Lots and lots of neat

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!) 

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 

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: timothy donnelly

But I feel like I need to be specific about which poem I prefer in jubilat 16. There's two. One of them wants to talk about what the speaker thinks of mysteries, and the other one indolence. I really like the indolence one. The mysteries one, not so much.

I've been trying to figure out why that is. They both use a very similar argumentative style. They claim an incomplete knowledge of their respective abstract concept, but quickly qualify this incomplete knowledge by explaining that there is some vaguely concrete situation that may help to shed some light on that abstract concept. With the poem that starts by talking about indolence ("Team of Fake Deities Arranged on an Orange Plate"), the fact is one could look inward and contrast what one see there to the things in the room around him, and that could make it possible to find peace. It's a refined and complex argument, and, like the poem here states, "I like it."

What's not to like about a frank bias for introspection over indolence. And what's not to like about a speaker telling you all these delightful things he likes, and give him peace. Absolutely nothing! In fact, what's not to love about it!

Well, when it turns out the idea is mysteries, like it is in "The Malady That Took the Place of Thinking." I guess the concept of mysteries is too wide open, and too presumptive mysteriousness. Or maybe it's just too explicitly vague.

Related Links:
jubilat
Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit

recommended: daniel khalastchi

Um, what do you even start to say about a poem like this. This is no false dilemma. This is no rhetorical turn. I really am speechless about this poem. It disgusted me. I can say that. The imagery is more horror film than surrealism. The image of infants' heads turning around beneath the wrist of this man is not right. But the image is done well. The whole unfolding catastrophe of this man stripped naked, with an "erect penis" for the madame and something, more infants, beneath his skin, is not something I want to read.

But I keep reading it because Khalastchi has not only this man, he has him in a brothel. The occasion for this poem never gets resolved. Well, it is kind of resolved, because he gets his money back. But "what the fuck is going on," really. The reader is never to know. And it might be that point of the poem is even more of a pleasure than that image of the infants beneath his skin. Because the reaction of these three prostitutes, and their wish for him to have his money back, makes whatever is going on beneath the surface that much more revolting.

Hooray to the jubilat 16! Hooray to Daniel Khalastchi's "What's Done:"

Related Links:
jubilat
Announcement of Khalastchi's new book (just accepted!)

recommended: sarah gridley

Oh, Sarah Gridley. Why can't I understand Weather Eye Open? I don't know. I wish I did know. Because I have seen the light, your light, that light. Whichever one means that after the newer poems I've seen, both in the new issue of Gulf Coast and the new jubilat 15, I am all in. I'm dedicated, because it feels so good. Bring me, Jesus, to the Gridley oeuvre. The new poems are just fluid and felt and felicitous. Well, felicitous feels a little light for the subject matter. These poems course in and through the page. They are viscous and petroleum being poured out of a barrel. These poems learn me "Acousmatic."

Related links:
Gulf Coast (Gulf Coast search on worldcat)
jubilat (jubilat search on worldcat)
Weather Eye Open

recommended: emily toder

I know I have my weaknesses. And for poet Emily Toder's poem in jubilat 15, it's using the surreal as a method of argument. Is this the Cathy Park Hong, guest editor for the issue, coming out? Oh, I don't know. But I toast a big YES! and YES! especially to that part 13 in "Brushes With." That slab doesn't just deserve,  it needs a very special place in that cemetery. It does. Even if it grinds the earth so that it looks more like a moto-cross raceway.

Related Links:
jubilat (jubilat search on worldcat)
nor by press (this is the press that Emily Toder runs)