Lots and lots of neat

recommended: Geoffrey G. O'Brien

"Six Political Criteria," by Geoffrey G. O'Brien
from Gulf Coast Winter/Spring 2012 

Is it really possible to form a more stable politics in 2012? Would it take six political criteria? More? And if more, why more? If you're looking for answers to those kinds of questions, don't start with Geoffrey G. O'Brien's poem. It might seems like it would be ready to answer lots of questions. It starts with such confidence and formality. But you aren't going to find answers to any of these questions. The answers don't exist.

On second thought, if you're looking for answers to politics in 2012, maybe you should read O'Brien's poem. You might learn something. Like quit thinking you can answer questions about politics! I admit I was lured into this poem by certainty. My certainty. O'Brien uses the rhetoric of foregone conclusions.  "We must rise as if to see what is / Really going on." There are things to do. We have purpose. And with this sentiment comes the images of towers and flowing honeys and clouds. My first instinct was to read this poem as an allegory that could teach me something about the current political environment. Sir, I concur. Life these days does feel like there's only "a percent / Chance of anything happening." I think I'm OK with that. I probably would rather know that the money I earn today will buy me fresh produce and a steady supply of Jif Peanut Butter. 

But the poem addresses stability only insofar as it can serve as a critique of complacency. In many instances, O'Brien presents an image of stability then he immediately turns to undercut it with doubt. "Why then do some people feel / Each dawn a new issue when / It's been growing and changing // For some time now?" Dawn is changing? Could dawn ever not be a symbol for new beginnings? Why isn't it enough to stick with one meaning for dawn? America thrives on consistency, especially when it comes to the meaning we lend to symbols. No matter how disruptive the American election cycle appears, how convulsive each end of the spectrum, 2012 is a time of complacency. We prefer order. If there's really any question about that just look at the size of the bail out we gave every sector of the American economy so that we could maintain the hierarchy and status quo. O'Brien's poem toys with the supposed benefits of order.

At the very least "Six Political Criteria" has the poetic framework that can express instability so that it feels like it's lingering on the edges of order. Or, what might be more disturbing, if these instabilities are actually inherent to the order we're now living in. The answer might lie with the dawn. "We must learn to rise as if / Seeing the inside of horizon // Or not at all." Does the dawn happen inside the horizon? Does that mean there's a dawn happening we can't see? Is there an end to the definitions O'Brien can figure for a dawn? From "running dogs with easy / Honey on their backs" to an "exercise in counter-melt," the rising sun (easily confused with the setting sun) seems to present some answer. I don't think the poem resolves which answer that is.

For my reading, people like to believe in the new beginning. It's morning again in America was Ronald Reagan's slogan in 1984. Hope, complete with a rising red-white-and-blue sun, was Obama's in 2008. It seems there is no end to our faith in new beginnings. But what's really beginning? Are we trying to foment revolution? Or just devising another complacent method of rephrasing what's been happening to us all along.   

Recommended links:
Metropole
In 2009, I recommended another poem by O'Brien.
Geoffrey G. O'Brien reading Gertrude Stein!!! 

Tessa Rumsey's Assembling the Shepherd

Assembling the Shepherd, by Tessa Rumsey
(University of Georgia Press, 1999) 

What if you could use a map to document the usual map-things, like places and landscapes. But then you could also use it to account for time and individual people and the feelings you had when you were seeing the landscape and being with the other person there? There are meadows that might give you a different feeling depending on whether you visited them with X, and whether they were blue meadows or yellow meadows at that time. And what if you could designate a specific city on the map as the capital of all this emotional history? It could be like the city is existing in the abstract while also existing in the your memory. The city would probably be the main feature of this map, because it’s the easiest point of reference. And it would fit conceptually with the map, because it’s where most of the emotionally relevant experiences happen.

It’s useful to think of Tessa Rumsey’s Assembling the Shepherd as a map like this, made as a four-dimensional document. Remember, the map covers time, so this map requires a kind of gigantic imaginative leap away from the two-dimensional. Isn’t a book of poems good for these kinds of imaginative leaps? Yes, that’s why Tessa Rumsey wrote this map as a book of poems! Assuming, of course, that this four-dimensional map is possible. Fortunately, it is a book of poems. And considering a book of poems’ normal facility with emotional landscapes, it seems a fairly natural step to designate it a four-dimensional document as well.

However, Rumsey’s book is more a thoughtfully geography when it comes to the subject of lost love, and of the dilemma inevitable when the speaker is moving past that loss even as it’s continually present to her. In particular, Rumsey’s reference to this city as a place where love happened, where the memories still feel fresh and alive to her, helps explain why it’s so hard to “move on” from this past. After all, who could possibly remove an entire city, especially when “Our city begins with a description / of heaven?” (from “Parable for the Sundial”)

To poetry’s great benefit, Rumsey is smarter than some mere city. For if a city represents meanings that she had made for herself, then it’s going to face the same skepticism as any meaning-making enterprise. For instance, in “The Smallest Effective Distance,” Rumsey explicitly refers to the romance that has passed. “You are my ex & thus / the past must outshine the present in a way that hurts / just to look at.” Romance is a sharp and ingenious craftsman capable of the most durable presences. But Assembling the Shepherd is not only romantic. Let’s call it romantic-conceptual. Like in the version of “Diagram of Faith” on page 30, “the rush hour of eternal return of eternal / renounce, as if multiplicity were the answer to ambivalence, as if / a wheel’s point of stillness hinged upon its spokes’ psychotic dance.” To call romance a system of passions connected with pronouncements connected with attitudes might be a modest description. Rumsey likes causal chains, especially when they’re reorienting meaning. And especially when they express the struggle that usually attends letting go of love.

Perhaps the causal chain is one of the ways you go about destroying a city.  You propose a new link between cause and effect. If planting the bomb in “Bluebells” might seem a bit violent, how about if the bomb creates a series of flowers in bloom? How about if you were to erase that old city where love happened, and replace it with Spring? Assembling the Shepherd is aggressive and often byzantine in its style. Losing love is confusing, though. Especially when love never leaves of its own volition. So then “a bystander explodes, inside my brother’s laughter, into springtime,” and all is better. The shepherd is ready to be assembled, and to usher in springtime, and to materialize new romantic-concdeptuals.

Recommended links:
Assembling the Shepherd

 

recommended: Kate Rutledge Jaffe

"The Climb Down," by Kate Rutledge Jaffe
from The Believer, October 2011 

I prefer my elementary school understanding of plate tectonics. The world shifts. There are these giant continental plates. In the beginning there was Pangea, and after a lot of shifting and wandering, we now have seven continents. And then, of course, the great mythological explanation in the tectonic universe: when two plates collide they form a mountain range. Does this really explain what a mountain range looks like? Sure. I don't have the patience to actually watch the real plate tectonics at work. And quite frankly, I fear what it looks like.

Language is unstable. In the poetry world, this fact is pretty much a foregone conclusion. It is not only done. It's done, did, and don't do it, please don't or I'll cringe. And yet, Kate Rutledge Jaffe's poem, "The Climb Down," is trembling with instability. It's like she put the poem on a fault line, and then a whole mountain range sprung up from beneath it. How's that for a mythology in only 12 lines!

What makes it unstable? To start with, I can't tell if the poem is told in first person or third. It might seem obvious: "I is the glance. I never finding stars." I would seem to signal a first person speaker. And for a contemporary American poem, an opening like this is jarring, but that alone shouldn't rule out the first person. Let us enjoy an irregular verb tense. Let us be made aware that there are verbal mechanisms in language. But what about when "I is us, unless us is a nebula, // then I is stars and Dad and Mom is good for little arms"? Is that still a first person? Has the poem made first person or third a matter of the reader's discretion? For me it is easier to make sense if I arrange these different characters (I, Dad and Mom) as a group of people, all in the third person. Then I can picture them as a nebula. Then I can enjoy this comparison of a nebula to a family unit.

Jaffe is playful with the language and point of view, but this play keeps us occupied in a certain quadrant of meaning. Yes, she subverts the normal grammatical usage, but all of this happens within a subject of family, with accessible observations about it. I don't feel lost, because the poem isn't willing away meaning. For instance, "Dad table-sighed: Toast? Insert and kick it under. We is animal." The family is eating. Dad is being funny with the toast, or he's preparing toast. And we're rambunctious or we're ravenous. Jaffe has moved me to a domestic quadrant, probably at breakfast. I don't need to know exactly what is happening so long as I can gather these basic pieces together.

Is Jaffe saying the family unit is unstable? She wouldn't be the first. But the great irony here is that the poem actually takes great comfort in the domestic. I sleeps "a green sleep." I "wears a glittering hat" while being pushed down the street. I am inclined to view this as an infant speaker describing how content she is with her family. I watched the Miranda July movie "The Future" this past weekend. I imagine this speaker like the cat voice in that movie. Sentimental and not fully equipped with the language to say everything she means. 

Recommended links:
Kate Rutledge Jaffe homepage
The Believer

recommended: Matthew Gagnon

"Some Novelties of Stagecraft," by Matthew Gagnon
from Boston Review, Jan/Feb 2012 

I remember these poems from a few years ago by Linnea Ogden. For instance, "Contact," published in 2008 by Boston Review. Ogden takes a snippet of legalese and inlays it into a lyric occasion. So simply. And so seamlessly. In fact, the connection between the two could make you think the legal statement simlpy generated the poem from its own juridical intent. The beginning of each stanza may be legal jargon, but the sentiment syntactically fits within the lyric and offers further complication for its occasion.

What happens when you open the poetic possibilities of jurisprudence? I say subversiveness. It's like poetry just happened to wander into the courtroom, or the zoning office at City Hall, and then started kicking its way into the law books. Perhaps that's too kind and too enthusiastic a take on the poems. But I want political poems that aren't so brash and unsubtle I feel awkward for them while I'm reading them. Is Poetry really going to win a fight with fisticuffs? I don't think so. Subversive poems are subtle. They occupy their space quietly. They rearrange the logic of the space to suit their own terms. Ogden's poem appropriates and confronts a vital and active and self-consuming part of our culture. I would say it's closer to protesting the 1% than many poems that scream about how angry they are with the 1%. 

And what, in God's name, is Matthew Gagnon's poem doing? Looking for a corporate sponsor? Describing the lyric exuberance of a poem that has already found its corporate sponsor? Here, again, is an appropriation of language: underwritten, churning, in the pipeline. The term, "irrational exuberance," that appears about 2/3 of the way through the poem, actually has a Wikipedia entry to describe it. The fact is, Gagnon's speaker has been underwritten. And his message is spreading like water threading everywhere. But what does that mean? If a "punch line" has some sort of corporate backing, who benefits? In this world where Facebook and Google are going to use data about us for some supposed diabolical plan, I wonder why we are so eager to presume these corporations will harm us. 

Are we not capable of being like Gagnon's speaker: "storied and customized." That guy is like a "fuse box humming beside a thornbush." As with many poems of the exuberant, the ecstatic here is an ironic gesture. Gagnon hasn't really decided which way he would go with this. However, I appreciate Gagnon taking a moment to speak for the 1%. Or at least to slip onto the balcony overlooking the proesters and toast to subversion in all its poetic immensity.

Recommended links:
Boston Review
Maybe this is Matthew Gagnon? More subversion?
Some other poems of his at Conjunctions.

recommended: CA Conrad

"(Soma)tic Poetry Exercise," by CA Conrad
from jubilat 20 

I know I'm not the first, and I pray God won't make the last to say this: CA Conrad is irresistible. I'm talking I want the inside of his voice inside me. Inside, like the diction and rhetoric of these poems makes me think of 10,000 pressed cardboard hand-held fans all fluttering in my face, and they spell out "CA" in giant white script, and I think, why, I didn't know hand-held fans could pay attention to someone like me. But these fans, I think they like me. "CA!" I want to say. And I don't know him well enough to say just his initials. But when you read his poems, you feel like, "Hey, CA, don't I know you?"

What's funny is that that's what "(Soma)tic Poetry Exercise" is all about! How we know people. Or how people know each other on that weird psychic level. Maybe we know dogs like that. Maybe we know strangers like that. CA (I almost find it improper to refer to him with the more formal "Conrad") is toying with this common belief that we communicate just by thinking of someone. He's flattering our common beliefs. And then he's encouraging them. And from there, oh my God, it is irresistible. What he says makes sense. "We are one!" 

I can go on. CA has asked all of us to go on for seven days. Seven days is not that long. And, then, it turns out seven days is just long enough to make this "Exercise" something serious. Really, he is asking us to sit around the people we know, and later the people who are strangers to us, and to think about each of them. He says we should focus our attention, our imagined conversation. We should become masters of thinking like this. We should imagine being recognized. We should take notes about how it feels. And we should make poems with those notes. Poems! I feel like CA is telling this to me alone, and I want to make poems then. I finish reading this "Exercise" with so much delight and enthusiasm filling me. And I believe every bit of what he says. I can make poems, and I'll call them "By CA!"

And honestly, if you're reading this issue of jubilat, you need to pair "(Soma)tic Poetry Exercise" reading with the interview Matthea Harvey does with Abraham Burickson. He's the founder of Odyssey Works. Burickson and his crew will create a performance tailored specifically to you. As in, they send a questionnaire, they find out everything about you, and then they show up in your life. And the point is your life will change. Or at least it might. 

Recommended links:
jubilat
The Book of Frank
Advanced Elvis Course (I don't know what to say about the book, but this edition is large-print! No eyeglasses needed!!)
CA Conrad has a home homepage.
Odyssey Works (for the adventurous!) 

Deborah Digges' Late in the Millenium

Late in the Millennium, by Deborah Digges
(Knopf, 1989) 

If I could have a contest for which lyric poet burrows more deeply into the earth, more completely voices what I consider the earth part in me, I wouldn’t care for the contest to end. I would just care who was allowed in as a contestant. In my review of Mark Doty’s My Alexandria, I mentioned the Stadium Arena Voice, which is this figuration to describe how I hear the poems. They are aggressively confident and logical, and they encompass me. And what I mean by that is they are inescapable. I don’t question how his narratives fit into one another. Why would I need to? I know that beneath these narratives lies an implicit truth which cannot be exhausted. It is deep and plentiful and more. That’s all I can think while I’m reading it. I want more, even if it means Doty has to live through all that tragedy and pain.

The figuration I would use for Deborah Digges’ Late in the Millennium appears in “Tartarchos.” The speaker of the poem is a girl. Her mother has just beat her sister with a brush, and so she runs to the pond where there are hills, and ruts in those hills have been eroded deep enough that the girl can hide inside them. “Eye-level with the earth,” among an entire inventory of rusted sled runners and old scarves, she can hide. In a book of poems that uses the turning of sycamore leaves as a statement of logic, or the extinction of angels to explain why we’re lonely, seeing a young girl “eye-level with the earth” seems the most appropriate figure for picturing the book’s voice. It is safe. It has found a place to be brave. It is fully consumed by whatever those rhythms or mineral qualities or dark subtleties are. And, like Doty, I feel Digges’ voice encompass me.

But the encompassing is different. In Doty, I feel subsumed by the logic arising from each of his narratives coinciding with one another. Late in the Millennium draws from something different. It takes that dark poem-feeling I get when I read a Mary Oliver or a Jane Hirshfield poem and extends it past the neat poem-lite container they keep their poems in. Digges’ work feels colossal. It feels borne. It doesn’t know what a poem-container would be. She has two sestinas in the book, and I find their maneuvers through the form to be only a small part of their work as poem. It’s like when she makes reference to the Tower of Babel in “Secrets,” she isn’t using that easy poem-allusion-as-guiding-analogy-for-the-poem method. The poetry I’ve read by Mary Oliver seems to operate on this level. The point of the poem is to make the reader see the equation of allusion and circumstance. For Digges the poem is a tapestry of allusion, narrative, circumstance and wildly submersed sentences. Those sentences that continue past the line break, where you thought it would end, past the last qualifier, where you thought it might rest. Her sentences will not tire.

This might be the quality that leads me to say that these are poems of the earth, because they are tireless. They begin as naturally as holding the door open for someone who’s coming in right behind you. And they are earnest, though I’m not entirely sure the subject they are so earnest of. Is it the unknowable origin of human intention? Or the inevitable circularity of human activity? Maybe it’s something in the book’s two sestinas, something about the muscular rhythms innate to that form could be what informs the earnestness of these poems. 

Recommended links:
Late in the Millennium
Her obituary (most unfortunately) 
A video of her reading 

 

Brian Teare's Sight Map

Sight Map, by Brian Teare
(University of California Press, 2009) 

Beneath every love poem there lies dishonesty. Love is never like what the poem said. And how would that poet know? My love was different. And I know True Love is different than that. And Mature Love is another thing entirely. The problem with love poetry is that love is too complicated to be nailed down by one poem. Love is wily and many-legged. Have you ever met Desire? It’s cruel. Sometimes it’s elusive. For that matter, everything about Love Relations usually stays pretty aloof. It reorders itself at will. And, poor poets, everything about love is being constantly rediscovered. No one sees this when they’re in love, but when you’re rediscovering love it’s just like when you’re first discovering it. And everyone’s said that before. So why write love poems?

Unless you’re Brian Teare’s Sight Map, because these poems understand love like the book was underneath it all along. Love changes. Love inhabits us. And trying to explain this habitation is where Teare’s book pulls away from the most common tropes used to explain love. For Teare, language literally rearranges in the first section. It’s like when our desire for love is rearranged into being loved at that moment of consummation. I really can’t celebrate this part of Teare’s book enough. Read through “Emerson’s Susquehanna” and “To Be Two,” and when you come to the third section of “To Be Two,” just listen. Lines from the poems before get reordered into this lyrically fluid tenderness. In fact, the recognition that this poem is from the poems coming before it is actually a sensual experience. I feel this poem and the warmth inside it.

If only love could always inhabit us like that. But what’s a book about love if it’s not fraught by desire? Love may be an ecstasy of togetherness, but inevitably there will have to be loneliness. And for Teare, loneliness is intimate and textured and repetition and remembering. And most of all it is landscape, and that peculiarly sharpened experience of a landscape when we suffer desire. For my reading, I focus again on the moment when a poem notices its own existence as an issue to composing more of the poem. “Sanctuary, Its Roots Sanctus” proposes a lake, but no more. Meaning a lake can’t be more than a lake. And, as is usual with poetry, this resistance to meaning is exactly what cues us to see beyond the lake to the metaphorical action the lake represents. Of course, he notes how “being / fucked is a version of prayer” while standing next to the lake. But Teare is obstinate with his resistance. He not only tells the reader, “I would like to keep it / here—the lake and its description— / before it becomes metaphor.” He repeats the description of the lake verbatim. The waves that sound like the short vowel sound of an i. The surface of the lake “nova’d” white. He repeats with the same phrasing. And then he blends this repetition into the poem as though he’s rearranging a collage. The result is that same sensuality from “To Be Two.” But where “To Be Two” gave you that heat of romance, now Teare puts you inside his reluctance. “Please don’t let me remember.” the poem says.

Teare draws the tension tight. He denies and indulges at once. It’s quite possibly the truest exercise inhabiting Sight Map. It is like a shaded light that burns brighter at the edge of the shade, giving evidence of the full lumination beneath.

Recommended links:
Sight Map
Brian Teare's homepage
Brian Teare reads "Emerson's Susquehanna," (of particular interest at Teare's homepage)