago, he met
this schizophrenic relative
(So quiet, so withdrawn—he said—)
(“So quiet, So withdrawn”)
He didn’t recognize her in the last photo
(“lucía tan diferente”)
(“She looked so different,
so attractive, so outlocked”)
In all houses
there will live a sister who is a poet
—crazy, by the way—
who searches her own disdained
genesis
(the one we know already)
In all houses
there will live a sister
who will ask her poet sister
to write the history
of their family
This poet (the house lunatic)
will eventually become part of this saga
on the day she leaves the telephone
disconnected
at the edge of dawn.

*

*******************

To go one Saturday

To go one Saturday
afternoon to a bookstore
without realizing
how dull we were,
plagiarizing even
curses and suicide.
To go one Saturday to the
bookstore
to copy Sylvia Plath
or the closest neighbor.
Although, either way,
almost everything always converged
in misfortune
it was an argument
to suddenly encounter
a current of vision
and run back to my house
to write a poem
about this city
I hate so much.

Saturday is a day to hate
this city
to hate this city
and its poets
until death

*

Today

Today
I have lost the world.
It is my own disappointment
I seek.
It’s Tuesday
I read Kristeva
(“melancholy is sterile
if she does not evolve into a poem”).
It’s Tuesday
and one month ago
my left hand
burned in live flesh.
I met a doctor
I loved madly.
That man washed
my blood
that man cleaned
my burned skin
tenderly.
That man knew
my lament
but that lament
was not a lament
that came from within
it was a different
lament,
an outside lament.
It’s Tuesday
I read Kristeva
(“I inhabit the secret
crypt of a wordless
pain”).
To him I dedicate
“Love can arise from pain,
the profoundest love.”

It’s Tuesday
and I read Kristeva:
“melancholy is
a perversion,
it is up to us
to lead her into
words and life.”

(Translated from Papel Literario, El Nacional, 15 September 1996)

*

When the government falls

When the government falls
I will be habitually alone.
Since I will have postponed
the shopping
—as always—
from taking so much time
to imagine you,
my pantry will be
empty
and I will saunter without
breadcrumbs,
or relatives, or neighbors
or pain killers, alone.
I will be a woman in a
country at war
thinking of you
habitually
—alone—

(Translated from Sesión de endodoncia, Caracas: Grupo Editorial Eclepsidra, 1997)

*******************

Martha Kornblith: A Poem is Merely Good for Being Happy
By Rafael Arráiz Lucca

When Martha Kornblith's eyes look they speak. Few glances reveal so clearly the tense dialogue provoked by the world's contradictions, but few eyes such as these announce the honey of victory. If the battles are arduous, the gains are definitive. As difficult as it is to learn how to walk, a memorable poem's light can reach the page in the same manner. Martha Kornblith is the author of "Jesse Jones."

"I'm an average person, but I have a firm conviction about poetry. Maybe this comes from my happy childhood, from the riches I had, from the good people that surrounded me. One is made by one's childhood. I lived within a house, a block in San Isidro. My childhood in that city where I was born is something I always remember. Later, I spent two years in Rio de Janeiro, but life there was harder than in Lima. Although Rio's beauty is incomparable, Lima was the place of my happiness.

I never went to the beach in Rio. I felt uncomfortable, uprooted. I think my poetry is born out of that discomfort, out of that fantasy-laden and solitary world. My texts come from my wanderings at the ocean shore. Like all teenagers, I dreamed of being someone important. I wanted to be an actress in Brazilian telenovelas. So, I dreamed. This verse of mine comes from those years: I tend to fly like a wounded dove / through an endless beach.

I arrived in San Bernardino [Caracas] when I was eleven. I ended up living in a competitive, snobby atmosphere that valued money very much and dismissed inner values very much. That was all very hard."

And it was this relentless carnival which contributed to the birth of the poetic word: That was a poem I made to save myself, to show to many people and to tell them: read this and stop bothering me. But after I did that I realized poetry doesn't save anyone. What you can accomplish with a poem is that someone will laugh out loud in your face. You can't buy an apartment in New York with poetry, nor can you travel every year to Europe. Poetry only allows us to gather together in a workshop, to have fun and be in contact with beauty. No one is saved by poetry. It's merely good for being happy.

"I don't have that tragic vision of poetry. For me, it's a great pleasure to write. If, for example, I wake up on a Saturday depressed and bored, not knowing what to do with my life and I suddenly manage to write a text. Well, that day is already something else, it's a day that flowered. I hate those torn people who walk around suffering with a poem in their hand. I don't like it, it annoys me because the poem is my happy self."

Chance or hidden laws often create situations which don't have an explanation that follows the rules of logic. Martha Kornblith began to write poems without knowing, exactly, that this is what she was doing. She was looking to save herself from others and from herself, and what she was really doing was writing a text. To undress: Whoever rids himself of everything, whoever is ready for loss, is also ready for winning. Rafael Cadenas has lost everything and has gained everything. It's as though depression turned into something else. It's as though sadness and being deprived helped fertilize the spiritual life's earth. But what was once a hidden inclination within the tracery of chance ends up being a function (a pleasure) to help face the world's vicissitudes. Living in Caracas is a terrible fate. I would like to live in a beautiful city, but I wouldn't be able to leave this place. I'm very scared of starting over again. However, the other afternoon I was driving along the Cota Mil highway and the sky was wonderful and, suddenly, I thought that at my 33 years, I sometimes forget we're covered by a sky and the sky is inexplicable. The sky is chance, it is God. All this, while I was driving in the car, made me remember some verses by Yolanda Pantin that expressed my feeling: I am close to the world outside myself / it is a miracle this sky exists.

But a woman who can look at the sky and remember the words of another one who also looked upwards, glances around herself and makes less complacent judgments. She worries about the attitude of many of her generational companions: They look for status before talent; they like to go to readings so that people will recognize them. They like prizes too much and this annoys me so much because, really, I think prizes deteriorate and alienate. But the greatest damage they inflict is they create characters. It's as though we were surrounded by characters instead of people. There are also many who think being a poet means going into a bar to get drunk, but that's how the sensibility for appreciating a good poem ends up being lost. And then you read great praises in the press for some books that are trash.

Perhaps these friends are the same ones who don't talk to Martha Kornblith because she is very reserved, she is silent. They're the same ones—Martha maintains—who on the one hand don't talk to her and on the other write the words silence, uneasiness and who act as though they were helpless. They're the same ones—Martha says— who read Pound and Eliot and who brandish a type of imported uneasiness, of imported helplessness. While credible and intelligent verses definitely exist, there are also many false voices and that bothers me. I sometimes buy ten literary magazines and don't find a single poem. Months go by and I don't find the poem I would have liked to have written.

My Poets are From Here

At the age of nine, Martha Kornblith had already read The One Thousand and One Nights but her father didn't know this. One day he brought it to her as a gift and Martha, so as to not disappoint him, thanked him and kept quiet. She reread it years later and couldn't put it down. Perhaps everything began there.

Then Jules Verne arrived, with his offer of other lives and other experiences and later on a poet and priest who inspired more than a few in the sixties: Ernesto Cardenal. I was in love with the Marilyn Monroe poem and I read it and read it until I memorized it.

But in these days marked by uncertainty, Martha prefers the voices of her closest neighbors: I'm not going to look for Anglo-Saxon influences. If I want to enrich myself, I look for an everyday reading among the poets of Guaire and Tráfico.* I look for a text by [Armando] Rojas Guardia, by [William] Osuna, by Yolanda Pantin or by Blanca Strepponi. Many young poets seek out very distant writers. Some of them even say in their poems that they're tired from so much traveling and, actually, they've never been out of the country.

(* Translator's note: Guaire and Tráfico were two poetry groups that emerged in Caracas in the early 1980s. Translated from Rafael Arráiz Lucca, Conversaciones bajo techo, Caracas: Editorial Pomaire, 1994.)

*******************

Kornblith’s Choice: Wearied by Fear
By Blanca Elena Pantin

El Universal
1 June 1997

In a moment on Thursday, May 29th, Martha Kornblith (Lima, Peru, 1959) decided to commit suicide. Some found out about her death through an announcement on the lower left-hand corner of the obituaries page of the newspaper. Read in that manner, it was a brutal piece of news. A poet, author of the books Oraciones para un dios ausente (Monte Avila Editores, 1995), El perdedor se lo lleva todo (Fondo Editorial Pequeña Venecia, going to press) and Sesión de endodoncia (unpublished, soon to be released by the imprint Vitrales de Alejandría), Kornblith belonged to the Eclepsidra group along with Israel Centeno, Carmen Verde, Abraham Abraham, Fernando Scorcia, Iván Crespo, Miguel Angel de Lima, María Milagros Pérez and José Luis Ochoa.

Trained in the poetry workshops of the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, Kornblith participated—as did the majority of the members of Eclepsidra—in the workshop directed by Rafael Arráiz Lucca between 1990 and 1994, first in the building of the Galería de Arte Nacional and later in the house belonging to Monte Avila Editores, when the author of Pesadumbre en Georgetown was the director of the publishing house located in La Castellana. When they publicly announced the birth of the group in 1994, they announced: “We are joined with Rafael by the ties of friendship and by an acknowledgement of his work as a poet and editor but that doesn’t mean we depend on him. On an aesthetic level, we feel closer to Terrenos but never to Balizaje. Rafael hasn’t served as a guide. All of us direct the workshop.” Soon afterwards the workshop dissolved and Eclepsidra suffered a division with two central arms. One led by Israel Centeno and the second by Carmen Verde. The first assumed the direction of the fiction collection for the Grupo Editorial Eclepsidra (it later made itself completely independent under the name Memorias de Altagracia) and Verde the poetry collection (Vitrales de Alejandría).

A desperate and painful book, Oraciones para un dios ausente anticipates Kornblith’s tragic determination. In one of the poems she tries to confront Adorno’s sentence on the impossibility of writing after Auschwitz. Against the philosopher’s sentence she proposes the vision of Günter Grass: “You have to use that suit / over and over / and never wear a new suit. You have to live off the urine / of poorly-washed kidneys.” Kornblith remembered all of this when she was going to write a poem. And then she wrote her own:

There was nothing to talk about,
except hunger’s conversations
the impossibility of abstraction.
One had to walk
with a well-sharpened pencil.
And write:
don't write poetry
or envy the silk of the synagogues.
I say it today
wearied by fear.

Wearied by fear like Miyó Vestrini, like Sylvia Plath, like Alfonsina Storni, like Alejandra Pizarnik, wearied by fear, Martha Kornblith decided her death.

(Translated from Blanca Elena Pantin, El Universal, 1 June 1997)

FEATURED POET: ROB HALPERN

2006-03-02T17:21:00.000-08:00

PRESENTED BY kari edwards who says:

I am not before you, my words are. Do not pay attention to me, pay attention to Rob Halpern's words, pay attention to the integrity of language that is before you, pay attention to the mosquito penetrating your body. Let Rob's words infiltrate deep into the layers of your flesh. Let the proboscis enter the epidermis and bring an infusion of language with the potential to wake up at each syntactical juncture, each momentary leap, each instantaneous swelling stinging real. Let Rob's poetics lay bare the blood bursting "Multi-billion dollar contracts icing profits". Can I say more? Can I introduce the effect that Rob's work offers; language itching at the surface? Can I say it is rare to find a seamless integrity of life and language? What can I say of the pleasure in the painful moment of waking to a mosquito doing its job and of reading Rob's work, waking to it doing its job.

*******************

from MUSIC FOR PORN
by Rob Halpern

[subtracting all that can’t survive

—achievements of environment]

What activates our withering away
Increasing daily forces squander
Fuels my harnessed links impeded

Heavenly connections trading soft
Targets doing business in
Absentia where my migrant sleeps

In clandestinity to earn a patch
Of hair or something taped illegal
Missing parts becoming real

Live guest-workers pump it up
I’m all you’ll ever need, he said
A bloodless thing my dildo stalks

                               —the new faux nation.

                              •

But it all gets even creepier still — stirring
Deep outside us there’s perishing, or something
Looming under legal methods, jet black wigs

Destined to what this destiny can’t contain
It’s really hardcore, the social being merely so
Many oppositions de-linking — wedged deep

In Styrofoam, my needles and the jugs break down
Being tour of duty, an avenue of ingress — tracks
Separate from the land upon which we move

Multi-billion dollar contracts icing profits
Over time, there’s nothing lurking deep inside
Resource — keeps it all intact until the day

All this appears in what appears to be still
Separating — love, or anywhere to hang
Their face turns real grub to fake adventure

[once again dehiscing—

out along the lines and routers]

— pumping my disturbance with phonation
days go by, open vowels, not generating much future
sound — losses where all this will have happened

any common place — strung out on being still, produced
disfigured gently now my ratcheted dejecta
— his leg becomes my fluted stump, my lip

his anal spur — missing tongues insert the word
whose shock force grids resistant salvage, ours
being squandered in advance, we molt in network

fiber, having traced the place of future action
what can’t be named in a field of roots, so come
inside my fjord of mannered stools — lights

                              •

watch the eyes peel back, so pasted to the blazing

[being refuse —

becoming natural gas]

drawn deep — kiss a little facial gum for steel
so shameful how his beauty hovers in me
like rain clouds all the block-womb, antecedents
boasting excess — this fantastic privation

little extra folds of skin—mine, ours
how we faked the needed hat disguise
persona or some little article wedged
between this pretty organ and that one

opportunity shimmies slender faults to sanctum —
i put my finger in his flap, still pulling back for more
a so-called viscid white emulsion, or whatever
it takes to make the ordnance take its target

anything to ensure the proper bonding
sickens in dehiscing blanks, a thickening
trace achieves salvation — withering away
gazing at events we still can’t name

                               —and these have named us.

                              •

The system and its structures speak
Of dwelling and utopian profiles
Penetrate us all like architecture

Or something standing in erecting
All these needs for dwelling swarms
New seeds dislodging shelter trades

The rent will not exhaust the ground
Vast huts all gone to weed
For the land’s this fateful portion

A little laminate remains to chafe
Scrotal shares our grainy waves
These phantasms stoke a pretty deal

                              ________________

And these facts constitute what sanctions sanctioned our reports.

*****

Rob Halpern’s first book of poems, Rumored Place, was published by Krupskaya (2004). Recent work appears in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Books), as well as Antennae, Chain, and Submodern Fiction. His translation of Georges Perec's "For A Realist Literature" is forthcoming, together with an essay on the politics of Perec’s early writing. With Kathleen Fraser, he is co-editing the poems of the late Frances Jaffer. Music for Porn is the title of his current manuscript. He lives in San Francisco and can be reached at ambarella@mac.com.

FEATURED POET: CARL GOTTESMAN

2006-03-02T00:32:00.000-08:00

PRESENTED BY EILEEN TABIOS who says:

I am delighted to present Carl Gottesman's lovely poems -- they speak for themselves. Some biographical details: Carl Gottesman graduated from the University of Iowa Poetry Workshop in 1972, worked as a typesetter, printer, business editor, technical writer for automative and other subjects, and was a college and high school English teacher in Athens, Greece and New York City. He's published over 80 poems in such publications as Salmagundi, Notre Dame Review, South Carolina Review, Poetry East, Poem and other magazines.

Four Poems:

WHY I CHOOSE SLEEP

Cloudy headaches, pinching shoes, hunger,
exile from dreams, thinning scalp --
sleep the strange balance amid autumnal gusts.

Behind the roadhouse
the icy blue wheels of vetch, joe-pie weed,
skeletal, resistant, cling like children
the last prayers of a world.

Disinfect walls, clear sky-lights, lie down
in deepening cold -- out of the west
thin smoke rises from rusting clothes.

With only half a heart
milkweed bursts
with flagrant whiteness.

Go hungry; black out in autumn;
abandon grainery; lights out; mute bells;
weather too bizarre to rise in.

***

GAMBLER LANCES A FLAME

4 a.m.; we cave in, then
we don’t; a strange hand
shoves the deck, we sit up,
money still flows, the door
stays locked. Your faces suddenly

magical, half-seen as bright robes beneath
lake ice. Look overhead, the mist of sleep,
it rose from us and gazes back down
as a child gazes back down
on its deathbed -- each breath

breaks off, yet remains, like bubbles
against rock face. If we
have motion, it is a dream of motion
crossing our eye-lids. If you go
to the window you may see light

flashing on the river bottom; the boats,
the paddles twined by heavy growth, the lovers
casting off for an hour turned to stone
dreaming of each other. We are wiser,
returning from beneath the scale

with the lightning of dawn. As you open
the curtains, what you see is the relic
of angelic slaughter laid down
as warning, as blessing. Let it splash
over to raise our desperate senses; what was,

a dream; today, and what’s to follow,
a dream, but sharper, made vital
by what passes from hand to hand
and never fails.

***

THE NETTLE

Children! Do you not know the nettle?
Do not touch him! Shun him, shun the field,
the feckled ridge, the tinner’s waste --
plunge like deer, bury yourselves. Deeply!
No prayers, no priest . . .

Look! I stepped down and the earth reeled
and stank, dust ate my heels
but the grandstand glitter lured me on.
All was free to taste, my palms tingled
but that music was a roaring cave. Children!

Get on and stay on. You’ll never see the end
if Mr. Nettle dogs your shadow. You’ll see your hat
ground my millstones, clothes drown
on your back. Listen when I spit in your ear!
Now that I’ve returned, shaken from a dark

blanket, and out of the ditches
a strangling, a splitting of doors. Cleave
to your harness, children, stoop to furrow,
surrender to the whorls of a still sky,
for one day while clearing your site

the nettle will be waiting, a sullen
churchman, unredeemed, patient. That broken soul,
listen to him, then, if you must, but turn,
stiff with cold, and drag your reins through brambles
back to the glow above your rafters, that silence

where your foals stir, women fling shutters open,
shaking the dust, calling your name. Touch their breasts,
bear your burden. Then bless your lucky stars,
children. I heard and followed. What’s poison
if not to taste? I stepped down

and the train rushed on. Now the rash burns,
never slows. From my hand our blood merged --
distemper my blood brother. No shadow before me,
none behind. Upon my forearm, in my palm grows
a sore, a brew that I suck for strength.

***

TO LISA

As you approach the piano, Lisa,
you would pass us here awaiting
a recital, pass without a glance
to meet those in the garden, a myriad,
you say, wearing the gold
of heavenly forgiveness;

you swear the angels surround you,
await you, and you yearn for the angels
to know you, to welcome you, but

what they desire, the angels,
is not your death, Lisa --

you breathe for them, they know it,
they know it like their deaths --

they may crave that you rise, Lisa,

rise out of your body,
but not for death, Lisa,

they may reach out
out of the last remnant
of breath, to you, Lisa;

and you hear them, you listen,
and offer, out of yearning, done
with yearning, with hurt, your breath;

all they yearn for
they live in your breath

they live in your breath
you take them in
when you take your breath

Lisa, they desire death,

but it is not your death,
it is their death

your death is their death

do not
do not rise
do not rise to embrace it

THE AREA OF SOUND CALLED THE SUBTONE by NOAH ELI GORDON

2006-03-01T22:51:00.000-08:00

RUSTY MORRISON reviews

The Area of Sound Called the Subtone by Noah Eli Gordon
(Ahsahta Press, Boise State University, Boise, Idaho, 2004)

[Review first printed in TRAFFIC: A Publication of Small Press Traffic, #1. Editor Elizabeth Treadwell, 2005-2006]

Giorgio Agamben proposes the value of writing that lets us see language-use as a “passage,” “an interval,” where we are located in “perceptual oscillation between a homeland and an exile—dwelling.” In Noah Eli Gordon’s second book, The Area of Sound Called the Subtone, which won the 2004 Sawtooth Poetry Prize selected by Claudia Rankine, we enter a rhetoric where not only habitual structure is destabilized, but also where ‘invention’ inventories its purposes, and even the desire to destabilize is met with deft, critical scrutiny.

Gordon’s lyricism makes music a sustained, sustaining dwelling place in this disruption of sense. In the shatter of each successive frame of reference, we hear amassing a sensually pitched cycle of resonances, which enlarge our receptivity to the physical, the phenomenal properties of language, and which engage in relational patterning beyond the confines of logic and the trajectories we expect meaning to follow. Such an “area of sound” tests the mind’s resources, but in so doing enlarges our own adaptive capacity to use language to press the parameters of reality in which we dwell.

Think-tank spillage alters the facts I’m after and I’d rather the
library weren’t so loaded as the shame in all those fuses you
couldn’t connect to anything worth calling apocalyptic. (26)

In many of the prose poems of this collection, one can read a critique of reigning intellectual regimes, as well as of progressive attempts that fail to disrupt or dismantle them. Gordon offers a tonal complexity that strikes the high chords of striving beyond the limits of our own apprehension, as well as the dark harmonics of blindness and confusion.

…The glue holds the gutters in. The rhetoric’s a
loose-leaf apprentice. Cracks in the oracular self I’m splitting
open, splicing states of consciousness onto what? Locomotive
sound wings? A burnt rabbit in the trap & a rabid set of num-
ber laws the numb part of me knuckles up to. (21)

But most immediate in Gordon’s phrasings--which can shift instantaneously between being a refuge for, and a refusal of, our perceptions of world--is the opportunity to experience the oscillation between the familiar and the alien that Agamben describes. The American Heritage Dictionary tells us that “oscillation” is derived from the Latin “oscillum,” which came to mean “swing.” But this meaning may be derived from “oscillum” a diminutive of “os,” meaning “small mouth”--following Virgil’s use, in the Georgics, of “oscillum” to describe a mask of Bacchus, which was hung on a tree branch so as to move in wind. I imagine Gordon’s collection as such a mask, which seems to animate, to move differently each time we breath into it, thus breeding in us a Dionysian appreciation, even wonder, at the physical materiality and mystery of words.

Gordon’s collection consists of three poem sequences, each distinct in form and self-contained. The first, “What Ever Belongs in the Circle,” begins as an expansive, part-serious, part-parodied investigation of the manifold movements of writing itself:

hello the poem says make me a motor

no matter & I’ll go all summer

humid just like the movies… (3)

And ends:

but I want to show you how they danced

in the neighborhoods make birds a shrine

they have bells on their feet and mongoose gardens

pulled me out with forceps ask & I’ll show the scar

a bleached thing is a dimmer light

O small o of disorder

move me along like we graze here (14)

This long poem’s slippage of pronoun referents--which includes a blurring of agency between poem and poet--alludes to the suspect positions of purpose and control in the writing process. It also exemplifies another of Agamben’s observations, that a writer can demonstrate how “usage” means both “to use” and “to be used to”--de-familiarizing one, the poet points to the other. Similarly, Gordon’s tropes suggest and de-familiarize various orders of transformation and birth. As readers, we are drawn along in a rush of doubling and disarranging interpretations. We might think of “the scar / a bleached thing” as this language, which itself becomes “a dimmer light.” As this bleaching of its meaning becomes inflected with a scar’s pale, almost translucent beauty, it marks the passage we make through the poem. And, we might think of Gordon’s ejaculatory and poetic “O” hidden in each “disorder” as a reference to one area of the emotive field where we might “graze” in the shifting grasses, where no vision of unified landscape will hold its meaning constant for long. For example, Gordon uses the word “like” instead of “as” in the last line of the excerpt above, which defies the grammatical rules of usage, but forces us to read the “like,” colloquially voiced, as meaning both “as” and “as if.”

The second series, “Jaywalking the Is,” offers prose poems that are more grammatically consistent than the first section, yet equally sense-deranging. Here too are some of Gordon’s most archly humorous aphorisms. These brief, fragmented narratives may shift tones suddenly from whimsical depiction, for instance, to elegiac sincerity: “a brown shirt in the wind makes a bad memory box & all this walking and unwalking is a haunting way to tell a ghost she can’t come home.”(93) Interspersed throughout this cycle are the poems “First Dream” through “Eighth Dream.” Each begins with the infinitive “To say” and proposes with acerbic naiveté the sweet complex of fallibility in any such attempt “to say a taut line’s sure turn…” or

…to find the tunnel leading from the sublime
to the stasis of countless layers of oil paint, to call in the crows,
the crying strangers, the dead & their dancing party, partly to pull
the lens a little left of the landscape, partly to latch onto the
larger motifs, Mount Fuji, my free hand, my finite sense of closure
already spinning in the waterwheels, wearing its brightest white
costume, sure to soak up all the blood you’d ever need. (88).

The third and last poem series, “The Area of Sound Called the Subtone,” is comprised of fourteen poems of fourteen lines, which might be called “experimental sonnets,” though that term has been used and challenged in discussions of writers as diverse as Kenneth Patchen, Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, to name only a few. In Gordon’s series, each poem ends with a rhyming or partially rhyming couplet, and the first word or phrase of one poem echoes in sense—or derives from a sound correspondence with—the last words of the previous poem. This technique--as well as the lyricism and startlingly juxtaposed image assemblages of these poems--calls to mind Aruelein Douguet’s surrealist writing, even as the syntactic arrests and devolutions place Gordon with other contemporary writers who use the lyric form to elasticize and extend what can be wrought in the relation between signifier and signified.

the way sub
tones wear their architecture like an old coat,
an unraveled rope—it’s thread, undone,
so put up the scythe: they’re splitting the atom. (98)

Many literary critics, notably Charles Borkius and Andrew Joron, have extolled the emergence of poets whose work, like Gordon’s, falls somewhere between the trajectories of late surrealist writing and a language-based critical lyric, where the insights of the visionary dream can incite self-reflexive examination of cognitive processes and social mores. Gordon offers us this charged space as an Area of Sound Called the Subtone, where seemingly dissonant historical, popular, and personal references press our aural capacity to detect new consonances beyond the threshold frequencies that had previously demarcated the limits of our listening.

*****

Rusty Morrison's collection, Whethering, won the 2004 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poems &/or essays are published or forthcoming in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn, one of five editors of 26, and a contributing editor for Poetry Flash.

THE BABIES by SABRINA ORAH MARK

2006-03-01T22:49:00.000-08:00

STEFFI DREWS reviews

The Babies by Sabrina Orah Mark
(Saturnalia Books, 2004)

[Review first printed in TRAFFIC, Editor Elizabeth Treadwell, 2006]

Consider peeping through some new key hole. Look for a street carnival. The young foreign taxidermist. A laboratory with only one animal. The bearded ornithologist. A lonesome place called “Butcher’s Lake.” The hunter and the sawdust girl. A little robot and a little accordion. With a little luck, you’ve landed smack in the middle of Sabrina Orah Mark’s stunning collection of prose poems, The Babies. It is against such backdrops and amidst such company that we begin to eavesdrop on extraordinary citizens and creatures clinging to the underbelly of a war-torn landscape.

In the opening poem, “Day,” the speaker and a carnie verify certain historical facts before consummating their relationship: “The world is, in spite of everything, very over,” and “the dish has run away from the spoon.” The momentary lovers part ways, and new stories unfold in an equally whimsical and ominous fashion. In each of the book’s six sections, we confront a reality in which the uncertain almost always rivals the inevitable. On page five the speaker explains, “Whether or not it was the trumpeter, or the brass, or the brass against a certain naked foot. Whether or not you are what’s left to be solved of the drowned, I rented a room beside Butcher’s Lake. Mostly sadness.” Recounting earthly events in beautiful and bizarre detail, Mark successfully fuses the magical with the material world to create a new sort of mythical truth. Another early poem, “The Dumb Show,” reveals human experience in history as a bumbling, burlesque act. We learn that “because the gods believe they ought, like buried corsets, to make the best of a bad bargain, they have begun to show their flesh a little,” and so we acquire a divine explanation for the chaotic history unraveling before us.

Mark’s imagination is absolutely electric, and yet the surreal dimension she creates does not belie the urgency of emotional truth achieved throughout the book. Armed with razor sharp diction and often frenzied pacing, her language runs through us like a shudder: “We marionette. We only story. We terrible to soil, and come gather. We trouble up the yard, what’s a mother? how much longer?” The graceful shifts from courageous declarations and commands to pleading questions, combined with lively syntax, seduce the reader and propel each new layer of narrative. The speaker simultaneously takes on the voice of a future child, a distant elder and the body in flesh standing before us; each page draws the reader further away from a fixed sense of time and chronology.

Inside this kaleidoscope of relationships, characters come and go, as do animals, enemies, talk of love and the danger that inhabits this world. It’s tempting to consider each poem a separate snapshot of activity, but such a static notion betrays the character transformations and narrative connections that surface throughout the book. One thread of truth becomes painfully clear: nothing is allowed to remain benign in this world. First, there’s a “black mustache growing slowly but unmercifully on [the taxidermist’s] left shoulder” and a little robot with “its black bangs already growing over its eyes.” “Then the terrible music of all those babies I once seemed to be suddenly having, marching, like soldiers, in rows. Then their round wet bellies coming towards me.” There is no escaping the sense of approaching tragedy and previous disaster: “In the burnt attic we are all a little dead. Bewilder shouting about her nightgown, and through the window you can see the rest of us walking around with our shoes and stockings in our hands.”

Every character grows accustomed to projecting fear and nonchalance in the same breath, often possessing the sort of chilling calm and childlike precision one might expect from someone recovering from unspeakable traumas, numb:

Hello. They call me Zillah.
I fell in love on the night train to Warsaw. Every human
situation strikes me as a terrific joke. I am a torn off
blouse in that red river. Ha ha holocaust. I can’t
complain.

Mark returns again and again to scenes and psychological states which at first appear unreachable but inhabit us in no time. The result is a fierce examination of a “vintage darkling, metropolis”—one that unmistakably evokes the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the survivors faced with an unpredictable future.

Searching for intimacy in a time of imminent darkness, the characters align themselves with one another out of desperation and compassion and often end up somewhere in the space between. The striking images of “In The Origami Fields” not only demonstrate such interpersonal bonds but also reveal how Mark’s occasional departures from prose block sections into lineated verse represent a natural and necessary strategy in the book:

where I fold and unfold my left arm into November, my hair into my sister,
where the black-gloved woman plays my heart like a crumpled violin,
where I stand creased and lusting for paper, where I have no more dead lovers
than you, where beautiful girls are always asked for directions,
where I keep myself real, flirting with the ventriloquists,
where my father holds me like a paper doll, where doors can be torn down
swiftly, where neither one of us is a miracle,

I understand only this:

It is lonely in a place that can burn so fast.

Throughout The Babies we follow a lyricist whose occasionally cryptic narration can just as quickly unfold into startling moments of clarity.

The story is born and re-born, and each new life that is introduced brings another question, but the answers always leave us wide-eyed and wanting. Although many of the entries that precede it find their strength in the process of inquiry and interrogation, the fifth section, entitled “The Walter B. Interviews,” is overtly dedicated to the Q & A format. When asked by the interviewer to describe “The Exhibition,” the man replies:

Like the bulbs, we were dipped into milk and hung. We swayed
and we shed, gently. Later that evening the collector led us into
the undressing room where, to the others’ delight, I posed like
a small piece of muscle.

Each character’s struggle with language—to translate experience into words in this erratic, haunting environment—proves crucial to their survival: “I want to point its fear at you, or worse, among the devastated walls of this cheap metropolis, barter away everything you’ve ever called me: burnt string, broken ladder, violent one, until I am unrecognizable. Even to myself.” For the speaker and the characters, The Babies is as much a journey through unexpected tragedies and toward an outer, unknown destination of humanity as it is a retreat farther and farther into themselves, into one another and the history they share.

*****

Steffi Drewes lives in Oakland, CA. She directed and performed her collaborative text project, "A Single Piece of Any Color," in The Poets' Theater Jamboree 2005 hosted by Small Press Traffic in San Francisco. Her poems have appeared in Beeswax Magazine.

TREMBLE & SHINE by TODD COLBY

2006-03-01T22:48:00.002-08:00

STEVE POTTER reviews

Tremble & Shine by Todd Colby
(Soft Skull Press, 2004)

[Review first appeared in The Wandering Hermit Review, Issue #1, Summer/Fall 2005. Editor Steve Potter]

John Keats wrote in one of his letters that poetry is medicine. True that, although some poems work more like recreational drugs. Some of my favorite drugs of late are gathered in Todd Colby’s recent collection Tremble & Shine. Here’s the start of Colby’s poem “Flight.”

I warmed my hands on the small of your back
so you should feel free to throw the butterflies into the fryer.
In fact, you should do it with total aplomb.
Observe however, that when the butterflies strike the oil
they may become agitated and their
papery wings are likely to splash grease. I should also
take this opportunity to inform you
that I have a bucket of fish entrails out on the porch
and yard-long strips of poplin, billowing from the limb of a dead tree.

Colby’s sentences are dextrous, sinuous, swervey. A reader never quite knows where he’s likely to end up when he gets to the next period, but it’s sure to be interesting and probably quite far away from where he was when the sentence began. This quality is demonstrated nicely by the second sentence of “Scott, Ventilator” quoted below:

A wet finger in a helicopter is a game we played back then. To play it, you lick your finger and whirl it in the air above your head until friction takes over and you are such a piece of shit liar. You should shut your goddamn fucking mouth and never mention it again. I sat you down on the bus and told you all about the solar system and the vast cluster of nerves around the bones that make up your knotty spine.

“Scott, Ventilator,” is the final section of the three part prose poem “Lives of the Ventilators.” Here is section two, “Justin, Ventilator:” in its entirety:

Years ago, when running backwards was still scary and not a sanctioned athletic event, it often led through sliding glass doors; the whole body would go crashing backwards through it onto the cement deck, resulting in dramatic gashes that often
demanded immediate attention.

Was it John Giorno who said, “if it isn’t a pleasure, it isn’t a poem?” Good point, whoever said it. These poems of Todd Colby’s are a pleasure to read. Tremble & Shine is a smart, weird and funny collection of recreational drugs with medicinal properties.

*****

Steve Potter's writing has appeared recently in publications such as Arson, Big Toe Review, Blue Collar Review, Drunken Boat, Freefall, Knock, Pindeldyboz and 3rd Bed. He lives in Seattle where he edits and publishes The Wandering Hermit Review.

CONCRETE MOVIES by NICO VASSILAKIS

2006-03-01T22:48:00.001-08:00

STEVE POTTER reviews

Concrete Movies by Nico Vassilakis
(Ordering Information: $8 postage and handling included to: Nico Vassilakis, 3046 61st Ave. SW, Seattle WA 98116 shoehorns@msn.com)

[First published printed in The Wandering Hermit Review, Issue #1, Summer/Fall 2005.]

Watching these -- let’s coin a phrase shall we? -- liquid concrete poems by Nico Vassilakis got me thinking about William S. Burroughs and Marcel Duchamp. I was reminded of Burrroughs’ claim that language is a virus and that we are its host organisms, of his insistence that we need to find out what language is, how it operates, how it uses us.

I was reminded how peculiar language is, how strange letters are, how fantastic it is that we view symbols, translate them into sounds, manufacture meanings we can share with one another. I tried to recall how it was to see and hear as a child before having been inducted into the conspiracy of language.

By decontextualizing language, by dissociating letters from one another, dissociating them from their function, isolating individual letters, or arranging
them for visual impact rather than their usual function as visual symbols of phonetic functions strung together to convey meaning, Vassilakis challenges us to see them anew, in much the same way that Duchamp’s ready-mades reminded viewers how much of our physical surroundings we take for granted and no longer really see.

I’ve included below some brief impressions of moments from each piece in the collection. For a more in-depthanalysis that places them within the broader context
of moving visual poetry -- filmpoems, videopoems, digital poems -- by a reviewer with a stronger background in that tradition, have a look at Geof Huth’s review online at dbpq.blogspot.com/2005/06/movies-made-out-of-concrete.html

1) Black & White: A strip of grayish white with black text drifting on it wiggling wavily on a field of black --- sections of dictionary pages flashing on screen --- three lines of white text on smudgy black background then white with smeared black text --- black numbers are rising through honeycombish bubbles on a white field like Lotto balls in the Lotto popcorn popper thing on TV (as we wait for the lucky number balls to pop up the tube and be selected by the lovely, smiling model) seen through the eyes of a fly --- a blurry background of black and white which could be from a slowly turning camera filming clouds and treetops over which individual letters and words and short phrases are rising like God’s good Christians while the rest of us are left behind to burn but now we have what looks almost like sections from architectural drawings or a fancy fence and are these patterns composed of letters I wonder but cannot quite tell and then some blue so we’ve entered...

2) Color: Blurred bluish letters with green outlines on orange background an almost tie dye effect --- blue green purple with dots and suddenly music, someone Theloniously Monkeying with a piano most beautifully accompanied by some submariney whistling, gonging, thrumming strings --- images from a map up close
portions of words the names of towns, the word river, the word sea --- background colors bleeding into letter colors which bleed into the background colors --- and then as suddenly and randomly as it begins the music stops, making the silence that precedes and follows it something more than the absence of sound. Cagey... a wise choice resisting the urge to add a soundtrack. These picture poems, though moving, are closer kin to abstract painting and/or collage than movie movies with their inherent linearity. (A video art collector couple in a recent New York Times article said there were several works they rarely had ‘on’ because they’re quite noisy.) --- The visuals become more psychedelic, letter shapes arise, their colors and the background colors bleed into and out of one another, blue to green to purple to red --- colorful words sway across the scene revealing themselves a little at a time, ear moves to the right and the p to its left is revealed, pear drifts to the right and we see another p then an a and appear appears.

3) Writone to Written: A black pen scrawls a wavy line across a gray background. The neologism “writone” appears onscreen. Shortly thereafter its definition appears below it, “to written.” As the words fade, the image of the pen moving across the page goes psychedelic -- like you’re staring at your friend’s tie dye when the acid kicks in and it starts dancing along to the music the Dead are playing down there on stage. No wait, I’m showing my years. Ahem, Phish are playing down there on stage. Yellow pen tip scrawling black letters surrounded by red then blue on a lime green, lemon yellow page. And then lots more happens involving “2” and variations on “two” and we get into “three” for awhile and Roman numeral “V” and other stuff.

This is the longest of the selections clocking in at 21 minutes 8 seconds. It’d be great on a big flat screen TV, like a constantly changing painting. Just keep it playing and have a look now and then to see what it’s up to at the moment. My 13” TV/VCR combo, inherited from an old cabbie who died while a tenant at a low income building I used to manage (“don’t let my no-good brother or junkie nephew get any of my stuff when I’m dead,” he asked by phone from the hospital) does not do it justice. In fact it occurs to me that non-narrative moving picture works like this, and the hand painted films of Harry Smith and later era Brakhage, may have found their true medium with the coming of the flat screen TV and DVD player.

4) STAMPOLOGUE: Geof Huth’s favorite, my least favorite. Closest to “writing” of any of them but with, to my eyes, the least visual appeal.

5) Collide-o-scope: two minutes of sepia tone kaleidoscope imagery brings the disk to an end.

*****

Steve Potter's writing has appeared recently in publications such as Arson, Big Toe Review, Blue Collar Review, Drunken Boat, Freefall, Knock, Pindeldyboz and 3rd Bed. He lives in Seattle where he edits and publishes The Wandering Hermit Review.

MEMPHIS JACK by HARVEY GOLDNER

2006-03-01T22:48:00.000-08:00

LAURA STAMPS reviews

MEMPHIS JACK by Harvey Goldner
Spankstra Press, 2004)(P.O. Box 224, Seattle, WA 98111, spankstra@hotmail.com)

[Review first appeared in The Wandering Hermit Review, Issue #1, Summer/Fall 2005. Editor Steve Potter]

Few poets in the small press can spin a narrative tale like Harvey Goldner. He is a master at weaving a story line around a lyrical poem, and his wild imagination knows no bounds.

I discovered Goldner’s poetry last year in his chap ANCIENT PILOT, which is one long narrative poem, a mystical fable written with the deftness of a Zen practitioner and the wisdom of Carlos Castaneda. Incredibly impressive, and I was hooked.

Now Spankstra Press has published MEMPHIS JACK, a collection of 22 poems, some long, some short, all modern-day fables whirling as if from the pen of the wizard Merlin. This is another beautifully produced chap, a characteristic of Spankstra Press, and one Chris Dusterhoff, the owner, obviously takes pride in, and he should. The cover is hand-printed, using a 1914 VanderCook printing press on Vashion Island, WA, and the choice of paper and typography create a chap that can only be called a collectable work of art.

The first poem in the collection is the title poem. Here we meet the infamous Memphis Jack. "Born in a city like a woman’s purse / cluttered with a hundred comforts, / born in a house like a woman’s / purse (perfumed darkness) / Jack grew up hungry. // Sitting at the table he was given a choice / between two dishes: on one dish lay a flat / game of canasta; on one dish stood a proud / bottle of bourbon. // Jack made a mistake: he chose the bourbon. / His brothers and sisters all chose canasta, / and they learned many things: / they learned red threes; they learned black / twos; they learned to win and lose, / to deal and not to deal; / but Jack learned nothing. / For twenty-three years he lived / in the bottle, learning nothing."

Hold on to your hats; Jack’s journey into the dark pavilions of the soul is about to begin. "But then one day, a hot / summer day, a boy playing war / down by the river, the Mississippi, / picked up the bottle which Jack / had lived in for twenty-three / years, learning nothing; / and he threw it hard against a brick, / hoping it would shatter / and its flying glass shards / would slaughter a few / of the frogs who were living / down by the river, the Mississippi. // Miraculously, Jack survived / and was taken in by the frogs, / who made him one of them. / Jack lived like a frog; he lived / like a frog among frogs; he learned / to catch flies with the flick of his / tongue; he learned to make love like / a frog, to hop like a frog, / to sing like a frog. / Jack sang like a frog / for so long and so hard / that his voice finally cracked. / His voice cracked wide open, / and then Jack sang like a bird."

In Goldner’s poems, the work of spiritual transformation often manifests in the form of physical change. As his characters move from one level of enlightenment to the next, they change into different creatures. A bird, a frog, a fish. And so it is with Memphis Jack. "He sang like a bird until / feathers grew, yellow feathers; / and then Jack flew / across the river and into the trees / to join the finches of Arkansas. // In Arkansas he learned four things: / he learned dawn and then noon; / he learned twilight and then midnight. / And Jack was happy."

Some poets might end the poem here. However, Goldner has another surprising level of transformation in mind for Jack. "But then one day / in the season of autumn / a boy playing war with a bb gun / (his name by the way was B.B. King) / took aim, squeezed; / and the lucky bb / cracked Jack’s skull as if / it were an eggshell. / Jack’s soul flew out, speeding / straight up to Jesus. // Jack sang for the Christ. / He sang like a bird / and he sang like a frog, / which amused the Messiah / a little bit; / so He put Jack in His purse / and from time to time / would take Jack out / to entertain visiting dignitaries. // Well, it could have been worse. / And this is not the end, / believe me, my friend."

Not only do Goldner’s poems sing and dance with lyrical metaphors and similes, but his fables often end like Zen koans, making them simply irresistible for those readers who appreciate the maze of mystical truths tucked between his lines. In other ways, his poems remind me of Longfellow, one of my favorite poets. The rest of the poems in this chap are peopled with delightful characters, like Baba Spider, Drama Bums, Diva Loraine, the Ancient Mariner, Lady Belltown, even Pol Pot and Ravi Shankar. And, of course, we’ve already met B.B. King.

Rarely do I laugh all the way through a chap, but I did with this one. Goldner’s high level of craftsmanship, his wacky imagination, and his commitment to creating entertaining poems makes his chapbooks rare treats. And, like any reader mesmerized by his fables, I always eagerly await his next chap. Order a copy of MEMPHIS JACK and see for yourself. Harvey Goldner is truly one of a kind.

Highly recommended.

*****

Laura Stamps is an award-winning poet and novelist. Over six hundred of her poems, short stories, and poetry book reviews have appeared in literary journals, magazines, anthologies, and broadsides worldwide. The recipient of six Pushcart Award nominations, she is the author of thirty books and chapbooks of poetry and prose. Her latest collection of poetry, The Year of the Cat (Artemesia Publishing, 2005), has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. More information about books by Laura Stamps can be found at www.kittyfeatherpress.blogspot.com.

60 LV BO(E)MBS by PAOLO JAVIER

2006-03-01T16:26:00.000-08:00

ALLEN GABORRO reviews

60 lv bo(e)mbs by Paolo Javier
(O Books, 2005)

[Review first appeared in the Philippine News, Feb. 20, 2006]

Paolo Javier's poems in his newest publication, 60 lv bo(e)mbs, reflect his capacity for improvising liberally with words, places, languages, spaces, images, genres, people, and narratives. His musings on topics running from history to racism, from Philippine culture to American culture, and from lust to love, share a panache and a radicalism that stimulates deregulated meaning and salutary disorder.

Constructive confusion and an aversion towards certitude happen to be two of Javier's predispositions in 60 lv bo(e)mbs. In the book's poems, he drops a name here, a metaphor there, a description in this corner, a historical figure or location in that corner. These are clues that Javier has laid out for us to collect and to cogitate over. However, the reader will be better off savoring the interpretive journey more so than trying to reach a singular closure to Javier's poems. There is no final score in his work; the disparate parts count for more than the whole.

While structure and linearity are rendered all but invisible in his book, there really is a method to Javier's madness. That said, it will take some work and imagination to find at minimum the shadow of his intent. Anyone hoping to shake the tree of Javier's protean verses for fast and easy interpretations are sure to be confounded. The pieces contained in 60 lv bo(e)mbs are not for conventionalists or for those seeking a quick poetic fix. So be forewarned: you will find few if any resemblances to the lyrical continuity of Emily Dickinson or to the reverential clarity of the Lord's Prayer in Javier's collection.

One of the things that Javier does in 60 lv bo(e)mbs is collapse the construct of Western classical poetry and send it flying into a thousand bits, which is what his poetry comes across like on the surface: copious iotas of vocabulary, expressions, and jargon are unsystematically garnished on his pages. Indeed, to the empirical reader, Javier's poetry in this form and appearance makes little sense and gestates even less poetic rhythm or artistry. By utilizing this fragmented style, Javier mimics the bohemian tradition of Philippine National Artist Jose Garcia Villa. It was Villa who once chided Philippine poetry for what he called its "outmoded conventionality" and "thematic timidity." For Villa, defying the standard rules of English was his way of decentering, or better yet, decolonizing, the Filipino identity. His literary insurgency paved the way for greater autochthonous influences in Philippine poetry.

Javier is one of many postmodernistic Filipino and FilAm artists who have taken up where Villa left off. He uses Villa as a major jumping-off point for his multilayered poetry as he conjures up the great artist's name throughout 60 lv bo(e)mbs. Though Javier prominently bandies about Villa's name, he also puts iconoclastic philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida in the spotlight as demonstrated by their respective surnames' constant reappearance in the book. Javier, Villa, Nietzsche, and Derrida emerge as deconstructionist soulmates separated only by the temporality of history.

From out of Javier's postmodernistic sensibilities arise his postcolonial reflections. Many of these poetic reflections implicitly and explicitly refer to the Philippines and to Filipinos. Javier hopes that these reflections, if consumed on an intellectual as well as on a creative level, will prevail upon Filipinos to re-examine their historical, political, and social identities. Filipinos will thus be empowered, in the process of revisiting their heritage, to produce new representations and meanings in their endeavor to re-discover and re-shape their genuine identity.

Using the same approach, Javier ruminates on racism whether it is directed at Filipinos or Orientals in general. His not-so-subtle allusions to racism resonate vividly. In addition to the subject of racism, Javier touches upon other topics like Iraq and English. For good measure, Javier includes a quirky, idiosyncratic play that deals with sexual and Orientalist concerns at least on the margins, but whose primary substance stymies any prudent decryption whatsoever. The piece, titled "A Play, A Play," features a cast that is worthy of its enigmatic composition: Paolo Javier himself, Jose Garcia Villa, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Love.

Beauty as we all know, is in the eye of the beholder. The same is to be said for meaning and interpretation. This is the stance readers should assume before picking up 60 lv bo(e)mbs for fear that they would sooner trash the book's abstruse lines than exhibit the patience needed to understand them. But that is the risk that a polysemist like Javier takes when he stresses the production of meanings as far as the mind can conceive and discourages any effortless analysis of his verse. Javier's work is in many ways, an illustration of creative and cerebral endowment ventured against the taste and expectations of popular culture.

*****

Allen Gaborro is an art and book reviewer for the San Francisco-based Philippine News weekly. He is also a freelance writer who has written on politics, history, literature, and cultural issues. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

VERSO by PATTIE MCCARTHY

2006-03-01T14:18:00.000-08:00

ANNA EYRE reviews

Verso, by Pattie McCarthy
(Apogee Press, 2004)

[First published printed in TRAFFIC: A Publication of Small Press Traffic, Issue 1, 2005-2006, Ed. Elizabeth Treadwell]

Emily Dickinson wrote that one should depart from their own departures and "were departure separation there would be neither nature nor art, for there would be no world." For Pattie McCarthy "it begins with departure". Her new book Verso is an investigation into the departure of history or how we perceive of the past in its relation to the present and future. Verso is a book which deals with the left side of the page, the page usually left blank that perhaps fills in more content than what has been inked. McCarthy adeptly confronts the other, or elsewhere; what has been left out or removed from record.

In the first section "otherwise (an eke name)" McCarthy explores the earned or supplemental name as it is a proper noun and that which we come to recognize things by. Yet how can we recognize things as they actually exit or existed through individual perspective? McCarthy sets up a rhythm that is at once abrupt and commanding only to tear it down with immense lyric and emotive metrical freedom. Revealing "I have about as much of that language as a moderately well-behaved dog needs to know" in order to deconstruct and reconstruct its pertinence. She re-presents "a timeline upon which borders are redrawn and disappear at regular intervals." Noting, "if she has sufficiently distinguished herself to be recorded by history : how will it spell her." The section interweaves dense prose on the left page with shorter verse on the right, similar to the ----- form. The pages communicate as much with each other as with one another setting up a dichotomy that stands individually as well as dissolves into one another, creating a third unwritten other.

There is no elsewhere if you know ahead of time where you are going. In essence there is no use for alibi when there is augury. Verso's second section "alibi (that is elsewhere) questions the use of words to construct a defense that at once excuses and attempts to prove. "'In 1878 Thackery wrote: women are not so easily cured by the alibi treatment.'" Nor is McCarthy and her intuitive language slaps against medieval vernacular as well as Old English to reveal the roots of communication in order that we might examine them more.

with maps one could endeavor to prove
one's self alibi

McCarthy is a cartographer of the intimate finding that

elsewhere is still
somewhere--but perhaps not
where the compass is--your
compass has fall to earth & so.

McCarthy's compass needle does not pin things down yet locates them in their continuous transition as well as transformation. Here we "recognize the timeline as an absurd artifact."

If history is what you make of it then McCarthy has made it into a breathing organism in the last section "Piseogs". Here she understands that "there isn't enough blood in my veins to write my name" or for that mater any other. Because name in this section takes on more than "a story told as if it were true" it becomes the language and superstition which surrounded the brutal murder of a woman by her husband, father an others during the 19th century. Instead of purely relaying the facts McCarthy gives us "letters on or near the skin, the better to get into the bloodstream."

Throughout Verso Pattie McCarthy never embarks upon "the linguistic path of last resistance." Instead her consistent confrontation with the language we use to depict histroy or past events transforms the language as well as the event itself. Her search for the other, or that which has been left out illuminates the margilization of women by a history that is narrowly formed by the perspective of single individuals. McCarthy notes that "any song is intentional" and it is "always the same song". To intentionally sing a song and include all that was excluded is to reclaim "a name misspelled in the manifest".

*****

Anna Eyre is a professor of English at UNM-Taos. She is also a reading tutor for middle school students at Taos Pueblo Day School and served as the assistant editor for the 2005 edition of Traffic. Her chap book Metaplasmic was published by effing press in 2004.

MUSEUM OF ABSENCES by LUIS H. FRANCIA

2006-03-01T14:16:00.000-08:00

YVONNE HORTILLO reviews

Museum of Absences by Luis H. Francia
(University of the Philippines Press and Meritage Press, 2004)

[Review first printed in Hyphen, Issue 9, 2006. Contributing Books Editor: Lisa Ko.]

The Poetry of Journalism

Much journalism has been published, posted and broadcast about Ground Zero in New York City. That work has its own poetry, drowned in the stories of writers and photographers on the scene, the elementary school nearby, the church across the street -- the chaos emerging after the settling of dust and debries.

Nations are formed after wars, and their aftermath is always told by residents securely rooted to the nation involved. New York City-based Luis H. Francia is one such writer, only he also is rooted in the Philippines, a country that takes 24 hours to travel by plane from the U.S.

In Museum of Absences, Francia writes from the very familiar space occupied by immigrants and lost souls, the space of the exile. In this collection, Francia is an exile writing of a war in his new residence.

In this house each death has a double
Each blast, an echo
It will not hold, no matter how
many rooms, all our names
(Two Houses)

Francia's new residence, newly-ravaged, is peopled and built by "Mongol, Aztec, Berber, Cherokee, Zulu, Zuni, Semite, Aborigine, Malay, Han, Viking," minorities and strangers who had built the great New York City.

News reports broadcast the faces of the team of terrorists who flew planes into U.S. landmarks, and one realizes how they were able to freely roam Francia's new residence -- they blended in. This is why the Patriot Act was passed -- this is why family and friends could not send off their beloved all the way to the airport gate. To leaders and authorities removed from the streets, the next terrorist could be any one of us.

Francia does not lament. In language deep and furious like the Amazon, he protests current ways of thinking that perpetuate fear. The very virtue of immigration is courage and victory -- one escapes a war-ravage land or circumstance, and emerges victorious. In a nation built by immigrants, this virtue has been all but forgotten in the mainstream rhetoric of war and freedom. Francia offers otherwise.

*****

Yvonne Hortillo is an editorial assistant for The Associated Press. She has never owned a business card in her life. She has crossed the Chicago River countless times, and is fated to cross it untold times more. She adores truth in all forms.

A BOOK OF HER OWN by LENY MENDOZA STROBEL

2006-03-01T12:43:00.000-08:00

ALLEN GABORRO reviews

A BOOK OF HER OWN: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan by Leny Mendoza Strobel
(T’Boli Publishing, San Francisco, 2005)

[Review first appeared in the Philippine News, Sept.28, 2005]

Understanding the Filipino American mentality can be a confusing task if for no other reason than because of its bifurcated composition. Torn between the influences of a colonial history and of an indigenous heritage, FilAms are compelled to acknowledge their cultural development to both. This duality unfolds into a constant push and pull between the FilAm’s two identities, leaving it up to the individual to decide how to negotiate the polar sensibilities into some kind of accord where harmony and equal standing, not domination by one over the other, are the end results.

Sonoma State University Professor Leny Mendoza Strobel intimates in her book, A Book of Her Own: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan, that the Filipino identity is in need of a restoration, a restoration that confers upon it an undeniable visibility and autonomy from the irresistible force field of the American colonial and cultural ethos. Strobel is mystical and inspirational with her thoughts on this matter. She is a deeply spiritual and passionate writer to boot, and gifted with a scholarly intellect that has closely-examined the works of prominent post-colonial/post-structuralist writers and thinkers like F. Sionil Jose, Michel Foucault, Walden Bello, Toni Morrison, Carlos Bulosan, Walter Benjamin, Edward Said, and Renato Constantino.

In the foreword fpr the book, Ianthe Brautigan proudly tells us that Strobel, her good friend, has “read herself out of her colonial consciousness.” No longer does she allow her identity to be determined by colonial values and moralisms. Strobel has found the courage to finally jump out of her colonial skin and touch bases with her genuine Filipino self. She calls on other Filipinos to do the same: “Enough of our furtive glances at each other, our self-doubts, our self-flagellation, our false imitation of idols, and fake bravura. I am taking off my mask…I can embrace my wholeness now and see my colonized self recede elsewhere.”

Strobel’s book is full of exquisite poetry and moving ruminations that reflect her intrepid endeavor to recover her postcolonial self. If one is to go by what and how she writes in A Book of Her Own, then it is safe to say that she has succeeded for the most part in finding her self, despite the “temptation to succumb to one’s inner postcolonial angst and fear.” Strobel now wants other Filipinos to follow her example and conduct their own meaningful search for the hidden subjective voice emanating from their authentic identity. That unique voice strips away colonial misconceptions and guides Filipinos into an enriching unity with their individual and collective selves.

Strobel organizes much of her prose and poetry in resonant, philosophical vignettes as well as in the form of essays which are either intellectual, personal, historical, or spiritual, if not a blend of all four. This is one of the beauties of her book: Strobel’s ability to balance art, politics, history, erudition, and something of a Buddhist/Gnostic life perspective. Analogous to the FilAm identity she belongs to, there is no easy formula by which to pigeonhole the body of Strobel’s work.

Strobel appears to perceive herself as a modern version of a babaylan, the exceptional women figures who thrived during the Philippines’ pre-colonial era. The babaylan held the authoritative roles of barangay leader, soldier, shaman, seer of the future, and educator. It is the babaylan ideal that Strobel tries hardest to emulate. It is the ideal of feminist power and respect, the ideal of parity with men, and the more contemporary ideal of reuniting colonial mentalities with their cultural and historical heritage. Strobel asserts that the babaylan ideal flows through the FilAm community today, not only giving “us a language for talking back to the empire that we now paradoxically belong to,” but also to “symbolize an imagined return to one’s roots within the context of the diaspora.”

A Book of Her Own brings together an eclectic mix of compositions, verses, representations, references, and stories that form a bond between the FilAm reader and the totality of their inner being. Such a being has gone through a disillusioning process of “decolonization” to use Strobel’s words. It is a being that can now stand on its own, free of its colonial demons and blinders, and knowledgeably raise issues that are critical to the future of the FilAm diaspora.

*****

Allen Gaborro is an art and book reviewer for the San Francisco-based Philippine News weekly. He is also a freelance writer who has written on politics, history, literature, and cultural issues. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

KIOT: SELECTED EARLY POEMS 1963-1977 by CHARLES POTTS

2006-03-01T00:42:00.000-08:00

LAUREL JOHNSON reviews

Kiot:Selected Early Poems 1963-1977 by Charles Potts
(Blue Begonia Press, 2005)
(225 S. 15th Avenue, Yakima WA 98902-3821)

[Review first appeared in The Wandering Hermit Review, Issue #1, Summer/Fall 2005. Editor Steve Potter]

Charles Potts has aptly named this breathtaking retrospective of his early work: Kiot -- the Coyote -- the wary trickster and cagey loner, announcing his existence with penetrating voice. Like the coyote, Potts wanders through time and the cosmos,
heralding his protest and outrage with a voice that cuts through human imagination and registers at our prehistoric core. Lending power to Potts' words are kiot drawings by Robert McNealy. Like the poetry these drawings represent, the art is simple but evocative of truth.

One poem alone -- "Obit Mirage" -- is worth the price of this book. In it, Potts reveals multi-layered worlds within worlds with such skill and grace that only one reading barely scrapes the surface of its content:

My people came
On a rickety ship
From the Favorsham
To the land of profits...

From the "land of profits", Potts takes us on a journey that enlightens, then amazes with his wily use of words. With him, we experience the:

Existential beadwork of despair....

And the:

Snapped synapse of communication

And we see through his heart and eyes the disfigurement of pristine land:

Though the unmysterious
Clutter of the mess men make with
Unordered hands
Can be found on the surface
Of the national forest...

We experience the laying of a railroad where native Indians once lived:

The Golden Spike
Came on a hammer
To clinch the tie that binds the blinded
Termites of a deserted woodwork...

Those are chilling words, but Potts has just begun his cry:

To the consciously expanding
Already rotten basket of
Interlocking grids
The erratic
Cancer America spreads to
Defacto territories and
Girdles the world with fear...

Solutions to such taints and fear-provoking problems are beyond man's ability to grasp:

And only the stars know
Which way to turn...
........
The mountains do not notice
That man has plumbed a line
On their rocks

Man pays a heavy price for his dysrhythm with the land, as does the poet who protests it:

The shattered self scattered
With too much to place
Collecting
Specimens in a death heap...

Well, those were excerpts from just one poem. Do you know yet why the kiot cries? Potts' use of word and cadence is often stunning, regardless of the topic. Consider, for example, these excerpts from "I Dream of Oaxaca":

I dream of Oaxaca
And the lean and haggard vigil
Born of love
I don't break laws
I reject civilizations...
.......

The blue winds of October blow
The particles of light
Into the whites of my eyes
And sculpt
Of the wind Sound
A Puget flower...
..........
I'll neither live nor die
For any madness other
Than my own...

I appreciate the ways Potts adroitly pinpoints weaknesses. This excerpt from "Throback" is one example:

The simple sexless creatures
Who imagine they are in charge
How I loathe Caucasians and the fear
That forces them to burn
Slant eyed children...

With equal ability, this poet also uses humor and irony as he moves forward and backward through generations, addressing religion, class distinctions, government trickeries and lies. His style is more elegant and eloquent than the Beat poets and
more engaging than post modern symbolism. Potts sets himself apart from the rest with earthy turns of phrase and cunning metaphors. Not one word or syllable is wasted or extraneous. In an Afterword that is easily as powerful and precise as his poetry, Charles Potts adds this later message to his early work:

The weddings, births, and baptisms turn quickly enough
into hastily assembled wakes....I wear death like a
necklace of chocolate skulls for school children in La Dia
de Los Muertos in Oaxaca or Jalisco. What these poems
from more than twenty-five to forty years ago have in
common is dead earnestness.

This poet writes on his own terms. The dead earnestness of Charles Potts is highly recommended.

*****

Laurel Johnson is a Retired Registered Nurse and the author of four books. She is Senior Reviewer for Midwest Book Review; Review Editor for New Works Review; Staff Reviewer for Shadow Poetry Quill Quarterly Review and occasional submitting reviewer for The Wandering Hermit Review and Irish News and Entertainment. Her poetry and prose can be found online in various literary e-zines. She lives in Nebraska with her husband of forty years.