What is Owed the Dead, by R.H.W Dillard

Posted on by
1

R.H.W. Dillard
What is Owed the Dead
Factory Hollow Press, 2011
ISBN: 0984069887
Pages: 53
Reviewed By: CL Bledsoe

 

 

 

Part pastiche, part homage, Dillard’s collection is, at times, a history lesson, a study in literary theory, and a collection of damned interesting and entertaining poems. Dillard has taken as his subject ‘the dead,’ or rather several poets who’ve gone before. These poems are odes; meditations on the life and works of the poets, their contemporaries, and critics; and responses to the poets and poetry itself. It’s been said that literature is a kind of ongoing conversation with the writing of the past and the future, and Dillard has joined in this conversation in a very compelling manner.

Dillard’s approach is to use sixteen-line poems with footnoted quotes, which, along with context clues, tell the reader who Dillard is writing to/about. These embedded quotes are sometimes lines from the poets’ own work or from reviews or writing about the poets and/or their work. Some of the quotes are from work seemingly tangentially connected to the poems/poets, either thematically, or through genuine inspiration. These quotes are connected with Dillard’s own thoughts, reactions, and commentaries on the poets, the poems, and other tangentially meaningful ideas.

Some of the poems are fairly straightforward, “Raven,” which begins the book, is clearly about Edgar Allan Poe. Dillard writes about the myths associated with Poe, “Edgar, they are still telling lies about you,” he begins (line 1). Dillard is referring to the long-lasting character assassination committed against Poe shortly following his death. The poem is full of references, puns, jokes about Poe, which flesh out the poem as a well-crafted ode. But in the final line, Dillard does something interesting: he adds a quote from Lolita. The subject matter of Nabokov’s novel isn’t much of a jump from the rumors and innuendo associated with Poe’s life. Poe was treated, in his obituary, especially, much like a Humbert Humbert type. And maybe he wasn’t wholly innocent on this part, since he did marry his quite young cousin. Or maybe Dillard is implying that Humbert was inspired by Poe. Here, Dillard has managed to transform this poem into a meta-poem, a commentary about poetry. Likewise, throughout the collection, his poems become increasingly complex in regards to allusions and connections between writers.

Dillard dedicates odes to a varied number of poets, from Yeats to Pound, Dara Weir to Lowell. He also brings in fiction and nonfiction writers such as Sterne and various biographers. Many of the poems reference multiple poets with similar themes. Dillard prefaces the book with a quote by Geoffrey Hill from The Triumph of Love, from which the title comes: “By understanding I understand diligence and attention, appropriately understood as actuated self-knowledge, a daily acknowledgement of what is owed the dead.” Here, Dillard reveals the collection’s raison d’etre: he is honoring his influences. He furthers this explanation at the end, where he includes “Epilogue” taken from George Barker’s The Dead Seagull, “…we the living, are, in this sense, indebted to our predecessors for some small mercies.”

Dillard’s combination of quotations from multiple authors and styles alongside his own words can be a little jarring; many of these poems are not necessarily quick reads. They are deeply layered, often given to quick jabs of humor and insight. But they are a delight for this very reason. In “Wind” Dillard begins with “Westron Wind,” the well-known Middle English lyric which implores the wind to blow and declares, “Cryst yf my love wer in my arms/ and I yn my bedde agayne.” Dillard then moves through multiple poets writing about the Western Wind, moving up through the course of five hundred years to nuclear arms to conclude with that same wish for simplicity.

Wind

“O,” you wrote, “westron wind,” now uncertain
When or who you might have been, five, maybe,
Centuries ago, “when wyll thow blow,” lonely
Query, “the smalle rayne,” recited, sung revised,
Downe can rayne,” appropriated, wind, “sweet”
To Herrick, thinking of kisses, Henley, no “hope,”
Yearning, “Cryst yf my love wer in my arms,”
Yeats, at the end, “O that I were young again,”
Satirical, Dehn, “had my arms again,” anti-nuke,
Fr. Raymond, “point-sharper,” resurrection,
“Than rain,” but raked by scholars, historicized,
Condemned – Christian dead white male –
Studied, closely, structurally, culturally, queerly,
Post-colonially, deconstructed, psychoanalyzed,
Yet, assured, “and I yn my bedde agayne,” poem,
Yours, as always, intact pure, true, inviolable.

In the end, Dillard prefers the original poem to the reworkings of the ages, the reinterpretations, which raises questions about this collection, itself. He seems to be saying that it is more an homage, a reaction to those that have gone before, but they are, themselves, inviolable.

Dillard is a master poet at the top of his game, and these poems are playfully complex in truly rewarding ways. The closest comparison that comes to mind is Nabokov. These are enjoyable and surprisingly accessible poems full of clever devices, memories, reflections of a poet writing about what he loves: poetry.

 

R. H. W. Dillard is a novelist, essayist, translator, and poet. What Is Owed the Dead is his seventh collection of poems. He has received the O. B. Hardison Poetry Prize of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Hanes Prize for Poetry of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the AWP George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature. He is a Professor of English at the Jackson Center for Creative Writing of Hollins University.

 

 

Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies by Anis Shivani TWO REVIEWS

Posted on by
3

Anis Shivani
Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies
Texas Review Press, 2011
ISBN: 978-1933896724
Pages: 272
Reviewed by: Amy Glynn Greacen and Quincy Lehr

 

 

 

Review One: Anis Shivani: Against the Workshop… and whatever else you’ve got.
by Amy Glynn Greacen

Sigh. I don’t normally do this, but since I am about to contend with an author who is awfully obsessed with biographical taxonomy and elitism (especially for a guy with a degree from Harvard), I’ll quickly taxonomize and classify myself, just in case anyone feels the need to question my personal prejudices.

I am under forty. Barely. I have an MFA. I have never held a job in academia – and never sought one. I earned my master’s degree in England almost two decades ago, when there were all of two creative writing programs in the whole UK, and not that many of them in the U.S. My undergraduate degree is from a good liberal arts college in the Northeast with a strong literary tradition – not a creative writing factory-farm on the order of, say, Iowa, but we’ve turned out a writer here and there: for example, Suzan-Lori Parks, Wendy Wasserstein, Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Oh yeah, and Emily Dickinson. I am a five-time alumna of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference – five is also the number of times Stanford has turned me down for the Stegner. I have appeared in a Best American Poetry anthology and been nominated twice for a Pushcart. I have never been to Breadloaf, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, or Bellagio. I don’t go to AWP, and if I ever did, I’d have no idea what to do there. I hail from Beatnik San Francisco, but personally would rather read The Changing Light at Sandover than Howl.

Any questions? Good. With that safely out of the way, we can talk about Anis Shivani’s new book, Against The Workshop.

I absolutely believe there is a place in the world for the acerbic critic – it’s a proud tradition, even though I’ve cringed watching, for instance, William Logan pulling the wings off Richard Wilbur (“This is what Frost would have sounded like if he’d given up”). There merely vitriolic is seldom if ever useful, but vitriol coupled with wit, style, perspicacity and great prose absolutely can be. Critics of the Asshole School can make us laugh, they can shock, they can force us to re-evaluate our sacred cows. But I have this nutty idea that the primary point of criticism is to illuminate something about the work criticized. It elucidates. It persuades by showing us why a work does, or doesn’t – work. And it declares itself. It says what it is.

When I picked up this book, I thought perhaps the bilious potshot specialist whose columns I’d read in the Huffington Post had found his master subject. Always a man obsessed with insider/outsider politics, cronyism, elitism, and unfairness in the world of literature, it appeared Shivani had put some serious effort (hell, the book’s 300 pages long) into an investigation of why (whether?) creative writing programs are degrading the quality of American literature. Guess what? I think it’s a question worth exploring. Lord knows there are a lot of people talking about it. A couple hundred creative writing teachers just sent an open letter to Poets and Writers urging them to drive a stake through the heart of Seth Abramson’s annual MFA ranking feature. People question the prevalence, and in some cases the presence, of creative writing degree programs. Are contests fixed? Is American writing in decline? If so, why?

Many writers and editors whom I know, respect, like or love happen to teach creative writing as part of all of their livelihood, and I wish to cast no aspersions whatsoever on their choices (some of them have been my own teachers and I have benefitted enormously from their tutelage). Nonetheless, I believe a very compelling argument could be put forth that there are way too many people getting MFAs for the sake of turning around and teaching in MFA programs. I myself, in workshops, have read what I thought were excruciatingly incompetent poems, only to discover that their authors taught poetry writing at decent schools. I’ve read celebrated young bucks with prestigious fellowships and tons of awards who appeared to me to have not one neutrino-sized clue about any writer working more than about twenty minutes ago. I admit that a few times I’ve even felt waves of the surprised, self-righteous outrage at this that appears to drive Shivani’s pen 24/7. I get it. It’s entirely possible that there are too many people writing, too few reading, and that the MFA degree is an increasingly solipsistic exercise in networking.

Here’s the problem.

Shivani’s book promises by its very title to discuss this – and he just plain doesn’t do it, to say nothing of providing a cogent and consistent exploration of a complicated issue. This book is simply a collection of his previously published essays, bookended with a spate of kvetches about the literary State of the Union and a verbose, scatterbrained quasi-explanation of how and why he thinks it’s down the pooper. He says fiction is too small, self-referential and unambitious in its scope, that too much of it sounds alike. He grumbles about David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Now, he is welcome to dislike whatever books and authors he dislikes – but are these three an example of “sameness” in the American novel? Um, because I personally could tell them apart them in a blind test consisting of one, maybe two, sentences.

The title of the book wants us to assume he means that MFA programs have caused writers to become “Puny, humorless souls.” Depending on what page you’re on, we writers of today are either too narcissistic or too meek; too overambitious or too underambitious; too afraid to tackle big sociopolitical tragedies or too eager to win approval by playing the Holocaust card. He makes bizarre references to the “self-hating” reviewer Michiko Kakutani without one shred of explanation of how she contributes to the problems in American fiction. Are there great writers whose reputations or sales she has destroyed with her poison pen? Mediocrities who have risen to greatness at her say-so? I’d love an example. And I have no idea what makes her self-hating, or what that has to do with anything.

He notes (I think; the prose is a little hard to parse) that MFAs are mass production factories that churn out interchangeable writers (adding that “when a writer gets big enough he becomes a factory of his own.” Soooo… did Dan Brown attend the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars when I wasn’t looking? Of what MFA program is Jo Rowling a graduate?) But let’s be clear: he certainly makes a good point or two about the self-referring, self-reinforcing tendencies that can arise from more and more writers teaching writing in an ever-increasing pool of advanced degree programs, from which only the tiniest percentage will ever have the potential to become the authors who change the way we see the world. Those people come along seldom whatever century it is and whatever the proclivities of our culture at a given time. Genius is a rarity. Genius capable of communicating itself, even more so.  ‘Twas always thus and always thus shall be, and we all know that. And anyone who teaches creative writing while trying to have a writing career at the same time will tell you that it’s a hell of a highwire act trying to locate the resources to work – solitude, financial security, travel, research, exposure to inspiring experiences, etc – while shepherding the nascent efforts of a flock of younger, less experienced, more insecure writers. Shivani notes this and on this at least, he’s damned right, even if you have to sift through a lot of convoluted grammar and syntax to get there.

Meanwhile: we are fearful. We are small. We can aspire to nothing higher than “chick lit.” We fear politics. We fear strong moral positions. “Contemporary literary fiction has chosen to marginalize itself from mainstream culture.” (Really? I write “literary fiction” and I swear on a stack of holy books that I would love nothing more than to be read by millions and make Ann Rice, Jo Rowling, Dan Brown money. Knopf, my agent and I await your call.) Anyhoo, I’m not sure what makes any of this true, but I’m expected to accept it without clear examples, and there is never a whiff of how my MFA or my twelve-day sojourns to Sewanee did this to me.

One’s already frustrated with the vagueness, lack of direct example, and inability to construct a throughline (is it the MFA that’s destroying literature, or is it movies and video games? Dude! Take a Ritalin and a deep breath! Namaste, baby!) when the second section commences and you realize what you are really in for when you read this book. Damn, damn, damn. Really? Because before we’ve even gotten started on the presumed premise of the book – Against The Workshop – we’re regurgitating old reviews of poets who, let’s just say, are not exactly examples of the current crop. Ladies and Gentlemen, do you stay up at night twiddling your moustache and fussing about the unfair successes conferred upon Jorie Graham?

Whether or not you’re a fan of Jorie Graham’s work, it’s impossible to discern how this chapter presents a case “against the workshop?” Is it because she went to Iowa? Is it because of the controversy surrounding accusations of cronyism that have attended her selection, as a contest judge, of at least five former students at Iowa (and one husband!) as prizewinners? Maybe! That might be interesting to talk about. But Shivani doesn’t; I learned about it on the Internet. Given a great opportunity to present a throughline for his titular argument, he opts instead to reprint a series of gripes about how bad her poems are.  He goes on to savage Sharon Olds, again without explaining what makes her an example of how the MFA culture is damaging literature (Olds holds a PhD – in English – from Columbia. She teaches creative writing at NYU but again, I know that from personal knowledge, not because Shivani ever weaves it into his argument. Does Sharon’s presence in a creative writing program create mediocrity for some reason? Is she a bad teacher? Has her influence weakened the standards of American letters? Shivani can’t comment. He just doesn’t think she should think about uteruses so much. Easy for him to say; he’ll never give birth to anyone.

On it goes. He hates Louise Gluck, calling her “a sort of Plath for the moderately depressed” – um, as opposed, presumably, to Plath herself, who was a Plath for the profoundly depressed.  Gluck has taught at BU, has been Poet Laureate of the United States, and until recently was the minotaur guarding the Yale Series of Younger Poets award. We don’t touch on what that might or might not mean to the declining quality of American literature. We are merely pissed off that she is famous. Philip Levine gets a little credit for having a brain before Shivani takes a swing or two at Billy Collins’s annoying cheerfulness. David Lehman’s bullet-riddled body appears in several chapters, the victim of death by firing squad for overseeing the Best American Poetry anthology. Apparently his failure to control Billy Collins’s cheerfulness or Paul Muldoon’s uncheerfulness or whatever, has made of this generally well-regarded anthology, regardless of the editor at the helm, an unforgivable pile of crap year after year. Dear reader, do you read the BAP anthology religiously? Do you think every poem in it is always a masterpiece? I don’t! And in fact Shivani calls out a few specific inclusions by poets whose work I personally wouldn’t spend five minutes with. I bet lots of them have MFAs too, or conduct workshops. But what is the upshot here? Nothing. Just that for any multitude of large, ominous reasons, Shivani doesn’t think the series is up to snuff.

His clutch of reviews does include a few positive ones (Jay Parini, Judy Grahn and Elaine Equi seem to catch a break – in fact he calls Grahn “required reading for poetry workshops” even though he feels those should not exist: see, it gets complicated). But the point is, there’s not even a halfhearted effort to edit these standalone pieces into a unified concept. There are kernels of potential truth all over this book, and I particularly appreciated the section “Boulevard Symposium: Writers In Universities,” which contains many. But he buries those kernels like a squirrel sensing the approach of a cold snap. Though he’s bitter and grouchy and often guilty of not-very-good prose himself, Anis Shivani isn’t a dummy. He has real ideas. He is capable of being funny, and perspicacious – he just seems to prefer being scathing, scattered, and half-baked. He generalizes on such a vast scale that it provokes shrugging more than debate. But worse than that, the prose is muddy, overwritten, and very confusing. If the book walked into a shrink’s office, it would likely find itself diagnosed with co-morbid Oppositional Defiant Disorder and ADHD.

Perhaps the most perplexing element of this book is the prefacing material – a nine-page ass-kissing letter from a literary agent to a young novelist still completing her MFA, offering detailed revision suggestions, invitations to lunch with the perfect-fit major-house editor, and kowtows galore. The date of the letter is even December 25th (of 2005), and what a Christmas present! A cursory check of Amazon.com shows this novel was published in 2009. I haven’t read it. I don’t know anything about it except what the agent says in her letter, which is pretty glowing. Shivani leaves this undiscussed, seems to want us to see it as evidence for his “case” – but all I am able to do is wonder why he has a copy of it and why the author of the novel gave him permission to print it. Can someone help me? What am I missing?

Anis Shivani squandered a major opportunity here. His title hints at a serious look at a subject worthy of serious debate. Many of us who write, who hope for fruitful, productive careers as writers (or who have them) ruminate on this topic. Many of us question the rise of the MFA culture, whether or not we are part of it. A large number of contemporary writers and thinkers have held forth on this very issue, and it doesn’t appear Shivani has been keeping up with them much. Influential writers, inside and outside of the academy, tend to spawn generations of mediocre imitators. Honey, if you don’t like Anne Sexton, you can’t blame her on Robert Lowell, even if she literally sat in a workshop with him. Some people can write. Some people who can write can also teach. And they should. They will have irrelevant mimics. They might also help to bring one or two brilliant new voices into the light over the course of their career. It does happen. People who can neither write nor teach, I think we can all agree, should get another gig. I’ve endured a workshop with such a person and I still get pissed off when I think about it.

There are lots of issues in play here – not just the helpfulness or hurtfulness of “The Workshop” but the demise of publishing in this country as it has been known until now; the pressures – so arbitrary, and so intense – upon writers to both tell the market what it wants, and be told by the market what it wants. Have people stopped buying books, stopped reading, because of MFA programs and their homogenizing, solipsistic influence? I tend to doubt it, but even this thesis would have been worth exploring, as would some serious delving into the experience of real people who exist inside and outside this system he despises. He seems able to say that their work sucks. But he isn’t terribly cogent, at the concept level or the sentence level, about why.

The picture for most of us is a lot bigger than a snow-roofed cabin at MacDowell, and the vicissitudes of taste and the cruel whimsy of the almighty market are the tip of a huge philosophical iceberg. It would have been cool to see Anis Shivani transcend his urge to bitch and offer some kind of manifesto. I think it would have taken a totally different book to pull this off, and in the meantime, if this one had just titled itself “Collected Reviews and Essays,” it would spare readers the disturbing sense that we’re meant to see that book when we read this one. The book’s final essay, a relatively cogent one comparing the MFA world to a Medieval guild system, begins to head in the direction I expected from page one. It’s on topic, it maintains a consistent line of thought, and it’s arguable, in the positive sense of the word. Had he started from this point and actually written a book, it would likely have been a book people would have wanted to read. What we have instead is a disjointed muddle, mired in a lazy assumption that a pile of unrelated essays would somehow magically deliver an important argument.

Review Two:
by Quincy Lehr

The first thing the reader notes about Shivani’s book is that it is fun. The ability to produce intelligent invective, indeed to follow it on its route to often surprising insights is a creative skill that criticism of contemporary work too often lacks. As an example of both, see Shivani on Michiko Kakutani:

The slayer of many a frightening, aggressive, precocious fictional dragon, she is the Alan Greenspan of the literary establishment: the very hint of inflation is to be fought off at all costs, including the risk of inducing a self-fulfilling recession; critical policy must be conservative in the extreme, favoring the account balances of the already well-heeled; and the markets must be soothed at the first signs of genuine rebellion among the have-nots, distracting the conversation toward productivity and growth increases.

Whether this holds for criticism in general is perhaps debatable, but generalizations tend to operate less with blow torches than bazookas. Shivani’s assertions about the results of the MFA system in American literature probably cannot be proven. He can and does illustrate them, however, and it is in the polemical, often quite funny illustration that his strength as a writer lies.

This is not to say that Shivani lacks a thesis—he has one, and it goes something like this:

The decline of American fiction is a sign of the decline of elite liberal consensus. The vacuum in political ideology is being filled today by an anti-politics, of personality and charisma, leading to gradual submission to authoritarianism among all potential sources of resistance. Without a vibrant class politics, without a political ideology arousing passions, there is no vibrant fiction.

Shivani argues that the MFA programs, which isolate writers from the broader social world, leaving them with “family matters, like divorce or abandonment, or personal incidentals like menstruation, abortion, or mental illness” as their only experience and thus subject. The problem, for Shivani, is not that the “new media” are rendering prose fiction redundant, but unlike the writers of the early twentieth century, contemporary writers are not up to the task of competing, having been misled by a workshop model that promotes narrowness, insularity, and mediocrity. The workshop and MFA program, for Shivani, are symptomatic of a broader retreat from social relevance. Shivani notes in a review of Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, a remarkable political uniformity among the anthology’s writers:

there is not a single poet who reveals himself/herself to adhere to anything other than a strict middle-of-the-road Democratic politics—the mildest of liberal correctionism in response to the Bush agonies. There’s not a Republican, not a conservative, not a libertarian, not a radical of any sort here, as far as I can tell; there isn’t a socialist, an anarchist, a revolutionary, any sort of agitator in evidence here, apart from what you might expect from a bunch of Democratic party functionaries solemnly penning the party platform.

Aesthetic sameness and careerism finds its political mirror in a milquetoast liberalism.
One can, of course, poke holes in the argument. I, for instance, have a collection of poetry and numerous magazine publications despite lacking an MFA. Nor is the writing coming out of the graduate workshops invariably apolitical—and indeed Shivani acknowledges that:

The typical fiction writer tends to be vaguely liberal about women’s or gays’ or minorities’ rights. He is ultra-sensitive about not writing anything offensive to any constituency, and mortally fearful of painting with broad brushstrokes. He takes care to mark down any budding writer who might want to speak truthfully about minority or majority groups (it’s open season, however, on white males, in the teacher’s own writing).

But that is rather the problem. In an era of genuine crisis, there is too little (which is very different from saying “nothing”) that addresses head-on the social crisis of an empire on the skids. And while arguments as sweeping as Shivani’s almost beg qualifications, it is hard not to recognize a good deal of truth in his depiction of the contemporary American literary scene.
In part, Shivani’s portrayal has resonance because he names names and associated career trajectories, critical readings of what Poets & Writers would present as gush pieces (and in some cases has). While his rigor at establishing a general model is less than sociological, he does give the reader a sense of how it works—how mentors connect to agents connect to writing programs connect to publishers.

Shivani isn’t exactly on weaker ground with many of his in-depth take-downs of authors as less essential. Sure, he is entertaining and damning when it comes to the likes of Jorie Graham and Sharon Olds, but I’m pretty sure William Logan said most of the same things ten years earlier. And while Graham’s poems may well be tailor-made for the literary theorists in the English and Comp Lit departments, one more often gets the sense that the lit crit and creative writing faculties at many schools have little to say to each other. That said, his discussions of Graham and Olds, not to mention Louise Glück, Philip Levine, and the dreadful Billy Collins, are relevant due to what Shivani deems their “vast numbers of followers,” notably in avant-garde (Graham), feminist (Glück, Olds), and lite entertainers (Collins, particularly the kind of poet Shivani scornfully dubs the Kirby Poet in a later chapter).

Having established the doings of the “mainstream” (albeit in several, often tenuously linked streams), Shivani proceeds, via the 2004 Best American Poetry (which he describes later on as “an accurate barometer of the ideal poem as validated by establishment circles today” with an implied sameness from year to year regardless of editor), to address the by now thoroughly assimilated avant-garde, of whom he argues, “Far from insinuating some revolutionary political feeling as they disrupt the established modes of language, they come across as juveniles newly in control of a dictionary, and not knowing what to do with it.” The apolitical resignation of the poets, Shivani suggests, is a rejection (at times and angry one) of the writers’ predecessors. Much as was the case with his treatment of Graham, Olds, et al., it is a bit too clear that Shivani is working from old reviews (and indeed, the book eventually stops pretending the chapters are anything else). It does help, though, that he is an entertaining reviewer.
His reviews of Elaine Equi, Melissa Kwasny, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Carrie Fountain, Judy Grahn, Dave Brinks, Jay Parini, and, more dubiously, the dull C. D. Wright among the poets and Teddy Wayne, Aravind Adiga, David Rhodes, Christopher Miller, Richard Burgin, and Eric Miles Williamson among the fiction-writers are positive, with Shivani presenting each as writing socially engaged and exciting verse despite their real stylistic differences. In Grahn’s case in particular, Shivani asserts:

Grahn should be required reading for poetry workshops, to demonstrate that a vital, accessible, politically necessary poetry from a woman’s point of view can still be written, without any need to resort to narcissistic confession, willful obscurity, or language games.

Whether one shares Shivani’s outlook or not, he shows himself, to a greater extent than William Logan, say, to be capable of balancing denunciations of what he sees as the characteristic literary shortcomings of an era with examples of how it can be done well. If he often presents the writers he likes in counterpoint to the greater mass of what he doesn’t like, Shivani is repeatedly ready to remind us that there are 350 creative writing programs in the U.S

And this, perhaps, is the book’s greatest flaw. While there is a long, honorable tradition of a writer putting out volumes of collected criticism (with the essays over here and the reviews over there), Shivani clearly has greater ambitions, to cajole and denounce an MFA program-dominated system that he sees as promoting conservatism (political and structural), mediocrity, and exclusivity. While one might not always agree with Shivani’s judgments (I certainly do not), his vision is often as compelling as it is negative. But one suspects that were he to distill the often repeated arguments from review to review, streamline the increasingly disgusted (and more and more hilarious) take-downs of the Best American Poetry Series, and more generally focus the book into a more seamless whole, Against the Workshop could be even more compelling than it is already.

 

In addition to Against the Workshop:  Provocations, Polemics,Controversies, Anis Shivani’s books are My Tranquil War and Other
Poems (forthcoming 2012), The Fifth Lash and Other Stories (forthcoming 2012), and Anatolia and Other Stories (2009). He has just finished a novel, Karachi Raj, and is starting another one, Abruzzi, 1936. His fiction, poetry, and criticism appear in Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Boston Review, Times Literary Supplement, Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fence, Agni, Denver Quarterly, and many other journals. He also covers books for many newspapers and magazines. A second book of criticism is in the works.

 

In the Kingdom of Oblivion by John Sweet

Posted on by
Reply

John Sweet
In the Kingdom of Oblivion
wall of noise press, 2011
ISBN: 5800064590944
Pages: 188
Reviewed By:  Michael Keenan

John Sweet’s latest full-length collection of poetry, “in the kingdom of oblivion,” is described in the press release as a collection of e-chaps and previously unpublished poems, and it reads exactly like that. The poems don’t flow in an easy sequence that hold steady in rhythm and resonance, but instead read as a kind of excited mixtape in which the songs placed on the tape are vitally more important than the order of the songs or the sense of a finished product. And this isn’t a bad thing. What matters in a John Sweet poem is rendered line by line, stanza by stanza, and even, one could say, day by day.

Sweet writes a line of poetry the way someone else might make a sandwich or read the newspaper. No matter what horrendous event may happen in his personal life or the world at large, Sweet consistently returns to the moment of the poem’s creation. He doesn’t just write to survive, he writes to live.
In the poem “a sudden silence,” Sweet writes:

nothing but sunlight and blue
sky out here

trailers on the hills,
garbage fires,
shadows of clouds, of minor gods

slow collapse

girl is burned beyond
recognition, but she lives

all roads lead to empty houses

Each of these stanzas, although quiet and simple, successfully hold their weight as stanzas and individual lines. The first one is deceivingly simple – with a closer look, however, we can see that it actually forms a kind of quick, minimalist painting. The first line begins with the word “nothing.” This absence of anything at all sits full of silence until the arrival of sunlight and the color blue. These two impressions of phenomena are not modified or described in any way, therefore they easily become abstractions reminiscent of brush strokes on a canvas. These brush strokes then carry over to the next line with “sky,” a word nearly as vast as its predecessor, “nothing,” and then finishes with a seemingly grounded,“here.” But where is here? Are we grounded in the moment or floating in empty space? (It’s these kinds of questions which gives Sweet’s work an ethereal texture which is wonderful to read and re-read.)

We’re given so much room to imagine within this stanza that it’s almost overwhelming. And with so few words in such a tiny area, it’s also like we’re given nothing at all. What we do end up with, though, is a kind of hazy canvas of implied impressions which define the already minimalist landscape of Sweet’s aesthetic sensibility. This is hard to do right and Sweet does it well. In fact, my favorite Sweet poems tend to seep into the realm of painting, especially the poem, “max ernst at the forest’s edge,” which references the extraordinary Surrealist painter, Max Ernst. In this poem, Sweet uses his imagination in ways that break away from the normative, logical thinking that is his safety zone. He begins the poem with, “in the end/you cut the dragon just to/watch it bleed,” and towards the middle he writes, “the sun screams silver/then white,” and then tells us that the air is “as cold as poison.” There are only a few poems like this one in the collection, but to me, these strangeifications read as the moments when Sweet severs the ties with his difficult life and an unlovable world and, if only for a moment, lives in the glory and freedom of a Max Ernst painting.

In the next stanza of “a sudden silence,” Sweet seems to be looking out a window and simply listing what he sees until the quiet but imaginative leap of “shadows of clouds, of minor gods,” which introduces a different shape and energy into the poem. One of my favorite qualities of these poems is how Sweet can deftly shift the direction of a poem without us realizing that anything has changed. The next line, “slow collapse,” is like a balloon deflating, and acts as a smooth transition into the sudden information about a girl who has been burned beyond recognition, but who is still alive.

John Sweet’s interior landscape, and the doubt, anger, and fear which reside there, is the palpitating heart of this collection. The girl who has undergone intensive agony, who has been burned so terribly she can no longer be recognized by anyone she used to know or love, is clearly a metaphor for Sweet’s personal experience of life. This is why it’s so easy for him to continue the poem with “all roads lead to empty houses.” He knows what happens next – in life and in the poem – because he’s been there, and is there right now.

The suffering girl, as a metaphor and a real girl, also haunts Sweet simply because she represents the answers that he can’t seem to wrench out of a consistently wicked world. He tries to reconcile his personal atrocities and the more universal miseries that take place in the world, but, excluding a few key breakthroughs and epiphanies, he can’t seem to escape the overriding experience that “all roads lead to empty houses.”
In the poem, “in the kingdom of christ,” he writes

(remembered saying I love you but
but not to who and not how it brought you here)

In short, Sweet finds that everything falls apart. Like everyone else, he seeks to find something, anything, that makes this alright. In this collection, at least, he doesn’t find it. But what he does find, despite the poor turnout and the repeated disappointments, is the next poem.

In “bathed in sorrow, bathed in oblivion,” he writes

and then the stars shining
clearly in the spaces between clouds,
and then the silences before
and after

the cautious optimism
of slow breaths

no hope for the future,
…………………….maybe,
but still the desire to see it.

In entering Sweet’s individual poems, we take part in a kind of waltz of uncertainties, a shaky present of despair and doubt, which, as soon as it’s mildly brightened by an experience of hope, is just as soon stamped out by reality. But what we see in the above lines is that Sweet hasn’t truly given up hope for a better life and a better world. The deliberate indentation of “maybe” attests to this hope and to the better existence he can’t help but believe is possible.

This isn’t a popular thing to say these days, but John Sweet is an honest poet. We, as readers, can trust him. He’s not fucking with us. He doesn’t hide behind the language he uses, and he doesn’t turn away from his own life-experience. In fact, the only complaint I have about Sweet’s work is that at times he tells us too much about his exact thoughts, instead of allowing us to simply experience his well-crafted lines and images. He confronts his demons on the page almost every day, reaches a kind of solid ground, turns on himself, turns on the world, has a minor realization about the meaning of life, only to return to the same tension and unease that began the poem. His poetry is a map of how the mind works. We return to the same idea and the same memory and the same question, even once the question has been answered. This is because the question needs to be answered again, right now. As long as John Sweet is writing the next poem, he’s alive, and so are we.

john sweet (n)

1.  b 1968 in the upstate desert.
2.  opposed to all faceless organizations dedicated to greed and the abuse of power including, but not limited to, those of the
religious and political persuasions.
3.  has been appearing w/ sporadic regularity in the small press,
both electronic and paper-based, since 1990.
4.  collections include HUMAN CATHEDRALS, FAMINE and SLOW DRIFT INTO
EXILE, among others.

Ephemeron by T.R. Hummer

Posted on by
Reply

T.R. Hummer
Ephemeron

Louisiana State University Press
ISBN: 9780807139875
Pages: 88
Reviewed by: Amy Glynn Greacen

 

 

 

 

THE FALLACY FALLACY –

Well… as Robert Hass famously put it:

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.

In T.R. Hummer’s tenth collection of poems, Ephemeron, “loss” doesn’t quite get the job done. All the new thinking is about obliteration. This is a book about death, about human ephemerality. (Is “ephemerality” a word? It should be, but I seem to remember getting knocked around by an eleventh-grade English teacher for using it. Whatever. It was a top-notch school and another teacher still told me flat out that “surfeit” wasn’t a word and docked me points on a paper. So I am planting the flag for ephemerality if there isn’t already one, because there’s no other good way to adjectivize this word, and you have to if you’re going to talk about this book.)

But I digress. Hummer’s poems are concerned with the stark inevitabilities of life: two cells into it we are already pulp waiting to happen. It’s riddled with images of shrapnel, decomposition, disease, surgery, abandonment. This book is about the indifferent cruelty – and occasionally, felicity – of the gods and of biology. There are poems about war, about killing and dying, about things that are burnt black, shot off, and all kinds of screwed up.

But then again, not exactly. To say that would cast them as bleak, depressing – and they aren’t. Stark, yes. Tough? Yes. But there’s humor in this voice, a sense of irony and slyness and – well, love for the entropic crap-storm that is our brief flicker on this brief flicker of a planet. This is a mind that sees horror and humor, beauty and cruelty, without needing to polarize them. They coexist, each playing in its own time signature and following its own rules. Hummer’s a jazz buff, as anyone knows who has read his previous book, The Infinity Sessions, so it makes sense that he is drawn to syncopation, to blue notes, to abrupt changes in tempo, to modulation.

The word “ephemera” has such connotations of airiness and windblown-ness that it feels a little weird to say this, but to me, the presiding spirit of this collection is plate tectonics. These are poems of friction: subtle but constant friction with occasional major earthquakes. Lines rub against lines, prose rubs against verse, ideas rub against ideas. Titles tug on the content that follows them. The primary throughline of this collection is an interplay between big, authoritative, conceptual stuff and small, fleeting, personal, intimate stuff. The titles are all big and bad and block-capitalized, words like “SYSTEM,” “ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN,” “SCHEMATIC,” “THEORY” – you get the drift. A few lines from THEORY:

…The form is expansive but non-totalizing.
……….It will not admit essences or transcendence.
It has no state, but is inclusive of gases, rage, plutocracy.
……….It is supercooled and volatile. In the shadow of a broken
Column, lovers lean into one another. They have already
……….Entered the second circle. By twilight, no one
Will remember the other life, its fragile music, its perfume.

See what I mean? Even the lines, alternately capitalized and indented, suggest a subduction zone, a faultline, a shifting ground. Gigantic ideas, then a telescoping to a single, anonymous “pair of lovers” who are somehow no one and everyone. And disappear.

Formally, Hummer is a bit of a trickster. Subtle and acutely aware. He’s the kind of poet who can make a staunch self-professed formal-poetry hater swallow two pages of terza rima without even realizing they’re doing it, the way you stick the dog’s medicine in a piece of meat. (There’s even a villanelle that doesn’t make you wince one little bit: the thing turns and if you aren’t at least smiling admiringly there is something wrong with you.) Yet these are also poems that flirt with prose. In some cases it’s more than flirting; they buy prose a couple of drinks and take it back to their place. There are interstitial series of prose epigrams. Many of the rest of the poems are the kind that make you scratch your head and try to remember how you define the difference. If you’re the kind of poetry reader who wants to be all hot and heavy with metaphor at all times – T.R. Hummer is not your man. His imagery is direct, and his vocabulary often a deliciously bone-dry combination of vernacular, conversational phrases and words out of biology and physics textbooks (another friction). The effect of this almost arid directness is that when he dos wax figurative it provokes a little surge of – what? Pleasure? Recognition? I don’t know, it’s (oh, say it) ephemeral.

Something also has to be said about the recurrence of invented rhetorical fallacies through the first section of the book. FALLACY OF COMPOSITION has time arrowing backward, erasing “the wreckage of history” on both universal and personal scale. FALLACY OF ACCIDENT insists on a “deep etymology” that connects disconnected things. BALD MAN FALLACY describes a sniper resting his gun sight on members of an oblivious family of women and children working and playing, the mother inaudibly singing in a language he doesn’t understand anyway. (“If you shoot them one by one, you will never kill them all.”) Reading them sequentially, I found myself thinking of pathetic fallacy, intentional fallacy, other rhetorical constructs that echo against these titles. It struck me that perhaps the fallacy was fallacy; that there’s something going on here that has to do with a wearing down of rhetoric – the fallacy fallacy, if you will.

In ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN he writes:

The failing kidney is a portal—the leaky
……….heart valve, the clot, the lesion in the brain:
All doors unlocking themselves. Likewise
……….outside the body: the razorblade,
The bottle of barbiturates, the utility pole
……….beside the curve in the icy highway,
The rifle over the mantelpiece (it must
……….go off).

This matter-of-fact cataloguing of accident waiting to happen is typical of what Hummer does in this collection: destruction awaits, either inside you or outside. The sword of Damocles hangs over each of us and somehow it all makes sense. It makes sense in its consonances (say it aloud and hear the “L” sound in failing, portal, valve, unlocking, likewise, razorblade – at which point it shifts to the B, plosive P’s I-give-up voiceless cousin; body, blade, bottle, barbiturates, beside). It makes sense in its enjambments (right down to the twist on Chekhov’s gun – not “it must go off” for the sake of drama so much as “it must go off” because that is the nature of the universe). It’s just… inevitable.

And all of this follows a first poem, the poem from which the book takes its title, in which the speaker finds himself “fifty and pregnant,” and refuses “to be ashamed of his joy.” Joy in this poem is not unalloyed (nothing is, in this book: beauty rises from bleakness and vice versa, over and over), but it’s there and it’s determined to live. The poem is addressed to the unborn child, whom he calls “zygote,” a term at once distancing and intimate, with a combination of world-weary been-there-done-that and wonder and – well, a sort of challenge: I dare you to become a person. In this moment the ephemeron is the thing too rudimentary to even be called “embryo,” (he rejects “child”). But the speaker of the poem knows perfectly well what’s coming: ephemera made solid, made real, made permanent. “…my sleeping wife is growing / a consciousness” even as he experiences a hyperawareness of his own mortality:

…the old gods’ abstract hearts contract.
……….I smell them gather above me like ravens, wheeling
Over the promise my body makes. Black-
……….hearted godhood has left them hungry.
But it is they who assemble, in the amniotic sac,
……….bits of star-grit, skeins of DNA, the holy chemistry
Of existence. What can I do but leave them to it, even
……….knowing what I know? My spiritual autobiography
Is a shambles-in-progress, my unfinished Confessions
……….a creaking stylized fiction from a distant century—
It reads like a pirated version of a bad translation
……….of a novel the young Balzac wrote, then threw away.
No god forgives such things. The gods have taste.
……….Smelling an uncouth sulfur in the aura of the coming day,
The Supreme Will wrinkles the Great Face.
……….The Gaze averts, and here’s our chance. A space
Opens—ambiguous territory, zygote. Translucent. Our place.

Is this the IT MUST GO OFF FALLACY? Nothing in Hummer’s poems is single-minded or unalloyed. Some give you a peek at the cards they’re holding while others maintain a basaltic poker face. But nothing in them is simple. A catalogue of human disaster is preluded by a beautiful ode to an unborn child, and it’s typical Hummer in its refusal to bow to sentimentality (bravo, hon) but it also refuses to bow to the destruction, decay and dismemberment that pervade the rest of the book. The speaker insists upon his moment of happiness, on momentarily defying the gods he sees as circling vultures, the details that “gather ominously;” the speaker’s own catalogue of failures pales, for the moment, beside the enormity of creating a life. Ambiguous territory, indeed. And without it?

But as beautiful an opener as “EPHEMERON” is, the blue ribbon in the “Damn I Wish I’d Thought of That” category, at least for this reader, is a pair of poems in the first section. The first is titled “EVERYTHING IN THE PAST IS A PARTICLE;” the second, “EVERYTHING IN THE FUTURE IS A WAVE.” The two pieces, for me at least, show off what is strongest in much of Hummer’s work: the combination of colloquial and technical or erudite language, the attentiveness to double-meanings and correlating sounds, the footsure enjambments, and the combination of something boldly and hugely universal with something tiny and personal and –yup – ephemeral. Even the two titles, juxtaposed, are poetry, light turned into time, which seems to collect in the space between them. Past participle. Wave of the future. Of course! Here we are, shedding light, which of course is both things at once, on the fixed solidity of the past and the unfixable, uncharitable future. The first poem is static, a particle of memory, a child pitching a passionate tantrum at a third birthday party (“crushed” is how he describes her). Hummer paints it as a sort of hotel room to be revisited at will, suspended, inanimate almost – and tiny. Personal. Intimate. Fleeting. The second poem makes you paddle out to a place that’s far beyond your depth, the undifferentiated terror of a future where anything can happen, and there’s a spooky repetition of the phrase “crushed child” which by now has a second, horrid resonance. In each, the illuminating ray points at inevitability. Something did happen, and something will happen. It’s elegant as hell.

What I find beautiful about Hummer’s best poems is the way his voice becomes drier, harder, more matter-of-fact as the emotional stakes of the poem rise. These poems are tough, and I mean tough as nails. They brook no argument (save the occasional fallacy) and they aren’t taking prisoners. They’re authoritative and questioning, mysterious and earthy, personal and impersonal at the same time. He has a talent for ambiguity (and the middle section, titled “EITHER / OR” tips its hand to this) and for friction. If any of these poems were two sticks they’d be a campfire by the last line.

 

T. R. Hummer is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Infinity Sessions and Bluegrass Wasteland: Selected Poems. He has been editor of Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Georgia Review. A native of Mississippi and longtime devotee and practitioner of jazz, he lives in Phoenix, where he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Elevators by Rena Rosenwasser

Posted on by
Reply

Rena Rosenwasser
Elevators

Kelsey Street Press
ISBN: 978-0932716750
Pages: 72
Reviewed by: Sabrina Dalla Valle

 

 

TRANSCENDENCE THROUGH COLOR AND PERSPECTIVE

“What rules govern the traveler with only rudimentary knowledge of [the landscape]?” asks Rena Rosenwasser. Her latest book, Elevators, is a poetic expedition through cultural strata marked by traces of initiation into the “Netherworld.” These poems guide us across Umbria and the Egyptian desert to observe frescoes restored in churches and buried in dark tombs; they leave us “ululating” with an exotic lover, and finally send us on our way up a glass platform above an abstract image of Manhattan. This playful mixed-genre portfolio of deeply sensitive thoughts and impressions is organized as an eclectic collection of paintings we might find hung loosely in the poet’s study. Rosenwasser has so thoroughly examined and dialogued with the details of these images that they become a self-styled lens of art appreciation theory through which she observes her psyche’s own hieroglyphic signatures (found in the dream panorama), the slipperiness of gendered persona, and the nature of sexual desire. Echoing in the foreground of this collection is the rhythmic beat of a “sifter” sifting tangible material from experience, historical memory, and myth through a “sieve” to concretize a unified understanding of a torn self. In the background is an Eleusinian aura emanating from a primordial void where we discover the themes of dislocation and absence. And somewhere in between, there is a message.

Harkening to Heraclitus’ philosophy of non dualism–the path up and down are one and the same– the poet tells us how Egyptian frescoes reveal the multi–dimensionality of travel: “The Pharaoh Hatshepsut/ she fishes and fowls with gods./In the fresco/wears crowns of Upper and/Lower Egypt/Her envoys on a trading mission to Punt/carry gifts, baboons, panthers, incense/ Float/Up the Nile/back and down.” This reference to Eleusinian mysteries of initiation through katabasis and anabasis is our map to steer by. It is an old story repeated again and again under different forms through our strata. The daughter is abducted into the underworld by her father for part of the year and lifted to the light by the mother for the rest of the year.

As if fastidiously primed with the staunch wisdom of Ernst Gombrich’s Story of Art, Rosenwasser explores how to measure the unmeasurable in this vital tension between darkness and light: “…medieval men built towers so they could get a better view of the darkness coming toward them.” For if we indeed meet such a boundary between absence and presence, something new arises, and that is color.  So to transcend this fundamental duality, the poet leans on a schooled acumen of color theory and rules of perspective. The categories of a visual grammar–vanishing point, horizon, convergence, receding lines, hue, saturation, density, tone, texture, and intensity–imbue her poetic and psychic constructions with a vocabulary that reveals something new within the rules of her text.

We are shown that color is more than adornment. Like numbers and syntax, there is an order. What’s more, color follows the laws of physics and participates in our daily experience of increasing disassociation: “Expansion of the universe […] concerned a shift towards the red: the wavelength of light was increasing as space enlarged and thus objects were moving farther and farther apart.” The poet uses this example to show an inherent contiguity between color, perspective, perception and corporality that she wields in her striving for a hermaphrodite identity in a world where everything is a threatened woven tissue of “threads.”

In her poem, “Real Mummies Wait Out the Hours,” Rosenwasser explores the provenance of the color mommia brown: “COLOR: Mommia was used by European painters to make shadows on canvas….Mummy brown made from the ancients themselves…out of gummy liquor that exuded from embalmed flesh.” And here our poet raises the stakes; our bodies are the source of our shadow, even in artistic representation. But we are not fixed in this shadow. We can make distinctions in our self-awareness, and one point of focus is sexuality: “slide across screens of sexual suitability.” By providing “distinct details” and “intricacy,” we can tell a specific story separate from all other stories, and ground it in its own legitimacy. The multiple screens insinuate this identity as “Indefinitely Positioned: the mutable self.” Such an idiosyncratic repositioning carries one forth into full Technicolor of personal expression as motion picture.

There are, however, slices in the film; Rosenwasser’s narrative is also disruptive. The plot shifts like a snake because, “Time is a snake/ Scarab red.” Take for example her treatment of the goddess Nut, depicting a new sequence within another disrupted structure in the representation of the mythical female principle traditionally associated with fertile earth. Here the primal mother creates the starry world, and the male principle offers his body to create earth. In this mythology, the woman’s body conflates Day and Night, “each evening Nut swallows the sun/ her stretched arms and elongated legs/light travels through her body/in cut caverns/blue black sky/flesh-toned stars [...]” Inscribed in this amniotic cocoon of her galactic body are all the volumes of the Netherworlds. The stars are text, and their light is like milk suckled by the many lesser gods who come to nourish themselves from the celestial mother. Light is transformed into language.

The poet’s disruption is purposeful; neither art nor the representation of the body can stand up to time. We restore the painting to resist time; can we also restore the text and image of the body? The poet questions the possibility of eidetic recall to extend life eternally. The fact that memory of the original design eludes us is problematic. “Perhaps it is already lost, and what she thinks she sees is long since gone. […] She has this need to know. What is there and what is not there?”

Rosenwasser looks through cracks and spaces that make structure breaks within the text, fresco, landscape, even within the body. The relationship between texture and text is challenged by unraveling threads of perception:

A switch of

                         positions,                                how
unstable

is
a metaphor of                  Raw skin

was
the woman                   in the screening

Being
a man                         An open ended

Chain                                      Displaced.

meaning
inside me […].”

Once we start restoring our own identity, stretching the unraveled threads anew across the great divide that frames our loom, the poet asks if we have any other choice but to stitch what was torn, create “Frankenstein’s Daughters”? These tears run deep; they structure the dream panorama, characterized explicitly by disruption of sequence, and hence the thread of causality. “The dreamer dreaming interrupts the fluid body’ sense […] I never find myself eating anything/real when dreaming.” For this poet, new patterns and shapes are not found in the dream. They are found in activities of distinction, somewhat like that of an archeologist: “The displaced location will have its sifter and its sieve.” Rosenwasser sorts through, separates and recombines material from the dark crack to transcend her own inner duality. The quality of her perception acts as a third presence. “Although there are two of us I am halted by the thoughts of threes. I make three marks [...]. Is there a key somewhere that has eluded me?”

Her poetic awareness fulfills the missing element in whatever duality she travels through, like a spirit of judgment that solves for ‘x’ in the algebraic operation. The etymology of this Arabic word, al jabr, referring to a reunion of broken bones, announces the role of the external calculator–to balance and restore the broken body. Such is Rosenwasser’s ambitious and poetic mission: to find the restorer’s vantage point. “Triptychs contain these painted threads. A spiritual realm instead of a landscape.”

This unique, active poetics of perception can be described in the words of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as “the powers of difference that draw together and assemble.” The fact that the poet steps into the stream of duality in full awareness leads her to become a conduit for that precise tension which through her act of witnessing, transports us to a newly inspired fresco of energetic fulfillment. The witness is the eye of color and perspective, the third piece in the primal tension, the restorer.

How can we trust this poet’s special authority to dissolve common dualistic boundaries with the eyes of an art critic?

“Uncontrollable emanations occur where sacrifices are made. If the alter opens and only two of the three parts are visible. The desire for the invisible other appears to leak when least expected.”

We must trust in her desires and in her poetic sensitivity to apprehend the spontaneous moment.

This desire for the invisible cultivates the poet’s sensitivity for meaning. And this is where we, as readers, find resolution to the problem of temporality, to the inevitable unraveling of matter that must be restored. Desire at all levels is a conflating energy, the poet writes of an affair she is having with an ‘exotic woman’: “There is gravity to the lightness in my body.”  She is fluid in the moment of sexuality: “Under her texture I wander like a spindle. Her tongue ululating inside my surface. I’m thrown before sound’s arrival into soundlessness.” And this is the space of the eternal.

Like the abstraction of Piet Mondrian’s grid-based paintings that spare no margins, linear perspective in this narrative is no less compelling. The final poem “Elevators” assures us that we can also find philosophical verity in the architectural design of current twenty-first century urban existence. Taking a lift up the elevator affects our perspective; we become witness to a vast concrete and steel fresco established by sets of horizontal and vertical lines coming alive through movement and dissolve. Our platform rises with “industrial urgency.” Perspective pushes the convergence lines ever flatter until the vanishing point itself disappears. We are the modern neophytes journeying between skyscraper and subway; we conflate the separation of space: “Floors/fabric of the infinite.” The poet is taking us, at the same time, beyond the horizon of our own organization of knowledge. “What was it, she thought, if the field of the painting moved outward into a horizonless space?”

Rosenwasser’s innovative documentation of her own Eleusinian journey addresses an ontological crisis in post-modern poetry, and by poetic design recovers the lost structures of layered representation from the vestiges of an incomplete knowledge.  Her text challenges the grammatical function of syntax and leads us to more disassociating energies of its broken form to show us the cracks where we might unearth our psychic artifacts. The theoretical, interdisciplinary design of this work is provocative, taking the hybrid text yet one step further.

Rena Rosenwasser
grew up in New York City where she cultivated her passion for literature and the visual arts. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1971, she moved to California to pursue graduate studies at Mills College, Oakland, where she earned her MA in literature in 1976. In 1974 she settled in Berkeley, where she co-founded Kelsey Street Press and subsequently served as its longtime director. Initially the press’s mission was simply to publish women writers, who were marginalized by small and mainstream publishers. As poets took up the challenge of feminism and the language poets, the press placed more emphasis on innovative writing practices. Between 1987 and 2006, Rosenwasser initiated and produced a series of collaborations between poets and visual artists that established Kelsey Street as the longest lived independent publisher of literature for women.

Rosenwasser’s poetry publications include Elevators (Kelsey Street Press, 2011) Dittany (Taking flight) (Mayacamas Press, 1993);  Unplace.Place (Leave Books, 1992); and three collaborations with artist Kate Delos: Isle (Kelsey Street Press, 1992); Aviary (Limestone Press, 1988); and Simulacra (Kelsey Street Press, 1986). Her first volume of poetry, Desert Flats, was published by Kelsey Street Press in 1979.

Currently a board member of Small Press Distribution, Rosenwasser has also served on the Literary Panel for the California Arts Council

 

 

Circe by Nicelle Davis

Posted on by
1

Nicelle Davis
Circe

Lowbrow Press 2011
ISBN: 978-0982955345
Pages: 104
Reviewed by Kelli Allen

 

 

What happens to myth when it is given a modern literary treatment? Is the romance of the arcane lost when a coat of current vernacular and diction is thrust, thick and bold over narrative, the essence of which is in our collective consciousness? To read Nicelle’s Davis’s debut poetry collection, Circe, is to ask this question after absorbing the peculiar language of her poems. The collection takes its reader through seven “books,” each detailing a modern-day Circe’s reflection on herself and her real and imagined histories. Davis does not allow her Circe to function as goddess. Rather she strips Circe to a woman whose magic is irrevocably lost, and ultimately the longing for what has been taken guides every word of the collection.

How we metabolize our grief is the central theme of each of the books. We are shown how Circe, the Sirens, Penelope, and Odysseus each manipulate language to spell a recipe for surviving through passion experienced, coveted, dispelled, and stolen.

Book I serves as an extremely brief explanation of the impetus for retelling Circe’s story. The poet shows herself in this section alone, and remains apart from the narrative action throughout the remainder of the text. While Davis does not write “Once upon a time” in this first section, the sensation of beginning an old, warm, and dusty tale from childhood is apparent.

Book II offers the reader an opportunity to watch Circe as she examines not only her present circumstances, but also how her past entanglements have colored her self-perception. We meet Circe as she is beginning to understand her own shades of madness and is resigning herself to whatever truth may be visible within the strangeness. We agree to accompany the poet through memory and into Circe’s experience with the line: “Will we heal?” from “A Doctor Comes to Call on Circe.” The question echoes in every one of Davis’s poems, with proffered answers as bizarre and melancholy as the illustrations by Cheryl Gross, which follow each “book.” The one answer which resonates the solitary hopeful note in the poems comes through in “Visions of Return from the Crystal Ball of Circe’s Glass Eye:” “There was/ song. That much is true.”

There are moments in the poems where language falls a bit flat and images seem forced: “I drop my basket and bolt for home- crying/ like a baby’s bottle in a footless pig’s mouth.” There is risk of preciousness in tackling sorrow when the character of import has leapt from the Odyssey. Both “Love Letter for Circe” and “Lottery Tickets” feel almost gimmicky—as though the poet is stretching too far beyond myth toward cleverness unearned. The luminescent moment in Book II, which compensates for weaker pieces preceding it, is the lovely poem “Circe Swallows Her Glass Eye.” In these lines Davis delivers a self-reflexive assertion about narrative and recognition: “Setting is the lie; there is no physical ocean/ keeping others from finding me.” We are allowed to assume the pursuit is both for poet and Circe. Indeed, all fiction, all narrative, is merely truth wrapped in swirls of misinformation and false memory. Our duty is in the choosing of these illusionary truths.

Book III begins with the lovely epistolary “Dear Odysseus,” which is an aching, open portrayal of loneliness in the wake of a lover’s refusal to reciprocate desire. Circe’s longing is painfully naked and Davis casts her as deserving of empathy, despite her apparent leaning toward ugly bitterness. There is pleading in this poem, which gives us the first real taste of Circe’s peripheral humanity.

The longer poems in the collection speak with more authority than their brief, and often postscriptory, sisters. The narrative weave of the books is often frayed by the small poems peppered in and around the larger narrative threads. They fit oddly between Circe’s moments of inner dialogue. Perhaps this slightly schizophrenic ordering and presentation is intentional as a linguistic mirror for Circe’s path through her loose and swirling psyche.

The concrete, or “shape” poems, are affective as visual representation of certain quasi-universal actions within the construct of the original myth, but do not present the most interesting or engaging language. They feel, as many of the shorter poems, rather artfully contrived. “The Sad Siren” is the most intriguing of these shaped pieces as it is accompanied by charmingly grotesque drawings of the same name. The conversations between the sirens could have been condensed into a longer-form poem to avoid some of the “over-cooked” residue of the short pieces in this section.

Books IV, V, and VI offer the most stunning poems in the collection. When Davis writes elements of myth into her own more casual and modern mode of description, we are given little moments of wisdom that ring of magic otherwise missing from this retelling. In “The recipe for Sirens,” Davis offers a gorgeous meditation on man’s inherent narcissism: “If they beg for mercy-/ try to be patient-/ most can’t see you have already given them/ what they ask for.” Again, we see Davis at her self-reflexive best here. This is followed closely by “Uses for a Witch’s Eye- 1.a. Jaw Stoppers” wherein the notion of seeing is discussed as the gaze is turned toward self: “Tell yourself/ it’s just an eye- you have two- and vision/ happens regardless.” In book V “The Body Is Two Doors” serves as a mother’s lament. This is perhaps Davis’s most tender poem while also being her most emotionally violent. Along with “Sing into Empty until it Shines,” Circe is given a space through which to express the thorough evisceration of female grief. While the language in these poems sighs, the lines resist overt brutality and instead sing through a palette of regret. “Connecting Cords” is the only anaphora in the collection and it allows Circe’s “I” to receive immediate and unmasked attention.

The parallel worlds in which Circe experiences womanhood through, and as, Penelope are the most complex situations in the collection. In “Circe Wakes as Herself after Being Penelope” motherhood is examined from a long side-ways glace both within and without. Here, we see Circe as clearly falling further into delusion, while in the same instance expressing the most harrowing moments of clarity. Her longing is laid bare and the reader cannot help but look slightly away just as Circe must.

The postscript of the collection invites the reader to begin again, much as a traditional fairy tale story asserts that every ending is the natural loop of opportunity to return to the point of beginning. Davis asks us more than to simply re-read the text, though that is certainly a delightful option. Her assertion in closing the collection with such a brief and direct postscript is to push her reader into the realm of myth—that which instructs us most in myth and fairy story is the message between the layers of language and narrative. All good stories invite revisiting, and Circe is no exception.

Originally from Utah, Nicelle Davis now resides in Lancaster, California, with her son J.J. She has taught poetry at Youth for Positive Change, an organization that promotes success for youth in secondary schools, and with Volunteers
of America in their Homeless Youth Center. She currently teaches at Antelope Valley College. Her
poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Beloit Poetry Journal, ML Press,
The New York Quarterly, Offending Adam, PANK, SLAB Magazine, Two Review, and
others. Her book, Becoming Judas, is scheduled to be released from Red Hen Press
in 2013. You can read her e-chapbooks at Gold Wake Press and Whale Sound. She
runs a free online poetry workshop at The Bees’ Knees Blog and is an assistant
poetry editor for Connotation Press. She is currently working on four different
collections of poetry and on ways to channel her many interests into large
paper-mache yard ornaments. She is grateful for the time your eyes took to read
this bio.

 

 

 

Honeycomb by Carol Frost

Posted on by
1

Carol Frost
Honeycomb
TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2710-4
Pages: 64
Reviewed by Amy Glynn Greacen

One of the wonderful and confounding things one confronts in reading Pliny the Elder’s Naturae Historia is the way myth and science sit so comfortably side-by-side. No irony, nary a wink, and no questioning. Fact and fable are equals in a happy marriage, peaceful and supportive. One would never tell an embarrassing story about the other at a dinner party. Neither would dream of trying to take down or dismantle the other. The Fat Man from Como can tell you exactly how to cultivate flax. He can also tell you with equal gravity that the mythological character Arachne personally invented the process for weaving flax into linen.

There is thus a twofold beauty to the trio of apiary passages from Pliny that serve as epigraph to Carol Frost’s eleventh book, Honeycomb. The quotes span the full breadth of Pliny’s oddball passion for the collection of knowledge and his utter disinterest in verification, creating a fascinating echo chamber in which to consider this series of elegies for a mother succumbing to dementia. One of the features of many dementias is confabulation, the fusing of reality and fantasy, the loss of ability to distinguish one’s own memories from received stories, or imaginings, or dreams. The interweaving of lost and confabulated, confused knowledge is a running theme in the poems as organically as it is in the life of anyone dealing with a demented person. In Frost’s deft hands it resonates and echoes through various natural processes and phenomena. Widely considered a “nature poet,” it seems, well, natural, for Frost to cast the profusion of scattered ideas, and emotions – wonder, grief, anger, a kind of mercy, a kind of steely frustration – of both the dying person and the people and truths (and myths) she leaves behind, in the garden, in the realm of bees.

Bees, beehives and honey appear in some form in each of the poems, though they are oblique presences much of the time, flitting, peripheral things, one might imagine, deftly collecting their materials for later use, later consumption, later waste. They hum loudly in some poems; in others they’re barely hinted at (the final line of “She saw that the tortured dream wrestled to the floor” for example: “the yellow asp stinging the black heart.”) They serve aptly enough as a large-scale metaphor for thought, for the pollination of idea, for the coming together and scattering of the disparate yet unified pieces of the mind, each trying to do its part to produce something meaningful, something nourishing. “Cells” appear as both honey cells and brain cells and both are eternally filling or emptying. Bees as both wild and cultivated creatures, in a symbiotic relationship with people, deepen the metaphors of mental cultivation, production, and loss and death as hive boxes are abandoned and colonies sicken inexplicably, as flowers inevitably arrive and bees inevitably arrive to process them.

Now, me: I love a high concept. Eternally a sucker for the overarching theme, the master-plan, the sense of an inevitable design. I dig packing density. There’s nothing wrong with a little piece of bel canto, but in a book of poems one sometimes hungers for the whole opera. To create such works is sometimes to compromise our ability to make individual pieces fit tidily into stand alone spaces in literary journals (though it hasn’t proved a problem here) – but a book of poems has the opportunity to be more than a mere assemblage, and Frost gets it. This collection is focused and determined without being heavy-handed. Each poem tackles an aspect of a moment of the process of the mind’s succumbing, and each does it with observational acuteness, an eye for eloquent details, and an enviable formal restraint. It is impossible not to trust this voice. It knows what the hell it’s talking about. Even in the individual poems I happen to like least, there is always something to appreciate or admire. In the ones I like most, Frost’s lightly-wielded but powerful authority over her subject can be breathtaking.

A particular example of what’s really humming here:

Abandoned bee boxes piled on each other at meadow end . . .

Like clothing taken off,
the bees who had alighted on hat,
gloves, shirt, have flown off somewhere.
Is it so terrible to outlive the mind?
Forget this, forget that—keys, glasses,
what it was you just said, what you meant to say.
Pseudonyms. Silences::
oddball or golden and grave, a dance of signs,
sorrows passing by like shadows,
time running by like a small girl running by like a madwoman.

Oh, my goodness, and yes, let’s put two colons in here for emphasis:: look at that! Look at the phrasing. Look at the – I say the word again because it’s what it is, deft – use of space, of sound, the economy of it. Few of us could pull it off, the sheerness, the diaphanous light and the essential rightness in this poem. Okay – me, I happen not to like the ellipse in the title. It makes you expect the title to be a sentence that continues in the first line, and it isn’t. Or at least, if it is, it makes a grammatical muddle of what comes after it, which is otherwise a complete, normal, linear sentence – which in turn makes you wonder what’s going on with the ellipse in the title and all of that distracts my poor pedantic eyeball. Other than that, what can one say but Hell Yes to the subtle shades of grief and humor and acceptance and loss and finding that exist in these short lines, compact as bees themselves and buzzing off in all directions but somehow with an unmistakable singleness of purpose? The double sense of “taken off,” the lovely consonance (pseudonyms – silences – signs – sorrows – passing – small)? Is it so terrible to outlive the mind? Her litany of things it might not be so bad to outlive neatly evokes Bishop’s masterpiece “One Art” but comes at it from an entirely different corner. Loss is loss is loss, and it is the essential master subject of any number of poets ancient and current. But here, loss is – not trivialized, certainly, and not funny, but a neat evocation of that strange relief that comes when, in dealing with a demented person, one realizes there is a sort of blessing in some stages of forgetting; that it releases us from things we don’t need any longer, be they traumatic, or embarrassing, or simply irrelevant. Sounds and sense serve one another just as they should. And holy crap, that final line: “time running by like a small girl running by like a madwoman.” I dare you to top that. Its sheer packing density rivals the hexagons of any beehive.

Any self-respecting nature poet will probably find him or herself in an intimate relationship with Orpheus, in one way or another, and the strains of that lyre certainly play in the background of this collection. He’s mentioned in “Two anthills and a late summer hive;” and in “Amid a menagerie she sleeps as in a lair” the mother is described as a sort of Orpheus, “speaking tree names” as Orpheus does in the Metamorphoses to bring them into being around him. (In the poem one can almost sense the mother’s vain attempt to do likewise, to keep things around her by repeating their names.) In “Light in a clear window, morning” he appears again, this time the image of the dead Orpheus whose severed head and enchanted lyre go on singing and playing as they float down the Hebrus. The repetitions are used to wonderful effect here, deepening one another and making sense of the entire vocabulary of the natural world she employs. Now, I’m an Orpheus gal myself and I admit that at first I wasn’t sure he really belonged here. In a way I wanted him not to, as dense as this book is with reference and mythology and natural science and personal narrative and honey, my brethren, is a high-calorie substance. That image of the severed head floating away, still singing – well, I’m still not sure if it’s wrong, or perfect. But it is there. And the large point about this book is that it creates a story that is both personal and universal and that is what all mythology is supposed to do.

Honeycomb contains stylistic elements, typical of Frost’s work and presumably familiar to her longtime readers, that are arguably matters of taste and aren’t to mine. In the same way I tend to love conceptual books, I tend to find enormously irksome such things as funky or deliberately wrong or arbitrary punctuation. Frost glories in kooky parentheticals, colon after colon after double-colon (girlfriend, buy yourself a full stop. Heaven knows you’ve earned it!) or sudden archaic outbursts from modern, colloquial speech (why “O Mother…?” What’s the matter with “Oh?”).  What I note, though, is that while these kinds of tics would irritate the heck out of me in a poet less capable than Frost, her phrasing is so lucidly right and her imagery so arresting that even I, stickler for syntax that I am, find it very possible to forego the urge to cross out commas and periods and white spaces that seem willfully to be in the wrong place.

Not every poem in this collection is perfect; some work much better than others, at least for this reader – her imagery can be muddled (“Light in a clear window, morning” felt that way to me) or her stylistic and grammatical quirks too distracting (“The humble sense of being alive”, to my ear), despite the confidence with which she deploys them. But a few things are clear. Frost’s command of her lexicon is tremendous. These are poems of lyricism and intelligence, and of deep curiosity. Her poems are formally acute, highly aware, sonically sophisticated, unsentimental and damned powerful. To be all those things – unsentimental in particular – given this subject matter is no small feat. This book absolutely deserves a wide audience.

To come back to obese, asthmatic old Pliny for a second: there’s debate around the small pond of the poetry world on the subject of epigraphs. David Orr, writing in the New York Times review of Books, recently complained of “The Age of Citation,” saying that contemporary poets used epigraph as a kind of shorthand for their intellectual alliances or credentials – one almost has the image of a young poet sending Wallace Stevens out in front of him like a sacrificial infantryman, or Karl Marx speaking for the poet as a lawyer speaks for a defendant. I don’t disagree with this, speaking of it as a trend. But let it be said that Frost gets the point of an epigraph. Her passages from Pliny (and from King Lear) are neither defensive nor explanatory shorthand for what she would like to say in the poems but can’t. The poems speak eloquently for themselves, and they know it. Her quotes from Pliny’s bizarre half-myth, half-truth encyclopedia of nature drip through the manuscript like… well, say it: like honey. They sweeten and nourish and preserve.

Carol Frost is the author of
ten previous collections of poems, including The Queen’s Desertion, I Will Say Beauty, and Love and Scorn from Northwestern University Press. She has received National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and PEN and Pushcart awards, and she has been honored by the Elliston and the Poets’ Prize committees. She holds the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Chair of English at Rollins College, where she directs the Winter with the Writers Literary Festival.

 

 

 

Why We Make Gardens (& Other Poems) by Jeanne Larsen

Posted on by
Reply


Jeanne Larsen
Why We Make Gardens (& Other Poems)
Mayapple Press, 2010.
ISBN: 978-0-932412-959
Pages: 74
Website: (see link)

http://www.mayapplepress.com/BookPages/Larsen.htm

Reviewed by M. Moro-Huber

To read Larsen’s Why We Make Gardens is to enter a world where the strata of each poem are enriched by the loam of that first paradisaical garden.  (You know, the one with naked people running a-muck and something about a snake and an apple?)  In other words, this is some epic writing. There are layers within layers which reveal that antiquity of garden symbolism and the metaphor of growth is cradled in the vivid images Jeanne brings forth from her own pilgrimage into the actual gardens that prominent poets of the past had tended and/or written about.

Where do we begin? Larsen’s poetry seems to ask, and what is the germination of our humanity, as a society, and as an individual. Is reality internal or external or both, how does our mind sift through it all, what takes root, what grows there, (here?) and what are we becoming?  Much, if not all, of the book might be read as Ars Poetica or meta-poetry.  For example, in her first poem we read:

The Gazing-Globe Garden

is the element ether, a stuff
insubstantial as any that transits

Carrara of columns, remembrance’s
granite, acute

angles of mountains, the blunt
edge of the world.

Nonsense. It’s
Glass. It’s merely

a mirror, a round-up
of jonquil, columbine, dwarf crested iris,

bellflowers’ slow first sprigs.
It glistens, accepts,

Sinks as the plants rise
towards their doubles.

It is what surrounds
it. Or it is

self-containing. Or
both, like the tangible bloom

of a face on its skin.

The “Gazing-Globe Garden” is a garden of the mind. Larsen begins by presenting the reader with the idea of memory, the elemental ether, the images our mind captures as if to hold and keep forever as some type of lasting monument, a Carrara of columns—(and don’t you just love the lyricism moving the lines along in this poem?) 

The columns represent that which we might imagine as real, or solid, or lasting/eternal, but Larsen turns the poem in on itself when she declares this reality to be “Nonsense.”  The reality Larsen brings to us is not just the idea of memory, but of the present, of the now, of us reading the words she has written on the page.  We see that stone column, we imagine the curve of that globe—which is a mirror as the mind is mirror, as memory is mirror—as words also become a mirror to thought.

And what is this poem asking us to see?  First, consider the glass and what is reflected in the globe: “a round-up of jonquil.”  A jonquil is a daffodil, of the plant family narcissus. Ah, very clever Ms. Larsen.  We are really just looking ourselves, she says.

But not only are we looking at ourselves in the “Garden-Globe” (our mind, this reflection of reality) by the reading of the poem we are now participating in looking at ourselves-looking at ourselves. (Are you having fun yet, well, I am—because I’m just narcissistic enough to do so.)

Let’s consider the other flowers reflected in this “Garden-Globe.” Larsen’s columbine allows a dichotomy in symbolism which adds another twist of meaning to the poem. “The symbolism of the columbine flower is varied, and often quite confusing. It was once believed that this flower was a symbol for cuckoldry and foolishness, at the same time, however, it was considered a symbol of fidelity and holiness.”
http://flowerinfo.org/columbine-flowers

Reality then, memory, and all the images we see in our mind—specifically the image Larsen is creating of flowers reflected in a garden globe becomes representative of what we, ourselves, “see” when we are reading a poem. What Larsen is reflecting back to us can be either holy or profane, depending on how the reader decides to look at it.

The reflected image of the “dwarf crested iris” in the “Garden-Globe” is a slyly humorous poke at the narcissistic tendency to wallow in the beauty or the idea of “self.” Larsen seems to be giving the reader a wink here, letting us know she is aware she too is a participant in this globe-gazing narcissism through the process of writing the poem.  We can also see Larsen’s smart sense of humor in the use of the word “Globe” (which has been used back in the day of good Old English *hello, Shakespeare* as another word for a person’s head, a globe might be construed as an overly large cranium perhaps,  a ridiculously intelligent person or a fat head—or both, maybe?)  The word “globe” also pulls from the idea of a literal map, the earth-sphere so often propped on a desk more for aesthetic appeal than actual use, so with the placement of that one word Larsen pulls us into that multiple world of meanings words have,  both internal and external:  Globe/mind/world—do you see it now, fat head?

I don’t think she is poking fun at the reader’s expense though as the poem itself becomes the globe, and here we touch upon meta-poetry, the idea of “poem” parallels that globe, it may just be ornamental or it can be a useful map, or both, depending on the reader. Basically we who dabble in words are ALL fat heads in the “Gazing Globe Garden,” but the question here (for me) which the poem brings to my mind, the problem, the sticking place—of what use are these images of flowers, of gardens, of reflections and why even bother considering the weight of meaning and symbolism each implies? If “remembrance’s granite” is “nonsense” is she claiming everything is a reflection and nothing is real or important or lasting, what are we to make of our own memories, these images, this life, reality? Is she claiming reality is only a reflection which occurs in the mind where the self is a mere reflection of a reflection? Is nothing tangible? What exactly is the “it” Larsen refers to in the final lines?

Let’s consider the bellflower (which interestingly enough in the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, Rapunzel took her name from one Campanula rapunculus (the Latin term for one of the bellflowers.)  What is the way out? Is there a long golden ladder of hair somewhere we can use to climb up, or down, this poem on?

The answer is no.  Tough luck fat-heads, there are a multitude of bellflower types, which seems to indicate to the reader—don’t expect one answer to any of your questions regarding the “elemental ether” that “stuff” of science and religion which we use to explain our existence.  We try to use words, too, to define and explain things, words like “self” or “soul.”  But, words provide so many dichotomies there are multiple ways to consider the reality of every single association the words in the poem call forth. Behind the words, though, Larsen is reaching for a reality that moves in and around and beyond language. Larsen provides us with complex layers of meaning not to confuse the reader with her careful word placement but to provide choices for the reader, different paths for the reader’s mind to ramble down. There is not just one way to interpret this poem, folks, not just one way to interpret any word in this poem, or in any poem for that matter as “it” (words, the act of reading) all brings to the surface of thought associative meanings that are unique to each individual reader.

Take the word/image of “columbine,” for example, besides the historical symbolism mentioned above, intended or not, there are many who lived through the terror of a high school shooting who will never separate that word from the flower from the event. Careful now though, let me be clear that in the above paragraph I’m just sharing my view of what one interpretation could be in this specific instance, which the poem’s carefully constructed (planted, seeded) dichotomies allow.

But there IS a resolution in this poem.  Larsen relates the way the reflection merges with the mind to the image of the bellflowers “slow first sprigs.”  To experience this poem, this moment, this reality and to see the brilliance working here is to also see the brilliance working in your own mind—the “It” is that which is seemingly unknowable, the undefined “ether” outside of self, but the “it” is also the internal processing of the external world and the “it” is that which we view, we know, we become as we discover in this moment that which is true.  Or should I say we discover that which is.  True?

It is what surrounds
it. Or it is

self-containing. Or

I must mention the important line-break on “is” here.  With that specific line-break Larsen is declaring: whatever this experience, this reality, this reflection can or can not be defined as, does not matter… simply put:  it ­IS. “It” exists, “self-containing” or what “surrounds”—internal reality, external experiences—“the bloom of a face on its skin.” Macro-micro, the elemental and the intangible not to be separated and labeled or put in a box, but reflected through and in the language of poetry into the mind of the reader.

Is the skin separate from the face? (interesting what she does here with juxtaposition…so many layers!) The face/skin and flower/bloom poem/poet reader/poem—all intertwine, and it leaves me feeling humbled and grateful to wonder: is the poem separate from the reader—are we not becoming something as we read, and is the process of understanding separate from that which is already understood, the revelation here—well, I will leave that to you to determine.

And folks, that was just the opening poem.  I suggest this book is a garden worth visiting, more than once.

If I had any complaints about Jeanne Larsen’s writing I’d have to say her writing is too cerebral.  She should dumb it down some with a rhyme here and there.

 

(Uh, that’s a nerdy joke.)

Jeanne Larsen’s first book, James Cook in Search of Terra Incognita, won the AWP annual competition in poetry. She has also published three novels (Silk Road, Bronze Mirror and Manchu Palaces) and two volumes of translations, most recently Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China (BOA editions). She lives in southwest Virginia and is presently the Susan Gager Jackson Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University.