Lots and lots of neat

recommended: Michelle Taransky

"Sorry Was in the Woods," by Michelle Taransky
from jubilat 20 

Most people like to start over. We like that optimistic feeling, when everything's probably going to be just fine now, because now we get to start with a fresh slate, or we've turned over a new leaf. There are lots of ways to phrase this kind of transition. Michelle Taransky, in "Sorry Was in the Woods," has started over, and it means she got to change to a whole new woods. And lucky her, it's not only a new woods, it came with a new woodsman in it. 

Unfortunately, the new woodsman doesn't seem to understand poetic conventions. Or at least he doesn't know enough to tell the writer here she should "stop / saying that is a symbol for that thing." Of course, what's a woodsman supposed to do when he himself is a symbol, and these woods he's living in are a symbol as well? Herein lies the magic of Taransky's poem. This symbol that's supposed to be giving the writer a sense of renewal is, in fact, a world of its own--a world with its own set of rules that might or might not comply with the writer's expectations. Of course, the woods shouldn't conform to anyone's rules. The woods are a force of nature.

But the symbol's real potential lies with the woodsman. First off, who's to tell what a woodsman does in a forest? Does he destroy the woods? Harvest the woods? And what about what the writer keeps doing to the woods that she thinks is causing "a disorder that prevents / a productive fall"? If Taransky's poem were a balance, it would be a balance that keeps pushing down on one side, then the other. Maybe you'd get worried that the poem is going to tip over. But it doesn't. Because what lies beneath all this "disorder," whether it's the writer acting on the forest or the wind blowing through the forest, is a calm wisdom. You can't run away from your mistakes. Yes, people can start over, but the past will always have to be reconciled. So the writer admits, when she steps in toward the end of the poem to say, "I admit fault and I cannot say it again / in another woods of preference". 

Thankfully, for this poem, no admission is going to wipe away the woods or the woodsman. Bring a symbol to life, and you can't very well take it away. It lives on. It even generates a witness who will try to calm everyone down. Fixing your life gets pretty complicated when you think you're going to leave the old life behind.

Recommended links:
Barn Burned, Then
No, I Will be in the Woods
beginning "the" - Michelle Taransky's home page 

Susan Stewart's The Forest

The Forest, by Susan Stewart
(University of Chicago Press, 1995) 

The nature of Susan Stewart’s The Forest is to ask questions about life. And not just any questions, but the ones that we are habitually returning to in order to define what life is. Can the story of Adam and Eve be revelatory? Can a single moment from childhood overwhelm all subsequent time? Does lost love define our adult lives? Many books of contemporary poetry settle on any one of these questions and use each poem to answer with a resounding, “Yes! I can define my life by this!” It might be why when I read those books I get impatient. I’m constantly thinking, “I don’t believe you.” I believe in the pleasures of the more complicated life.

“The Forest,” as the first poem in the book posits, is a place where you get lost, just like any question about life starts with one answer and then turns by necessity to a circuitous string of more answers. For every answer gets burdened by new facts, which is in turn burdened by a reconsideration of earlier facts. Memory is always imperfect. And this is without even considering the motives and expectations of those you hold dear.

But even how we frame a loss in our lives changes over time. The Forest partly enacts this in “Slaughter,” where the speaker is taught how to slaughter an animal. Loss is not only suffered in an instant. Most tragic narratives have a sharpened point. The plot leads us to the moment of catharsis. But tragic experiences usually hover over our lives. We live through them, sometimes for months, sometimes years. And just when we think we know what they mean to us, they become something new. Stewart’s poems in The Forest are this exercise between certainty (“truth” often appears in poems) and reconsideration of certainty. Turn. And then turn again. Poems constantly urge the reader to turn from one idea to another. In “The Arbor 1937,” the speaker turns “from tragedy to cynicism” as the interpretation of this childhood story. “Turn” is one of the end words in the oblique sestina “Holswege.” And, then, in “Nervous System” the turning away that allows Aeneas the luxury of forgetting he left Dido behind.

Where does all this turning lead? The book begins with biographical poems set in the 1930s that could be interpreted as someone close to the poet. But any expectation of this biography as a sustained frame is contradicted. Considering the longer poem titled “The Desert 1990-1993,”dates which correlate with the first Persian Gulf War, should I be reading The Forest as a crisis in the American identity? Or is it about the complication of identity after crisis? Could it be Stewart presents an open-ended approach to narrative, and then asks the reader to use allegorical image (in “The Desert 1990-1993”) or lyric association (in “Medusa Anthology”) to think through whether there is “truth” or certainty behind a narrative? I wish I could say for certain. Though I admit, I appreciate the gesture toward a logic left open-ended and uncertain. 

Recommended links:
The Forest
Susan Stewart on the Radio, where she talks about being conscious of the shape of a book. 
Stewart's Princeton page, that has lots of links on it. 

 

recommended: Dara Wier

Some people are really good at being talkers, meaning they seem to just talk at people. And it doesn't really seem to matter whether there's someone sitting across from them or not. They're not looking for your consent or approval or even acknowledgement. I remember in the Navy, where we would have to stand watch for five hours at a time, I learned that having people like this around isn't so bad. They tell stories. Sometimes it's just nice, because they fill in the silence. They're "thinking out loud." And when you're out at sea, all you want is for time to go away. So you listen. You're bemused. Which can be a strange word, but it fits here.

I'm not sure what the occassion is for Dara Wier's poem "Assassins Who Bring Building Materials to Architects." It appears in jubilat 20. The title proposes an unlikely scenario, and I might be tempted to assign symbolic referrents to the "assassins" and "architects." But it doesn't take long for me to turn from that enterprise. Because what I find most interesting about the poem is the fabric of language. I want to call it a discursive formation, event though the term "discursive formation" is used by Foucault to talk about a reframing of events and ideas on a monumental or historic scale. Maybe it's wholly inappropriate to use it in reference to a single poem, but Wier is covering quite a few ideas here, and all those ideas can be put under the umbrella of this one speaker's attitude. What does she think about living and experiencing the present? What does she think about people not "getting it" when she says something to them? How does she react to some "they" who expect her to use her eyes for something she's not all that sure she should be using her eyes for?

I say Wier's speaker is kind of speaking at you. But if  going to really love Wier's poem, you have to like listening to her talk. It might not feel like she's addressing you. And she might be roaming of her own accord from one subject to the next. But there are these hooks. Like "Passive can be // Transformative." Or "the insides of every idea will have // Migrated." And hooks like that challenge me to piece together this whole fabric of language, to form her discursiveness. There is pleasure to being talked at when you can get little prizes like that. Perhaps that's where the "architects" from the title come in. 

Recommended links:
jubilat
Dara Wier poem at Sixth Finch. It's kind of like the occasion for this poem, but like the occasion here were made into a story. 

recommended: Rebecca Elliott

I honestly don't know what I would use to create a village. I imagine at the very least I would get plywood and backhoes and clay shingles, and it would have to happen in the Midwest. I'm only interested in creating a village somewhere in the Midwest. It would take some consulting from Hillary Clinton, since she's very interested in villages. But isn't there a village-ness that goes beyond these kinds of practical details? It's kind of like the difference between "house" and "home." Whenever I move to a new place, I'm always conscious of the moment I switch from referring to it as "the house," and I call it "home" instead. What entitles a house to be called a home?

Rebecca Elliott might say language. Because for her, you make a village from language. You name all the things arond you. Then you combine those names, and if you're good, they make the shape of a building. You name the building. Eventually you invite people to live there. And those people are going to have their own things, and you name them. And in my mind this whole thing is growing into a great Legoland puzzle of words that miraculously fit with one another. Except they're not as shiny as legos, they're more like the color of "lived in." Reading Elliott's poem "Experiment #9: Creating a Village" in the #4 issue of Artifice, I want to create that village. Or, mainly, I want to live there. Then I want to be the one to create the next village. Because it sounds easy enough. 

Not just easy, either. How about it looks like fun. I've seen a set of instructions used as a poem before. For me, the move usually fails because the poet won't leave the list alone. The poet wants to be too clever too soon. But the instructions need to read like a real set of instructions, not just a display of imagination gusto. Of course, this is a common problem with many contemporary poems. They operate more on imaginative flash rather than imaginative vision. With Elliott's "Experiment #9" the vision is so strong and so invigorating it's giving off imaginative flashes without even trying. 

Recommeneded links:
Artifice
furtherexperiments.com - Elliott's official web page. Might I recommend the Chicago Poem/Map. 

Cole Swensen's Noon

When I taught creative writing to grade school kids, one of my favorite prompts used “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens. The idea of capturing any one animal or place or piece of fruit (sometimes we’d cut open an apple and use the inside view and the smell as an additional “way of looking”) touched a profound note in the kids. It does in many of us. We like it when the act of seeing is repurposed to the act of looking. Usually, we see the world. And when we’re reminded that we should take time to look at it, we’re grateful. Looking is intent, and it’s thoughtful.

To compare Cole Swensen’s Noon to the Wallace Stevens poem is apt, if only to prepare for what it means to look at the poems. As with much of so-called language-driven work, reading is an activity. I’d like to say Swensen wants you to “look” at the poems, except I don’t want to say “look” as in “be conscious of the language on the page.” I experience these poems. Swensen places me inside a lyric sensibility. I am instructed to reorient my perspective on the inside of language rather than the literal. Consider the second poem in the book, “Nine Trees.” Like Stevens’ “Blackbird,” complications arise when a single speaker is noticing the subtle differences among nine trees, sometimes taking them individually, sometimes as a group. Swensen is asking me to look into these complications, and to feel them, to have “listening skin” or to see “the little smile that seals itself to sleep.” Maybe phrases like this, quoted out of context, sound too sentimental. Too cloying. But it is Swensen’s ability to create a context that is so irrevocably lyrical that these phrases merely fit into the overall experience of the book’s poems.

The poem “Signature” might help me describe this lyric context better. Here, Swensen sorts through what constitutes the physical and non-physical body of someone the speaker knows. For example, how do I know my wife, who is sitting right now in the other room? Why, when I take her hand, would I say I am touching her? What does the “her” signify in that last sentence? Perhaps questions like this are unnecessary. In the everyday life, they are. I pick up Carrie’s hand, I am holding it. I am touching her. But Swensen’s occasion is the desire for a more thorough and personal understanding of her beloved. Is there a part of that body that would better signify who that person is? If she could cut the skin and the “internal skin,” would that bring her to a more beloved—a more significant sense of the beloved?

This anatomy expressed in “Signature”  is the lyric context for these poems. As a reader, I am constantly probing at and into the language of a poem, and that probing reveals its body. But how do I describe what constitutes that body? The words of the poem? The definitions of each of those words? The elusive grammatical structures? Perhaps my description here would be a basic primer for a number of deeply lyric poems—books like Lyn Hejinian’s My Life or Michael Palmer’s The Promises of Glass. What I distinguishes Noon, for me, is the access it gives to this lyric sensibility. “I was the one with ten thousand hands,” Swensen says in “Body Parts for the New Millennium.” Noon makes me feel I can handle this lyric context with all those hands. 

Recommended links:
Noon
Five poems at almostisland.com (one of the poems has my name!)
An interview on video (especially for the way to get a sense of certainty in reading her poems)

 

Carrie Oeding's Our List of Solutions

It is an important fact every reader should be warned of: Carrie Oeding’s book Our List of Solutions, at some point during its composition, found the secret lair of the Carpe Diem. The Latin creature was trying very hard to be careless. “Oh, just live in the moment,” Carpe Diem told Oeding. “We can be friends in the moment.” But Oeding outwitted the dumb animal. She eyed the Carpe Diem suspiciously, and in this book of poems, she transforms it into a jeweled surface. Of course, life is fascinating. Each day can be full of life. “And so?” Oeding asks. “What’s your point?”

Which is a dangerous question to ask. No one wants to involve themselves with a book of poems whose only emotion is cynicism. It would be as bad as reading one that functions only on irony. “Yes, Ironic Book of Poems, you’re clever. But then what?” Oeding is not against the Carpe Diem. The poems believe in joy. Her objection is more along the lines of Aristotle: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And if there’s anything that doesn’t know self-awareness, it’s definitely Carpe Diem. It’s pretty much retarded for any sentiment but one: “I’m ready!” And it’s all Carpe Diem can do but scream that phrase over and over again. Oeding’s speaker has had just about enough. Everyone around her is so ready to be ready. But you can’t sit around expecting the unexpected.

So how is it Oeding craves the unexpected? This, for me, is the paradox that drives Our List of Solutions forward. And I marvel at how this speaker seems to be holding Life down, like she wants to smother it. She has so much snark for people she’s deemed pathetic. Poor Stacey. Poor Rob. Poor Maureen and Steve. Maybe all Life is pathetic in your lives, because you’re trying so hard. You’re trying to make surprise happen with a litany to Carpe Diem. That’s not how it works. Read about bright autumn trees in “Apology for Meditation.” Read about real trumpet playing in “Poem in the Shape of a Trumpet.” Oeding’s speaker knows joy. She has a poem called “Joy,” in case you need to check it for reference.

How odd it is to claim you would persevere against Carpe Diem. It’s such a kind and excitable creature. In our contemporary culture, it is the root of all joy. Or, perhaps, as Oeding would posit, Carpe Diem leads to an indiscriminate acceptance of every joy. Which makes less the enjoyment of deep joy. It’s a welcome point of debate complicated by Our List of Solution’s speaker—someone who would criticize others’ joys, and yet, still, be struck so deeply by joy. This is the book’s imaginative and magical leap. It is the contradicting heartbeat at the book’s center. Yes, it is possible to be cynical and optimistic and puzzled and inconceivably charmed all at once. Does that lead to any of the solutions proposed by the title? Not so much. More that the confident impulse to list things, and the intention to drive that list forward is plenty solution enough.

Recommended links:
Our List of Solutions
Carrie Oeding's official web page
"Work Harder" on Verse Daily
An excellent interview 

 

recommended: Patricia Lockwood

I think Patricia Lockwood has a problem. I was reading her poem in a New Yorker from last month, and I think she got stuck in a time machine. And not even a modern time machine. One invented in 1859. First off, the word "parrot" has totally changed. When I was growing up, there were only parrots, the bird kind. They star in movies. They make appearances at the local zoo. Lockwood says the word "parrot" "will never / be replaced." I quote from her poem. "Parrot" has been replaced, Patricia. Look how I'm using it right now. I think I am. Maybe.

Just like love is getting replaced. I love now like your love poem loves rope and parrots and the Western Wind and, I imagine, My Fair Lady. I don't love My Fair Lady. I love your love poem. I would love it even if it mentioned My Fair Lady. I don't know how else to give your poem due homage except to repeat that I love it. I love it! Even if you wrote it on a time machine. Even if you didn't get your props back in the 19th, 18th, 17th or 16th centuries. You always have today. That's what love is! It's language that bears repeating. A poem that can reiterate, retract, reorient and replace those old love poems. They're tired of being replaced, I know. Oh, love poems. It's called the tradition ongoing into this century. It's called get ready. Because more centuries are still to come.

Recommended links:
Patricia Lockwood blogs! She jokes, "Poems are jokes." 
She comments on writing a poem.
Octopus Books is publishing Lockwood's first book. 

Mark Doty's My Alexandria

There is this vein of American poetry that produces what I’m going to call the Stadium Arena Voice. It’s loud and saturating! And when I’m reading it I feel like it’s vibrating me in my seat. It’s deep and probing and the wisdom is implicit to the tone, so that it feels like the language is this textured old growth forest, and you’re inside it, the shadows of the forest, the grain of the individual trees. Poems in this voice give me an overwhelming assurance. And honestly, I can never get enough of it. I wish there would be a Stadium-Arena-Voice Movement! There could be small shrines set up for Robert Pinsky’s An Explanation of America and Larry Levis’s The Widening Spell of the Leaves and Robert Hass’s Human Wishes and Carolyn Forche’s The Angel of History. I could name more. Very importantly, there would be a shrine for Mark Doty’s My Alexandria.

When Doty is inside this voice, I am given intimate access to the complications surrounding death and mortality. I have not lived through this experience, but I know the voice in these poems is interested in my understanding it; it is capable of holding the experience before me for consideration. Together we’ll be devastated and coping and unable to go on, though we have to. This isn’t to say that My Alexandria is an emotional pummeling. Maybe I could understand a book of poems like that. But Doty is sensitive to the scope of literature. In fact, I admire how often the book recognizes literature as an intellectual and emotional endeavor, not a reenactment. Can I truly understand what it is like to have a partner diagnosed with H.I.V.? Of course not. But then Doty points out neither can he. And he was the one who lived through it. I look at the transition from “Fog” to “The Ware Collection of Glass Flowers and Fruit, Harvard Museum.” “Fog,” for me, represents utter tragedy. To follow that with a poem that puzzles over glass sculptures of rotting fruit, calling them “lovely because they seem / to decay,” sets art apart. It is merely mimesis. Art can only seem to express this tragedy. And yet, I felt a tragedy inside me when I read the poem. How can art only be something that seems when that feeling for me was very real?

I’m grateful to have the Stadium Arena Voice there as my guide, because the voice is capable of anything. Doty frames different views into his loss. The turtle that hides in its shell in “No.” The wave that breaks into the statement You’re dying in “Becoming a Meadow.” In any frame, that voice is assuring and earnest. I might understand how to live with mortality, if only I listen. This speaker might too—however difficult it may be, he is trying to understand more about his experience. I think that’s the touchstone of My Alexandria. This speaker who says, “Maybe, when we read through these poems together, I’ll understand what I’m feeling.” The poems mark the difference between knowing of devastation and living with it. It is the voice that negotiates between these two perspectives with such assurance. And it’s the complexity of the Stadium Arena Voice that allows comfort to reside amidst all the tragedy.

Recommended links:
My Alexandria
Mark Doty's home page
Mark Doty examines Walt Whitman
Still Life with Oyster and Lemon (like Doty's longer poems, except as prose!)

recommended: Alec Niedenthal

It's odd sometimes to think about mythology, and how it feels like there are so many scholarly layers assembled around an individual myth. With popular myths, like Icharus flying into the sun, or Persephone being kidnapped by Hades, there are tidy correlations drawn to life lessons or nature. We "know what they mean." And I fear it leads people to shelve mythology as something quaint and entertaining. So that when they come upon a myth, like Cronos sneaking into his father bedroom and castrating him, it doesn't make sense. Or it's exotic. In either case, the first impulse is to consult these scholarly layers and get the definitive answer. Why did something so horrible have to happen?

Alec Niedenthal's short piece, "The Possum He Was Say This Long" in Agriculture Reader 4 feels like myth to me. It features "the father" and "the son." And it addresses the very complex relationship a father and son are going to have. Of course, the son will want to overpower the father. The father will encourage the son's spirit, but he won't let the son cross a certain line. And the son will admire the father, because the father is so encouraging. And the whole cycle surges forward. The son testing that line. The father keeping the son eager. How is anything like this supposed to end? In the Greek myth about Cronos, the son comes to his father at night and castrates him.

Not in Niedenthal's short piece. In fact, I would say the father wins in this struggle, cutting the son at his little knees at the last line of the poem. I admire the sudden shift. But I recommend Niedenthal's work, because it puts me in an uncomfortable position. I feel all that paternal warmth in this poem. I feel the son's gleeful affection. And woven in with that, I feel a disturbing fealty expected by the father from his son. And the son's happy compliance. I refer specifically to the scene of the father and the son in the shower, which, to me, is reminiscent of Abraham in the book of Genesis instructing his servant to put his hand on his thigh and swear an oath. For me, Niedenthal's piece is saturated with allusion. It's like a big ball of complicatd mythological relationship world, and that ball is bearing down on you while you read.

Recommended links:
Alec Niedenthal's Blog (Be careful. He is up for most things.)
Agriculture Reader
A letter Niedenthal wrote to the Times where maybe he casts himself as the son of this short piece. 

Thalia Field's Point and Line

Hermeneutics has always been a difficult word for me. On one hand, I understand it deals with insularity and the innately oppressive force that that kind of inward focus exerts on the subject. On the other hand, the boundaries of hermeneutic influence never seem all that clear (are there boundaries?). And so, whether right or wrong, I always think of hermeneutics in terms of a suffocating inwardness, and all the complications that that would imply.

What does this have to do with Thalia Field’s Point and Line? I can’t help but think of her book as a hermeneutic study of the lyric I. Perhaps I am probing too literally into the Kandinsky quote that serves as the epigraph, but for me the book probes at its point (the I) to discover what might be possible when extending a point. The book indulges the voice of the lyric I throughout, whether it’s the nearly catatonic client in “A [therefore] I,” or the hyperdetailed perspective offered  in “Walking,” Field essentially “leaves the mic on” for the lyric self to express and express, until we realize there need be no fatigue to the lyric. The pressures of a hermeneutic self create a perfect Carnot engine for generating language. May it be ad infinitum!

I would venture to say that Field is the Experimentalist Extraordinaire, at least when it comes to thinking through this subjective self. Allegory, stream of consciousness, imaginary families, dramatic productions. There is no shortage to Field’s resources, and there is no conceptual boundary she’s unwilling to cross. In the poem “Seven Veils,” who is Sal? What is Sal? Just for some lyrical fun, I like making Sal (who is either a him or a her or an it or an interstellar comet that has a room in the palace) that client from “A [therefore] I.” Why not? Field’s experimentalism is infectious. I’ll say it makes me an Experimentalist Reader, and Field offers a lot of material for a reader to experiment with.

What I’m most fascinated by, though, are Field’s [bracketed phrases]. And here I return to the Kandinsky relationship between point and line. The [phrases] remind me of reading Timothy Donnelly’s itemized poems in Twenty-Seven Props, if only in the way they seize the flow of language and prioritize a conceptual framework. But Field’s [bracketed phrases] often come in the course of a dialogue between characters. If a reader were to fill in the blank with what the brackets say they should, with “7 outdated objects that dangle” or “3 symptoms of epilepsy,” then the dramatic “conversation” Field has staged between her characters would veer into the absurd. Field chooses instead to hold down the volume, so that you have to speculate about why this character would be asking the reader to list these items. Why would a Monkey be thinking of 7 outdated objects that dangle? Why would an Unformatted Child be thinking of 3 symptoms of epilepsy? The “conversation” becomes a game where I try to read each character’s subjective reasoning. And, even further, to consider that subjective reasoning in light of the ridiculous dramatic situation Field has staged these conversations in.

Yes, the book is exhaustive. It could be exhausting, unless you’re the ambitious reader who rises to the book’s obviously ambitious scope. I don’t even know where to say Point and Line proposes its ending is. According to the “Impotence of First Lines,” there’s a p. 998 somewhere!

Recommended links:
Point and Line
Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit
Thalia Field's page at Brown University (if only for the brief account of each book)
An article from Fanzine offering some thoughts on Field's version of hybridity.