Norman Ball
The Frantic Force
Petroglyph Books, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9800396-6-5
Pages: 192

Reviewed By: CL Bledsoe

Ball begins his introduction with a reference to the old TV commercial in which a guy eating a chocolate bar collides with a guy eating peanut butter from a jar, and voilà, these two seemingly disparate tastes combine into the peanut butter cup. Similarly, Ball’s essays combine many seemingly unrelated things – he throws in everything including the kitchen sink – when discussing poetry. This is because Ball is interested in shaking things up, bringing poetry down from the lonely mountaintops of college professors’ covetousness and plopping it down for all the world to see, or even opening it up to scientific inquiry. A noble sentiment. Reaching back to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and even further back to hold Eliot up as the last gasp, Ball argues that modern poetry has become obscure, purposefully obtuse. (Eliot at least knew what he was doing, seems to be the implication.) This obscurity is difficult to argue, in a certain sense. Ball cautions that difficulty in reading is a good thing, but impossibility in reading has made modern poetry irrelevant.

Ball blames the commodification of MFA programs, which afford a common, easy scapegoat. One problem that he neglects to address is that not all MFA programs encourage ‘experimental’ (i.e. purposefully obscure) poetry, and not all the journals he references publish ‘experimental’ poetry. I, personally, studied at an MFA program that strongly dissuaded students from inaccessibility, for example. I’ve also worked as an editor on a couple journals, which I steered towards a focus on narrative poetry. But let me just go on the record saying I have no love lost for MFA programs in general, and many of them may well pump out cookie-cutter hobbyists posing as writers. Likewise, it seems like one can’t virtually spit without hitting some new online journal, many of which boast guidelines that discourage anything resembling emotional impact in the work they’d like to publish. But there are also plenty of journals interested in poetry I think Ball would quite enjoy. So let’s be accurate. But let’s also not skewer Ball unnecessarily. His motivation isn’t sour grapes, and his goal isn’t petty. He’s fighting the good fight.

After the introduction, Ball deals with the very personal topic of his father’s death. There’s some damned good writing, here, as there is in his first true essay, “Cultural Referents The Intermittent Man” which deals with Ball accidentally attacking his mother-in-law when she sneaks into his house and, also accidentally, breaks a vase. Ball waxes philosophically on the gender role of men in modern American society. But what does this have to do with poetry? Ball explains that he is not really a fighter, though when he sees ancient art (the Mycenaean Urn his mother-in-law broke) destroyed, he rises. He is showing the reader some of his motivation. Again and again, Ball refers to himself as a journeyman poet, which I take to mean ‘not a very serious one’.  But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love poetry, and he sees poetry being ‘attacked’, inadvertently (destroyed through carelessness), just as his urn was attacked. Still, he has risen to the occasion and penned these essays.

Many of these essays are about poetry, but often, Ball is writing about the state of the modern world, i.e. politics, alongside poetry. He uses Da Vinci, Jung, the Bible, Quantum physics, and any number of other approaches to filter his observations. In “Prozac IndigNation,” Ball gives statistics on the numbers of Americans on mood altering medications, and uses this as a possible explanation as to why there hasn’t been open revolution in America, after the Ponzi scheme that brought on the Great Recession. It’s a humorous take, a tongue-in-cheek idea not dissimilar from conspiracy theories (the one regarding fluoride in water comes to mind).

In “Nothing But Nihilism” Ball takes three branches of some of the world’s major religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) to task for their negative tendencies when it comes to apocalyptic fervor. Ball brings in Jung, Christopher Hitchens, and many classical allusions to this well-rounded discussion. Progress is hampered, argues Ball, by people who’d rather look backwards, or worse, who’d rather see society destroyed in apocalyptic vengeance. But let’s not lose hope; Ball considers this extremism the last gasp of this kind of extremism, at least when it comes to these religions. He references the shockwaves of conservatism reverberating throughout America these days, the war on women, and the general backward-looking that’s pushing the Republican party into irrelevance.

And this really brings us to Ball’s strength as an essayist. His chocolate/peanut butter mash up approach allows him to come at ideas in such fresh and new ways. He is, clearly, a philosopher in many regards, but he’s quite accessible and focused purely on application, on real-world ideas. He deals with pop culture only when it’s relevant to larger considerations, but he does take it to task, often relating the negativity so prevalent in pop culture to the nihilism so pervasive in religious extremism, politics, and modern art (he muses, at one point, that a certain starlet may be working for Satan in order to bring about the downfall of Western civilization). He also links all of this to poetry, which is no small feat. In the same way that poetry shouldn’t be a grouping of meaningless syllables interesting only for their complete lack of being interesting, Ball argues that poetry should be (and is!) a vital force for social commentary and change. Poetry is revolution, or it can/should be, anyway. Ginsberg wrote about all the celebrities he fucked, but he also wrote extensively about political corruption and the government overreaching itself (and isn’t Ginsberg’s sex life a kind of political and/or social commentary in itself?).

For such a seemingly stream of consciousness writer, Ball has organized the book mainly around the major topics of poetry, politics, and science, which gives it a nice, readable structure. His tone is playful; admonishing, at times; and very readable. He’s having fun writing about poetry – how often do you see that? I’d like to read more of his work, which is certainly a compliment.

Norman Ball (BA, W&L (’83);MBA, GWA (’91) is a Scottish-born writer, musician and businessman who lives in the Washington DC area. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee and Associate Editor for The Potomac: A Journal of Poetry and Politics, his writings appear regularly in eScene’s Best of the Literary Journal series.  His poetry and essays have appeared in hundreds of publications including Prairie Home Companion, Epicenter, The Times, Scotsman and Raintown Review, among others.  His first essay collection is How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable? (Del Sol Press 2010). A collection of poetry: A Signature Advance from Hoof and Paw is due out from Diminuendo Press in 2012.  A book on the cultural effects of television, Between River and Rock: How I resolved Television in Six Easy Payments will also appear in 2012.

Reviewed By: Quincy Lehr

John Gosslee’s debut collection, 12, comes in a rather large package. Twelve sonnets, after all, are a bit slim for a chapbook, much less a full-lengther, so the collection, which has one sonnet for each sign of the zodiac, has a fair number of doodads, both visual (calendars for each sign), and were that not enough, translations of the poems into French and Spanish, never mind that Gival Press is Virginia-based and presumably has limited reach in Cartagena and Lyons. One almost suspects that the doo-dads were put there so that the book would catch the eye of editors, to make it “different” and thus “interesting.”

The discerning reader may have intuited a certain curl of the lip in the above.  When one strips away the doo-dads and translations, we have twelve sonnets. About the zodiac. But hey, sonnet collections are in, with an off-the-top-of-my-head list of recent titles including Ernest Hilbert’s Sixty Sonnets, Julie Kane’s Jazz Funeral, Kim Bridgford’s In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records, William Baer’s “Borges” and Other Sonnets and “Bocage” and Other Sonnets, and others. So it’s trendy. On the other hand, though, while the quality of these books is by no means even, the best of them set the bar for sonnets quite high indeed.

For all the bells, whistles, calendars, and sonnets en francais, the sonnets in this book are… underwhelming. In the Taurus poem, “Bulls Always Charge,” we get these lines:

……….I know what is here and what has commenced
……… The divine past cannot be dispensed!

The latter line recalls in its tenor not so much Shakespeare or Sidney as it does Skeletor from The Masters of the Universe.  Gosslee’s tone and indeed imagery at times hit a bathetic level, as in his Aries poem, “The Ram’s Baa”:

………Musicians drum on its kindred’s skin torn
………By a sacrifice o’er a mortal duel.

O’er really? The poem describes a ram being sacrificed in Conan the Barbarian-like detail (original film version, 1982)—do we especially need the archaism, which elevates the tone unto risibility?

Metrically, too, the poems’ lines tend have the ten syllables connected with the traditional iambic pentameter meter, but Gosslee seems to interpret meter syllabically, resulting in periodic rhythmic constipation. Perhaps Gosslee is attempting to play it loose. Perhaps, though, he simply doesn’t have meter down yet. One cannot say with any certainty, but I would suspect the latter, with the excuse given as the former. Certainly, the collection strives, not entirely successfully, to meet rather robust requirements such as those of the Petrarchian sonnet with its ABBAABBA rhyme scheme in the octet. However, here, too, Gosslee is frequently less than sure-footed, and we get too many runs shoehorned not entirely successfully into the formal requirements of the given sonnet form. Take this example, from “Lady Justice” (the Libra poem):

……….You, bestow desires or passions deplete,
……….And decide from the start, but are discreet,
……….Allowing judgments to change through action—
……….By disavowing outside distraction.
……….The scales are above any that compete;

The inversion of “passions deplete” is, in a contemporary poem, maddening and a bit distracting, while the long sentence seems less subtle and complex than gaseous, as if coming up for breath at regular intervals for the end rhymes that punctuate generally awkward phrasing.

This is a remarkably bloated book, a lot of rigmarole for a series of less than surefooted, rather slight poems built on an idea that seems more of a workshop exercise than a grand conceit. Many of its missteps—the convoluted phrasing, the overwrought imagery, the needless or lazy archaisms—are a beginner’s missteps, and it is quite possible that Gosslee will outgrow them. Far less forgivable is Gival Press’s decision to publish this premature debut collection. Youthful maladroitness can be a phase. A book is far more permanent. Let’s hope that Gosslee’s next shows greater thought, craft, and depth.

John Gosslee was poet-in-residence for Attitude: The Dancers’ Magazine from 2008 through 2011. His first book “12″ was published by Gival Press
in French, Spanish and English. He is the Editor of Fjords Review and enjoys riding his motorcycle throughout the United States.

M. A. Griffiths
Grasshopper:  The Poetry of M. A. Griffiths
Arrowhead Press, 2011
ISBN:  1-904852-28-5
Pages:  352
Reviewed by:  Marybeth Rua-Larsen

As poets, very few of us impact the world of poetry in a long-lasting and significant way. We write our poems, revise them, maybe workshop them with poet-friends or on online poetry boards, and if we research current journals and markets carefully, we may even be fortunate enough to publish them in respectable journals and raise a glass of champagne or oatmeal stout in celebration. But the next day, it’s another poet getting published in a better journal with more fanfare, and our work and effort fade into the distance. Most of the time. So, when dozens of poets around the globe admire and respect a poet’s work so much they spend countless hours finding, collecting and cataloguing her poems from various online sites and then publishing them in an extensive collection after her untimely death, we know this is a poet who made a significant impact. Very few poets command this kind of respect, and the resulting book of poems, Grasshopper:  The Poetry of M A Griffiths, proves the full range of Maz’s talent and accomplishments.

I did not know Maz personally, but I certainly knew her by reputation when she frequented the poetry boards at Eratosphere where I began workshopping my own poems in 2007. It quickly became clear that if you could catch Maz’s eye with one of your poems and prompt her to comment, it was a coup, even if she found the poem lacking. She was clear-eyed and succinct in her criticism, almost always on-target with her advice, and if you followed it, your poem would improve. I was lucky enough to attract her attention only once, and when she noted that my poem had improved significantly with revision, I had a smile on my face for days. This poet’s approval, even though she was essentially a stranger, meant that much, and when I had the opportunity to read and study her work in this posthumous collection, much of it previously unpublished, I was eager to learn from her example.

In some ways, this is an unwieldy book. Unlike most books of poetry these days, which organize the poems into manageable sections and group them by theme or narrative flow, these poems are presented in alphabetical order, all 300-plus of them. There is little context provided, other than Alan Wickes’ informative introduction, and the poems are undated and include few notes, which occasionally make it difficult to pin down the historical context. There were moments when I wished the book had been organized by theme or some other structure, but given the fact that Maz was a private person and many of her personal notes and drafts had been lost in various computer crashes over the years, other ways of organizing would not have been possible or accurate. After reading the book, I understood why the editors made this choice, and truth be told, I learned much from this arrangement, which allowed me to group poems by theme organically rather than be influenced by someone else’s interpretation.

With a book this size and considering that every poem Maz was known to have written is included, several key themes emerge, including elegies to pets and animals in the wild, poems on the process of writing and commentary on poets and scholars, poems about illness and aging, poems about God and spirituality, and poems about the effects and consequences of war. One of the most varied and compelling themes, however, centers on women and sexuality. In his thoughtful introduction, Alan Wickes states that there’s conflicting evidence on whether or not Maz was a feminist.  I find that her poems overwhelmingly confirm her as a feminist. Yes, Maz criticized women, and she sometimes criticized feminists in particular, such as in this sonnet, “The Women’s Circle,” included here in its entirety:

Faith takes the chair, and switches off her phone,
“First, gifts for our poor sisters overseas:
Joy has donated three warm wraps, and Joan,
a book entitled, Women:  Off Your Knees!”
Amanda checks her hair, Sue clears her plate
and Caitlin thrums her throat to signal hush:
‘Anent last month’s pornography debate
I’ll show a tape to illustrate this trash.’

Faith views the tilting pricks and shaven groins,
tuts with the others at the sordid scene,
the squalid pumping of the actors’ loins.
Stern-faced she watches like a widowed queen
and feels with pique, as personal affront,
the creeping liquefaction of her cunt.

The criticism here, though, is for a particular kind of feminist, one who is judgmental and holier-than-thou, for whom any kind of pornography is automatically a “sordid scene” and “squalid.” Maz’s poems imagine women capable of being more and doing more, and some poems nudge women in the direction of asking questions about their own behavior, such as in the sonnet, “Ding Dong Bell,” where a cat watches and offers commentary on how its owner cleans the house for company:

Great Bast, today she pulled out all the stops,
all faff and fussle to impress her friends;
the bedrooms were a whirl of cloths and mops,
much bathroom bleach sploshed all around the bends,”

The owner continues to “Hoover” and make the furniture “gleam,” while the cat watches in disgust and eventually pees on the rug just as the guests arrive, suggesting that its owner has much better uses for her time and energy than impressing her friends with a clean house and an elaborate meal.

Maz is often at her best when offering her insights couched in wit and sly humor, but she can also take a much more serious tone, such as in the prose poem “Traditions,” which explores the horrific effects of cliterodectomies, a form of female genital mutilation performed on young girls in some African cultures:

 Outside was a big dusty black car, and waiting inside were Nurse Hani, the midwifeand some other women.  They drove me to a place I did not know.  They stripped me and held me down and Nurse did it with a razor blade.  I screamed and screamed with pain till the screaming nearly made me sick, but they did not stop.

It is the women in the poem – the mother, the grandmother and the nurse – who conspire and ensure young Amele, the speaker, has the procedure. They secretly go against Amele’s father, who said, “No, I will not agree to it.” In this instance, it is not men enforcing and perpetuating this cultural tradition but the women themselves, believing that abandoning the tradition will result in disgrace and that Amele will lose her opportunity for marriage. Through her critique of the women in these poems, Maz encourages women to make different choices, choices that empower, and suggests that we have power over our own destinies if we choose to exercise it.

There are, of course, poems that focus on the suffering of women at the hands of men, such as in the historically accurate sonnet “Constanza Carved,” in which the sculptor Bernini suffers no consequence for having his former lover’s face slashed:  “Did God forgive the razor that you sent/to slice her perfect, faithless face to shreds.”  Despite the harshness of this example, Maz casts a wider net as a feminist. Numerous poems challenge the status quo by presenting, through history and myth, women who are powerful or make choices that allow them to live more meaningful lives, such as in the free verse poem “Emily abandons her breasts.” The subject of the poem, Emily, is an 18^th or 19^th century young woman who chooses to bind her breasts and live as a man:

Emily feared she would be rolled up
like bills in a man’s pocket
amongst the must and fust
and fingered things.

Emily chooses to take control of her own life rather than have her options limited by others. Maz also portrays women who wield power successfully, such as in the sonnet “Hippolyta on a Field of Linen.” In mythology, Hippolyta was an Amazon queen descended from Ares, and the poem depicts her sexual conquest of a warrior-lover. Sex is equated with battle, and it is a battle Hippolyta wins:

He sighs, he yields – this skirmish ends to soon –
and he sleeps like one slain, force spent for now,
but I’ll engage a battle royal by noon.
They say an army marches on its belly – how
I plan to feast! The world and its alarms

One last notable theme, more subtle than some of the others, is that of transformation. A few poems, such as “Sally’s Song,” portray a character’s inability to transform or become all that she is capable of because of circumstance. Here, young Sally is forced to turn to prostitution:

Your Ma is dead, your Pa’s a sot.
Feel in your stocking for what you’ve got.
Your petticoats hide such tight young meat
so sell it while it’s hot and sweet.
Another tickle, and God willing,
another trout, another shilling.

More often, however, transformation is portrayed in the spiritual sense or the ability to open the heart and the mind.  In the poem “The Silkie,” for example, Mhaire, the subject of the poem, is tired of her life and housework and chooses the life of a Silkie at sea:

At night, on a sheet of sand,
her muscles liquefy.
Silver fishes shoal her bowels.
The ocean shakes its creamy mane,
rises on strong green knees
and carries her away.

Mhaire opens herself up to dreaming, to the power of transformation, and as “Sky in the Pie” suggests, we must cut ourselves open to the “rush of dark thrushes,” to all possibilities.

Sky in the Pie

Two sure cuts open the crust
And release a rush of dark thrushes
With golden beaks, heralding an arc of stars
borne on a rainbow.  The spectrum flexes
like muscle, then settles in a single depth
of colour, blue as the powered lapis
on a manuscript page in a rich book
of hours, blue as a dunnock’s egg, blue
as distance.  Take your spoon before
it elopes with the knife, and taste.
The clouds melt on your tongue
and sweeten your throat.  You can chant
this day across the meadows, and call the lost flocks
home. The sheep and the chestnut cows. The dappled deer
and wild black horses. The wolves and small quick foxes.
All the lost beasts of your kingdom.
Call them home.

Maz’s death was a huge loss to the writing community. Her sonnets, especially, are remembered and quoted often, and there are seventy-seven included in the book. She was much more than a sonneteer, however, and these are skillful poems, poems with heart, poems that believe we can be much more than we are, if only we choose to be.  “Take your spoon…and taste.”

Margaret Griffiths (1947-2009) was born and raised in London and lived for some time in Bracknell then later moved to Poole. Rather than seek publication through traditional channels, she was content to share her work with fellow poets on various Internet forums. On the rare occasions she submitted work for publication, it was typically to online venues. Also known by the Internet pseudonyms “Grasshopper” and “Maz”, she began posting her poetry online in 2001. During the mid-2000s she worked from home, running a small Internet-based business, and edited the Poetry Worm, a monthly periodical distributed by email.
In 2008, her “Opening a Jar of Dead Sea Mud” won Eratosphere’s annual Sonnet Bake-off, and was praised by Richard Wilbur. Later that year she was a Guest Poet on the Academy of American Poets website, where she was hailed as “one of the up-and-coming poets of our time”. She suffered for years from a stomach ailment which eventually proved fatal in July 2009. Almost immediately after her death was announced on Eratosphere, poets from all over the English-speaking world, from London, Derby, Scotland, Wales, Queensland, New South Wales, Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Missouri, Maryland, California and Texas collected her work for this publication.

Alan Shapiro

Night of the Republic

Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2012
ISBN:  978-0547329703
Pages: 80
Reviewed by: Amy Glynn Greacen

Night of the Republic – Alan Shapiro

There’s a trick in much of Alan Shapiro’s poetry, a mode of diction or syntax or a logos, that has the effect of a Mobius band. Sentences take you in circles that somehow, despite being circles, keep twisting, pushing and pulling you in different directions even as you follow the path of his phrases. There is a constant chase of memory and forgetting, and forgettability, the observed and the ignored, the great “except for” that haunts the (largely) small scenes in Shapiro’s new collection, Night of the Republic.

Readers of Shapiro’s previous books will recognize some of his signature preoccupations in this one – you know, the Poet Stuff. Love. Loss. Mortality. Time. (and Pee. This guy sees more in a men’s room than some of us see in the Vatican Museum.) What’s a little different about this collection is the way he has seriously upped the ante with regard to the presence of Absence. No love songs here, no second-person epistolary reflection – very few characters at all. Section One is a series of landscapes, generally man-made, generic, suburban, mundane – and empty. These poems look at the life of human places when the humans aren’t looking. The closed-for-the-night shoe store, the gas station john, the dry cleaner, the hospital exam room: places where you can hear the desolate buzz of the failing fluorescent lighting tube, the tick of some ungodly clock. Even his outdoor settings (park bench, playground) are examined in their abandoned moments – even memory seems to have abandoned them, except perhaps for his own, as in the poem “Park Bench:”

Behind the bench the drive,

before the bench the river.

Behind the bench, white lights

approaching east and west

become red lights

receding east and west

while before the bench,

there are paved and unpaved

pathways and a grassy field,

the boathouse, and the playground, and the gardens

of a park named for a man whom

no one now remembers

except in the forgetting that occurs

whenever the park’s name is said….

Do you see what I mean, the gyre thing? Mobius strip? Coriolis effect? I’m not sure what to call it but you get it, sitting on that bench – or looking at it; I don’t think even the speaker is sitting there – a tumbling outward and inward of Things with, at the same time, a life of their own, and a total anonymity (I get an image of the bank of the Charles River, reading this, but have no idea where we actually are. It’s somewhere. And it doesn’t matter where.) Loops and twists infiltrate everything in this world: the nasty revolving towel in “Gas Station Restroom.” The “shadowless shadow / play of hands and legs/ up and down along the poles, / and the hands retreating from the money, / and the hands in pockets dreaming, / or dreaming later on a another body” in “Downtown Strip Club.” (Technically, that poem is peopled. But note the interchangeability, the particularly desolate designed anonymity, of that space.) It’s maximized in poems such as “Funeral Home,” which spools itself out in a single sentence, clause tumbling over clause, the eye drawn to the detail that opens from the observation of another detail, ad infinitum: only a “roped-off staircase” prevents us from seeing the empty funeral home as “a mansion / where no one lives.” Ha ha: A home where no one lives. It goes on; the dry cleaner’s conveyor rack, the ellipse of a racetrack – even the elliptical machines (ha ha!) in the empty gym.

But they’re never just circles. You come back to where you started – but you don’t. Everything goes upside down and over and over itself in the transit. And they are, in the other sense of it, Elliptical Machines. They signify by way of what they leave out.

It works among and between, as well as within the poems: Section One’s “Gas Station Restroom” transmutes the ping and blear and dirt into “Paul / becoming Saul / becoming scents,” and then inverts it in “Edenic Smile,” where a solitary innocence turns to abashed self-awareness in a restaurant men’s room.

Shapiro takes on many, many subjects in this book, from the tiny to the gigantic, but the throughlines are consistent, and satisfying. These poems are a kind of encyclopedia of humanness, despite – or more likely because of – the conspicuous absence of individual humans – a conspicuousness that a more pastorally inclined poet would never pull off. Somnambulism and dreaming, emptiness, what we notice and don’t, what we attend to and don’t, what we do to enable ourselves to be “normal” in the face of what is waiting for us; age, infirmity, humiliation, indifference, helplessness, darkness. Every inanimate object in this book implies the hand of its maker. In keeping with the twisting, circling, tumbled nature of the ideas he presents, Shapiro generally abandons stanza (until the final section of the book, where the poems share the single form of unrhymed triplets in somewhat sprung pentameter) in favor of uninterrupted chains of mostly short lines, beautifully enjambed to create long, complicated sentences. Shapiro’s sense of prosody is so quick on its feet that it feels like pure instinct, and even in poems where you reach the end of the sentence and find yourself going back to the beginning of it to retrieve the subject, it’s exactly what you should do. He is one of those masters of repetition who can make the same word mean seven different things within the space of five lines. He knows when doing this will hold the reader in suspension and when it will hurtle them forward.

The final section’s triplets are an interesting formal move, taking up a number of seemingly small moments, which, as in the earlier sections, unravel into big, very big things. Childhood recollections; a fever, staring at clothes agitating in the dryer, or a cup of cold coffee, or cigarette smoke or a dripping faucet (Coriolis Effect? Meet Butterfly Effect. Hi there). Small, contained – formalized. Yet they echo, cavernously, against the earlier sections, and the way so many of them appear to be from a young person’s perspective makes them seem at first to be more, what, innocent: small moments that perhaps cut those themes of mortality and entropy and the abandoned and broken and the endlessly, incomprehensibly expanding universe down to size. Yeah, right: like one of those Greek plays with a happy ending you totally didn’t see coming. Ahem. Putting those things in the containment unit of a stanza and making them the fallible recollections of a younger self makes them even more ominous, more inevitable, more eternal. Here’s a portion of the poem “Dryer:”

I watched geologies of color, deep time

Of mountain ranges rising from a sea

They just as quickly sank into again;

Pangaea breaking into continents,

Continents into islands, and the islands

Into that reef of blue cuff green peninsula

Of pant leg, flashing up and driven down,

Churning itself upon itself, in cycles

Neither different nor the same, over

And over for five billion years until

The bell rang as the drum stopped, and it all

Fell past the porthole into what it was.

You hear echoes here, of the middle of the book, the “Formation of the Galaxy” section, and even the palsied hands of the old woman recollecting the War in “Forgiveness,” the fingers (and the story) struggling to move in two directions at once. Similarly, “Funeral Home” is re-evoked in the lines of “Family Pictures,” where portraits of dead relatives collect on the walls of a sitting room whose sofas are covered in plastic, silver under felt in a drawer, and the speaker imagines “Seeing myself / Up there among them keeping a close eye too/ On everybody coming after me / who needed constantly to be reminded / that nothing in the living room was theirs.” Eeep! You want to go back over and over to count the number of things this dead “living” room keeps covered up – it’s everything but the actual dead.

Or, take the beginning of “Light Switch:”

The bad news was the sun was mortal too.

One day it would just burn out. The good news was

We’d all be long gone by the time it happened.

The good news was there wasn’t any place

Inside the house I couldn’t find extinctions

To study and by studying prepare

Myself for what I wouldn’t live to see:…

Every section of this book brims with these moments of being jarred out of a dream you didn’t realize you were even having; mortality lit from every facet imaginable. Shapiro’s an alchemist, someone who can turn anything into anything – and he does it without being a showoff. No baroque formal explosions, no I Am Erudition, Hear Me Roar. What these poems contain instead is a startling generosity, given the book’s themes. He treats the fragile, broken, teetering world with a keenness and depth of observation that makes stinginess impossible and ironic distance irrelevant. These are plain-language pieces that magically deepen and stretch as you read; evocative, formally acute and exceedingly subtle. Shapiro can be grim without cynicism, woeful without hopelessness, cataclysmic without dourness (indeed, there’s frequently the specter of a chuckle in cataclysm’s face). The good news, and the bad news, generally, are the same news. We all know it. Shapiro just says it better than most of us could.

I could go on. You could be dealing with me picking out line after line to rhapsodize over a comma or the way a certain phrase inverts itself like a surprise plot twist in an unusually well-scripted action film. For pages. And pages. I shall resist the temptation. I’ll leave you with just this:  Night of the Republic is simply the work of a great poet at the top of his game. Read this book.

And I’ll sign off with what might arguably be a gravitational center (pun very much intended) of the collection, “Formation of the Galaxy,” in which the speaker is reading an article on dark matter in a noisy bar:

“The writer of the article describes dark matter as a black canvas on which the

visible universe is painted. If that figure captures best the relationship of gloom to glitter, couldn’t the canvas also be the painter, the unseen the conjuror of the seen, as if the ten percent that doesn’t hide were being imagined by the ninety percent that does?”

From where I sit: uh, yeah. It sure looks as though it could.

Alan Shapiro has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Old War, winner of
the 2009 Ambassador Book Award. Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, Los Angeles Time Book Award, and twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, he has also published two translations (The Orestia and The Trojan Women), three books of prose, The Last Happy Occasion, Vigil, and In Praise of the Impure. His first novel, Broadway Baby, will appear in 2011.

Shapiro has received fellowships and awards from The Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the
Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation and many others. A fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Shapiro is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, and also teaches in the Warren Wilson low residency MFA program.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.