Lots and lots of neat

recommended: Kathleen Ossip

"A. in May," by Kathleen Ossip
from Boston Review March/April 2012 

Some days I think dissipation deserves a trophy. Like we could set it on a marble dais, we could feed it Turkish Delights, we could flatter it with some sort of devotional verse, maybe about the regularity of its phonemes. I've always felt that Mary Jo Bang's Louise in Love gave at least a healthy nod to dissipation, if not an outright embrace. Like if there was a lifestyle piece in the Times about what it feels like to have no direction in life, and a full measure of wealth to invest in this shiftlessness, it would end up being a selection of poems from Louis in Love.

Ossip's "A. in May" starts with that feeling. As though the woman being described could barely trouble herself to create language. "Natural it is to be disgusted and hopeless, / Disgusted and hopeless at being related to her, / Relating to her is what keeps me alive." The language actually feels as though it can't get up out of its chairbed. Or it won't. And yet, the literal message from the speaker is that she can't help but observe this woman. In fact, the statement "Natural it is to be disgusted and hopeless" could be what this speaker thinks the woman is thinking. It could also be what the speaker is thinking as she looks at the woman. We could say the first half of the poem is a double entendre dedicated to dissipation.

And the second half of the poem would be the struggle with disappointment. But not the disappointment where the speaker can stand at some distance and judge this woman, as though that woman and all her unurgable minutes are some grand disappointment. The dissapointment in "A. in May" has to do with how "natural" it is that this scene exists. In fact, how natural it is for the woman on her chairbed to be suffering, and dissipated, and self-absorbed. And how natural it is that we, along with the speaker, would be disappointed, and, naturally, our judgment would have no basis. If you can pull the frame of reference back far enough, say to the whole "universe of process," there really is nothing we can claim is unnatural. 

It's like the poem is one long pean to discouragement. The woman's. The speaker's. It's like Ossip tapped into malaise. And, quite honestly, that woman on a chairbed might benefit from reading a poem about that.

Recommended Links:
The Cold War
Louise in Love , by Mary Jo Bang
Kathleen Ossip home page 

recommended: Timothy Donnelly

"Apologies from the Ground Up," by Timothy Donnelly
from A Public Space 15 

What isn't funny about narcissism? And I don't just mean narcissism like the Howard Stern kind. That's more a talking narcissism, which I would compare to the "talking cure," except with Stern it's like all the language he generates actually reconstitutes itself on his command to become a gigantic trophy. And he can hang from his neck. Think albatross. Think Flava Flav but much more unwieldy. The narcissism Timothy Donnelly is talking about is different. It's more like the one where, when you're 17 years old, you figure you'll probably be President of the United States by the time you're 37, or 41. Which might sound like a delusion. But for the narcissistic, it's called self-importance, which is this uninhibited force inside you whose trajectory extends beyond your 20s, your adulthood, and includes even the historic ramifications of your life. FYI, there are encyclopedia articles that are part of those ramifications. So you'd be best to remain sharp.

"Apologies from the Ground Up" is talking a narcissism that looks at a painting of the Tower of Babel, and feels that magnitude of ego required to order such a spectacle, and thinks: I am that king. For I am willful. I am powerful and demented. I direct the people's will. And, yes, I may have to admit it was ill-advised to start on a project such as this. But "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

It may be that this narcissism of presumption is what we feed off of in 2012. Listen to Kanye West. Listen to Arcade Fire. Listen to about 3/4 of the pop music that comes out these days. We are pressed daily with so many ennobling spirits. We are urged to the imagined violence of the fighter. If there was ever a poetic needle Wallace Stevens could have ordered up so that he could inject nobility into our very sensitive egos, he just needed an iPod on 2012 Genius Mix. The world is ours to conquer, says the imagination. Donnelly's poem even makes light of this easy obsession/mistake of thinking that life caters to our wills. The occasion for "Apologies from the Ground Up" is a ride on a Manhattan-bound express, where the speaker is able to avoid "a general rupture from the keeping / of thoughts to oneself." This to the extent that it almost feels that these people keep themsevles to themselves for the speaker's benefit.

Is this detachment of 2012 self from other 2012 selves equivalent to the King who orders the Tower of Babel be built? Donnelly says yes. Or actually what Donnelly says is that every presumptive thought, when extended beyond its reasonable extreme, will continue to rationalize itself. And yet, in the end, if we are to continue the analogy, it seems we are all victims to individual languages that are specific to our overindulgent subjectivisms. Which is to say, all us narcissists make for the most alienated population. And we seem to take some strange pride in it.

Recommended links:
The Cloud Corporation
Recent LotsofNeat review of The Cloud Corporation
6 poets Timothy Donnelly recommends 

recommended: Jorie Graham

"The Bird that Begins It," by Jorie Graham
from A Public Space 15 

Please, Lord, please do not let Jorie Graham reconcile the mystery that binds the self to its body, or that keeps the abstract so inextricably assigned to the concrete worlds it informs. Early-ish in Graham's carrer, in her book The End of Beauty, she refers to a veil that separates the world of volition, emotion and consequence from the physical world. As it turns out, this is a subject of inexhaustible depth for Graham. There is no end to the poems she can and does write on this subject.

And thank the Lord for that. Because when Graham writes that poem about the irreconcilable relationship between spirit and flesh, I go weak in the knees. For Graham cannot be dettered, and her method of inquiry is indefatigable. "The Bird That Begins It" starts quietly. It is just before the morning. It is when the self is rousing itself to wake. But why? Why would the body react to light? What part of the body is "listening" for the command to waken? And, most particularly, why would this poem endeavor to inhabit the time that marks this very sensitive transition from sleep to waking?

Am I doing this poem justice? For me, what Graham brings to this occasion is a scrupulous and sensitive scalpel, which she uses to tease open this mystery of self versus body--a mystery attending even the most common experiences. In the poem "The Veil" from The End of Beauty she describes the anxiety of a mother waiting for her son to come home. In "The Bird That Begins It" she talks of waking. In both, it is her ever-widening intellectual treatment of the subject that raises its significance. Sentences in her poems are like tree trunks animated using CGI so that you witness their immediate growth and maturation. And yet, even in this overflow, her attention to each instant of an event feels precise. The first light of the morning arrives "as leaf-shaped coins." Later, "the clay / in the soil gleams where dew withraws." And later still, "preparation / of day / everywhere / underfoot." Graham notes the texture, thickens that texture, and, in the process, makes day a dense lushness of time. What irony that the self gets drawn out of sleep by such a crowd of facts. Where does the self fit in this frame? Well, I'm always in a frame, says the self. Think again, Graham says. Think again.

Recommended Links:
Place
Jorie Graham has her own web site! 

Ross Gay's Against Which

Against Which, by Ross Gay
(CavanKerry Press, 2006) 

Is poetry the genre that has the most fraught relationship with autobiography? It would seem not. There is an entire classification of poem just for confessing. There are entire poetries existing as testaments to experience and identity. My issue is that people compartmentalize what certain poetries are supposed to be doing. The poetry of autobiography can speak most emphatically to the condition a poet is born into. He or she has no choice to live in the world gay or as a woman or African-American or Native American. And it is through their experiences, through a singular examination of their identity, that they come upon insight and truth--a truth that can speak to the larger human condition. But to what degree must the poetry of autobiography remain faithful to and unfailing in its factuality? If it does not come directly from the poet's experience does that mean the poet is lying to us? I'm not sure if this is a resolvable question. I couldn't possibly read Marie Howe's What the Living Do if I thought she was fabricating her brother's death. However I may appreciate the fictional or the fantastical in poetry, I fear what I would feel about Howe's book if it weren't based on fact. 

In terms of Ross Gay's Against Which, how should I incorporate what I take to be poems from an imagined speaker, or poems of an exaggerated truth, when it feels that one of the book's central events is Gay's father's death? The effect is not to cause a dissonance as fact runs against fiction. Instead, what I find is a book whose overwhelming argument is life. And the humanity that roots that life to us will use whatever means necessary to testify to its existence. Violence. Ego. Racism. Adoration. All sentiments, every sentiment is at play here. And so that each registers, Against Which openly straddles the line between autobiography and fictionalized speaker. Who are all these speakers? Can all of them be Ross Gay? Is he the one who would have killed the Drunk Man in a 7-11 parking lot? Is he the 14-year-old who had to train a 38-year-old new hire at Burger King? Remarkably, when I read these poems I believe they might be Gay. But correlation is unnecessary. All that matter is the deeper sense of all that life embodies. If that, at times, need be addressed by a dramatic speaker, then that dramatic situation functions as complement to the book's overall theme. 

"What is the florid burden of living?" Gay asks. Gerald Stern, in his introduction to the book would approximate Gay's answer as rage and tenderness. I would agree. Against Which is a farewell embrace, with all that life of these speakers struggling to let death be death. My first introduction to Gay's work came a few years after Against Which was published. His poem in Ploughshares, "The Lion and the Gazelle," describes a child who has to witness his dog being shot in the head. The description, whether Gay has ever witnessed something like this, felt factual. And the feeling that lasted with me involved the child, and the reality death became for him. To me, a similar sentiment underlies Against Which, at least in its capacity to describe that life which survives the death of a loved one. Between tenderness and rage, it survives.

Recommended Links:
Against Which
Recording page at From the Fishouse
Ross Gay talks about How one of his poems happens 

Heather Christle's The Trees The Trees

The Trees The Trees, by Heather Christle
(Octopus Books, 2011) 

You know that omniscient narrator you read about in your Introduction to Literature class? The one who knows everything that's happening in the story? Imagine what would happen if you gave that narrator a microphone. And you said, Now, you're a speaker. Speak! Now, you're a tree. Speak! Now you're lonely or funny or 8 years old or a nail-gun or an enemy or the kind of person who dwells on having enemies or water or a hand-bag. And now none of us care what you are, we just want you to speak. Speak! Speak!!

Because that's the impulse behind The Trees The Trees. Speech. Whatever comes to mind. Whatever realistic boundaries can be blurred or eliminated or redefined. And, to be clear, with a declarative sentence, it's very convenient to set anything to be anything else. Language is that easy. It's the most efficient thing in our language! I mean if you're half-hedgehog, half-man, and you want to become a tree, use your words. Say it, don't draw it. Drawing it makes it too complicated. And let me assure you, these are Christle's instructions. My instructions: be grateful this book of poems exists! Get thee to Christle!

In fact, with The Trees The Trees, saying anything feels like the easiest, most fantastic activity anyone ever thought of. It's like saying could get you out of anything. Are you stuck inside a room? Just say you're not in the room. Do you miss your friends? Say you're eavesdropping on them from a safe distance. Are you afraid of flying? Say the sun. It's like that omniscient narrator I mentioned at the beginning has been given the chance to experience a more realistic self who has boundaries, who's maybe human. Maybe not human, but a tree instead. Maybe a tree with a long list of things to do. Either way, or any way, the omniscientness really appreciates getting to try something new, even while it slips out of that realistic self into another reality. There are other realities! 

If you're fortunate enough to be a reader of Christle's book, you'll feel like you're trying on something new all the time. It might be that's what reality is supposed to have been all along. It's like you're taking a yellow highlighter to all of Russel Edson's poems and coloring in everything. Or it's like you put Dean Young's poems into one of those hot rods from the Fast and the Furious movies (I think I prefer Tokyo Drift on the merit of movie previews alone), and you're like, Dean Young! Step on it! Not to put too obscure a point on it, but Christle has uncovered that poetic note where everything feels as though it's constantly blooming, and the blooms that just bloomed have blooms inside them blooming. There is an unimpedable, unquenchable, unbelievable energy in these poems. Take a picture of your favorite person smiling, tape it to your computer monitor and then smile back it. Everything in Christle's poems is that easy. And enjoyable. Even grief. Even alienation. Love is probably one of the things that makes the world go around. Read Christle's book and you'll find out what other parts of life are involved.

Recommended Links:
The Trees The Trees
The Believer Is Up on Christle
Heather Christle Is Up on Christle 

recommended: Malachi Black

"Compline, by Malachi Black
from Pleiades Winter 2012 

Perhaps the poem is rightful home for the everliving sentence. And yes, I do mean like that one-sentence-long story "The Bear," or the inexhaustible Gertrude Stein in The Making of Americans. And, yes, I mean in the contemporary vain of poets like Shane McCrae and Samuel Amadon. A poem just looks so comfortable picking up on the subtle rhythms of syntax, asserting a timely accent, attending to those microbursts of energy that it must keep up in order to sustain the spirit of the piece. In one of these poems it feels as though the line break is that kid on the playground who's keeping the merry-go-round going with that little push, push, push until the momentum starts to feel dangerous, like it could be what's in control rather than that kid. And when that merry-go-round is the poem, a reader has to just marvel at the way language can start to take care of itself, can feel as though it keeps itself going, without even needing a poet to tend to it.

So Malachi Black's poem "Compline," a poem that formally offers a prayer to the vague boundary between day and night, is everliving sentence marking that moment where something "is left," and in its place there should be something to "come." It is a moment that is delicate with expectation, and, for Black, deflation. For while it would seem that a poem positioned to mark the closing of a day, and to welcome the coming of night, would have some hope to it, even a foreboding hope, Black explains "what is left for [him] has come / to nothing ever after." That "nothing" is the dwelling place of this poem. A kingdom come to nothing. Nothing come to nothing.

And yet this poem is a prayer, is even self-conscious of its role as prayer. As such, to claim that nothing has been left to the speaker, to manipulate the words of the Lord's Prayer so that it is not a request for God's kingdom but an avowal that that kingdom has come to nothing, is an act of pessimistic aggression. Or, if not aggression, then it is at least a point of tension. To the point that there will be no reconciliation drawn between the poem's reverent tone and its pessimistic subject.  How does the Christian not address this irreconcilability with an everliving sentence? In fact, the seemingly unending sentence leaves one wondering whether the poem should be taken as a sustained act of defiance or a last ditch hope for God's intervention.

Recommended Links:
A poem from Black at Poetry

Fanny Howe's Gone

Gone, by Fanny Howe
(University of California Press, 2003) 

I know I’ll never actually get to see the pistons in my car engine turning. No matter how many 70mph trips I might make between Huntington and Charleston, no matter how I assume that they will turn, and they will make the wheels turn, and I will be sent hurtling between these West Virginia mountains, those pistons will remain elusive, implied, and understood. Fanny Howe’s Gone functions like this car. The grammatical mechanics always have movement in mind, and momentum. Gone goes. As in, if there are 14 Stations of the Cross, then Gone is going to see the spiritual sensibility each station should represent. These are not your 1980's poet's Ekphrastik responses, though. Instead, they are spiritual interrogations between the speaker and some Other. Who that Other is typically dictates the kind of interrogation. All this to say, the 14 Stations of the Cross, though central to what is "gone" in the book, they feel only incidental. They're more mile posts for the speaker's spiritual exploration. 

In this light, should Gone be labeled as religious poetry? Usually, "religious poetry" calls us to mind liturgical textbooks. It assumes a reader who is fluent in or at least appropriately curious about the various codes and language tags that are ingrained into the grammar and exposition of Scripture. Namely, religious poetry will likely be read only by a religious reader. Gone is more a book of lyric poetry, asking for a reader equipped with an understanding of the contemporary lyric.

However, for a religious reader, the lyric of Gone reveals something that's hard to describe. The spirit in pursuit of identity? The resolved will of God? Howe is writing about a love that necessarily weaves in through doubt, and passion, and identity best framed? In the opening section “The Splinter,” Howe sets her speaker on a journey to find some alternative "she." She identifies that search as her theology, making this journey more personal than overtly religious. When I read it as a believer, I feel she opens the concept of spiritual search to a new and fresh language. There is a surrealistic juxtaposition between the speaker and her mirrored self. There is grammatical slippage and confusion. The speaker wants to find this "she," even when the trip required for finding that "she" is rooted in alienation. The speaker understands “she” is out there, and she can find “her,” but they are always going to be separated.

From a religious perspective, it seems only natural that this would lead to The Passion, the central poem of Gone. Christ's sacrifice, the need to trust in God's will, the bountiful grace available to the believer are all invested in this pivotal event. As a Christian, the narrative is familiar. It is ritualized. It is also the peak of illogic, as the Father insists His Son be killed with such viciousness and inhuman violence Why would something so terrible be at the center of the Christian faith? Howe doesn't resolve the illogic, but she touches on the dilemma with modern examples. In "Doubt" the artistic struggles of Virginia Woolf and Simone Weil situate Howe's own struggle with Christ's Passion. For her, "The Passion" is personal, though it's not clear whether the speaker of the poem is consistently a modern-day speaker. At many moments, I feel the speaker may be Mary Magdalene.

What is clear, though, and what animates the spiritual struggle in the poems, is the relationship between the speaker and this sometimes shadowy male figure. What is also clear is that this male figure at least alludes to Christ, while still exceeding the human figure of Christ. In fact, it's Howe's treatment of this male figure who is at times filthy, at times fragile, and at other times wholly divine, that distinguishes Gone as a religious book, but not a book of "religious poetry." Meaning Gone has every intention of investigating what a personal relationship with Christ would look like, but it it needless to fetter that investigation to the language of the religious Christian. 

Recommended Links:
Gone
Jordan Davis reviews Gone 

recommended: Eric Smith

"Ash Wednesday," by Eric Smith
from Pleiades Winter 2012 

What can't a fable make into truth? I guess the grammatically appropriate way of saying this is: What can't a declarative statement make into truth? But there is something that takes over the declarative statement when it's fixed by fable's assurance. And that something is like sweet syrup. Why else would Mathias Svalina's Decunstruction Myth have gotten so much play a couple years ago? You take on the authority of a fable, and you tilt the world to one side, and you tell everyone why tilting the world to that one side is perfectly natural, or kind of natural, or at least natural enough that all these weird oblong angles that seem to populate that world feel reasonable enough, and it frenzies the people. I would venture to say the fable is like crack for poets. Maybe it's not Stephen Burt's "New Thing," but it's that thing that just won't be snuffed out in 2000s and 2010s poems. What helped to spice James Tate's Viper Jazz and Mark Levine's Debt is what thrives in the voluminous speakers of Patricia Lockwood and CA Conrad. 

And it's good for some subtle undertones in Eric Smith's poem "Ash Wednesday." The poem opens: "The world gave birth to judges and famine." Why? You ask. Or you don't ask, because we're all smart enough to know that when the poet opens with the vested authority of that fable voice, we're in for adventure. Why would the world want to bear forth judges and famine? Please, tell me Mr. Smith.  

Spoiler alert. He's not going to tell you. In fact, Smith isn't even going to settle on a relationship between the judges and famine. If a famine is judged indefensible, which the judges do in "Ash Wednesday," is that a gesture of acquiescense or defiance? If judges keep famine in an ornate box, are they isolating it or revering it? All this to say, it feels as though the world of this poem is populated only by dark possibilities. And the fact that it won't settle on any one of the very particular truths it hints at only darkens the poem further.

In fact, this is what returns me to Stephen Burt. There's something in Smith's grand gesture to human impotence that I find relevant to Burt's "New Thing." "Ash Wednesday" starts off proposing this fabled world that gives birth to judges and famine. But then it settles on the human responses natural to that kind of world. The poem draws a tension between the larger idea of human resistance to famine and the specific activities and details that would probably occur whether the larger idea were there or not. Widows clutch to their hens. Boys paint angry eyebrows on their faces. And I realize, Hey, this isn't a fable. It's a poem that is noticing the world. It's not the world I live in, but if I did live in this world, well, I might not appreciate a poem so committed to ambiguity--a fact which only increases my appreciation of the poem from the perspective of my world.  

Recommended Links:
Eric Smith reads at AWP 2012
Stephen Burt's "The New Thing" 

Kathleen Graber's The Eternal City

The Eternal City, by Kathleen Graber
(Princeton University Press, 2010) 

In the opening poem to The Eternal City, Kathleen Graber describes a mirror she finds in an abandoned building. After she sees her reflection, she smashes the mirror, collects the shards, and, when she gets them home, pours the shards into a milk bottle she casts as an idol for her home. I can think of no better analogy for the poems in The Eternal City. But it’s not an analogy based on the violence of smashing a mirror. Instead, it’s Graber collecting these shards that had held her image, significantly, her kept memory of whatever that image represented to her alongside the physically fragmented evidence that that image at one point existed.

It’s difficult to touch the complexity of this milk bottle filled with mirror shards. For it possesses a stillness and a tragic memory and a self-reflection that infuses nearly every fragment in Graber’s poems. The image of the milk bottle refers to an order and artful arrangement accomplished as the fragments of each poem coalesce to become a complete thing. For instance, in the poem “The Third Day,” fragments about Augustine and his friends stealing pears are juxtaposed to the fragments about a bunch of kids the speaker sees rough housing after school, and both of these fragments reflect on the Senator who makes a speech about “Islamo-fascist terrorists.” The speaker of the poem explains that sin is the absence of good, and when I weigh this statement against the accumulation of the different images of the poem, then I must reflect personally on what circumstances exemplify an absence of good, and at the same time whether I have lost sight of what animates the most adolescent versions of evil.

This is the kind of thick and textured meaning that Graber creates in her poems. And to what effect? To touch on, to reconsider, and to remythologize the conventional conversion narrative. The Eternal City starts with St. Augustine’s shattering conversion in the garden, moves to Aurelius’ late-life contemplation and concludes with a speaker actively interrogating her peace with the world. Any peace is going to be coarse with circumstances, and I want to be able to point at that image of the mirror shards in a milk bottle for some satisfying explanation of how this explains the complications surrounding the conversion experience. I want that to be explanation enough for how Graber creates meaning, because the meanings she accumulates in her poems always seem to refer to something implicit, below the deepest layer of meaning I am sensing in any one of her poems. For instance, the Marcus Aurelius poems that are the centerpiece of The Eternal City, where Graber takes such a full accounting of the act of accounting. Where would it end if it needed to? Why would it necessarily need to end there? Is this the process of finding peace? Is this how one lives at peace?

In the title poem of the book, Graber offers another analogy that might help to explain this act of accounting. She describes an attic fan rattling in its housing. But she asks us not only to hear the fan, and to imagine its shaking. She also wants us to picture the blades and even the air the blades are cutting. It’s this gesture to totalize, even while she speculates in the subsequent poems how futile any totalizing gesture might be, that gives The Eternal City a sense of capaciousness, even while the speaker admits to her own isolation amidst the world’s great effulgence.

Recommended Links:
The Eternal City
Graber reading two poems from the book 

 

recommended: Gottfried Benn

"Left the House," by Gottfried Benn
(translated by Michael Hoffman)
from Poetry March 2012 

On a recent tour at the Eames House (Case Study House No. 8), I learned that Charles Eames would at times hang a painting face-down from the ceiling, so that he could view it while reclining from his chair. This makes me unsettled to think of it. I mean, I get why. It's kind of like the argument for recumbent bicycles: if they put less stress on your joints then why wouldn't you prefer them over the normal bicycle. If Eames were to give himself to this painting for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, it makes sense that he should do so in a relaxed position. For me, I just don't feel like my organs would be in the right place for concentrating. I would feel like my attention was laid out flat, like on an ironing board. I would feel as though my life were askew.

This is the closest semblance I can draw to what I think Gottfried Benn means when in "Left the House" he talks about feeling "shattered." He's not talking impossible devastation. More like controlled delirium. Like if the world were suddenly put at a 15-degree angle, so that no matter where you walked you always had to lean to the right. Or, from the second part of Benn's poem, a world where "at least / this mixture of death and laughter would persist." This mixture leaves a coppery taste in my mouth when I imagine it. Who pairs death and laughter in a poem that's just trying to talk about some guy going out for a walk?

Benn's poem is controlled and cynical. There's always something in this speaker's life putting remarkable yet not untenable stress on his ability to do anything. Problems with a rent check. His uneventful ambitions. A girlfriend back at the apartment who's crying. And it feels as though these things are always going to be happening to him. They are additional links in a causal chain that he's pretty sure will never find resolution. The speaker feels "shattered," but in that strangely resilient way that marks the modern life and, though Benn never saw it, the postmodern life as well. "How far are you allowed to push your I, / and see peculiar things as somehow symptomatic?" Benn's speaker is suspicious of how healthy this kind of life is, and at the same time he is suspicious whether these kinds of misgivings in any way deviate from the natural course of anyone's life. 

And with this juxtaposition comes the indelible mark of Benn's poem. The suspicion that a fraught existence has always been our destiny. "Damned evergreens! Vinyl whines!" What else can you curse to make clear your objection to this life? To make clear your resignation that this life will just keep proceeding?

Recommended links:
"Left the House" (available online)
Primal Vision