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

"Assassins Who Bring Building Materials to Architects," by Dara Wier
from jubilat 20 

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

"Experiment #9: Creating a Village," by Rebecca Elliott
from Artifice 4 

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

Noon, by Cole Swensen
(Sun & Moon Press, 1997) 

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

Our List of Solutions, by Carrie Oeding
(42 Miles Press, 2011) 

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