Book Review: In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame by Ted Rees

Ted Rees
In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame
Timeless Infinite Light, 2018
142 pgs.

A few weeks ago, poet Ted Rees asked people on Facebook what poet they wished they’d read when they were younger, and I wanted to say to Ted, you! Which is funny; he’s 20-25 years younger than me and his books didn’t exist when I was younger. Also though, it was true. As I was reading his recent book In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame, I kept thinking to myself, this is the kind of tradition I’d want my own poems to be in, if my poems were going to fit into any kind of tradition.

The works here, mostly prose poems although a few are lined, have a lot of elements that I really admire in poems, including a big geopolitical sweep. The poems often explore contemporary landscapes that picture the variety of human and non-human interactions happening in different locations, some urban, some in the rural back country and even the wilderness. Environmental concerns, concerns with power structures and what’s happening to people, insights into a range of identity and class issues: all of these are mixed together in a way that makes clear that the problems that the poems are exploring are not easily separated from each other. Rees doesn’t write single poems that try to isolate single central issues. His writing moves in sweeping waves that gather things together from place to place, person to person, problem to problem.

The poems also aren’t the pious commentaries of an outside or supposedly objective observer. Instead, the figure of the poet himself is very much a part of these interactions, a young man struggling to survive and facing a shortage of options. He can observe and participate in street level activity because he’s already more or less living right there, down in the worst of it, at least at times, except for those stretches when he seems to have moved out into the California back country. As anthropology has known for awhile, there’s no such thing as an outside observer; there are only people who are involved in a situation, however differently. The narrator in these poems moves around at the most immediate levels of social and financial alienation and disenfranchisement.

One of the most fascinating and original ways that Rees signals his involvement in the many conflicts of the book is the constantly surprising language. The ornate, sometimes nearly anti-imagistic language disrupts any notion that what he’s doing is merely describing. The voice is not that of sober (and often implicitly masculine) direct description that somehow asserts its normalcy by vanishing into the expected vocabulary. Instead, it flaunts a flamboyant and uncontainably wild vocabulary:

“So as to better skiptrace moisture’s corpse, you heave a slippy couch to the makeshift summit and settle into some kalimotxo. Beyond unctuous tide and squall of trade, the incarcerated juttings in murk, what progress has been marched. There emerges a frame of reference for the structure of this smoke, its frottage with our garments and exposed pores, a darling of the blank monolith set.” (31)

My only reservation about In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame, and it’s not a huge one, is the tendency of certain lines to focus more on the poet’s anger than on what’s being discussed, and not always in interesting ways. This happens most often in the use of the word “fucking,” which every time it appears it stands out, at least to me, as the most boring word in this otherwise consistently inventive book: “because being a teenager is always fucking terrible.” (99). The book has a lot of original insults, but at moments the poet’s anger comes off as one-dimensional. This tendency makes the last section of the book, centered around a response to the work of queer writer and artist David Wojnarowicz, feel just a little less effective, maybe also because the more clearly essay-like elements of the last section lead Rees towards what sometimes feel like overgeneralizations.

Quibbles about invective aside, In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame kept me involved and fascinated. It’s hard to put down. It offers a perspective on contemporary U.S. social problems that comes from a narrative voice like no other I’ve read in recent American poetry. I loved the intensity here, and the insight, and the sheer exuberance of the language. Rees is a poet determined to say whatever he needs to say to make the world more survivable for him and many others who live on the outcast edges of a culture too often committed to ignoring its ever-growing human and environmental disasters. And if that’s not poetry worth knowing about, then I don’t know what is.

Book Review: Born Again by Ivy Johnson

Ivy Johnson

Born Again

The Operating System

112 pgs.

2018

I really like the tightly constructed, and tightly wound, poems and prose essays and narratives in this gripping and sometimes disturbing collection. They center on the experiences of a young woman shedding her small town, Christian past and remaking herself, and finding herself remade, in an urban environment unlike the one she was raised in.

These are Gothic-influenced poems, but not in any clichéd way. Like much that’s Gothic they don’t reject Christianity outright so much as turn its imagery into new forms of worship and obsession and a woman’s determination to find a self that could never have emerged in the environment where she grew up. The dynamics of dominance and subservience are unique and surprising. The prose pieces are more loosely structured and narrative than the sharply-lined poems and tend to fill in elements of the narrative that the poems mostly just suggest. The writing is blunt, sexually but not only sexually, yet also implies many barely spoken and sometimes unspoken struggles. Intriguingly, the book both tells a lot and tells only a little. The book is not memoir; its intention is to lift itself beyond a recounting of experience.

Anyone interested in the Gothic and religion and American culture in cities and small towns will find Born Again fascinating. Any woman who has used the Gothic subculture or perspective as a way to overcome a small town or Christian upbringing will find it essential.

Brief Reviews: Amy De'Ath and Murat Nemet-Nejat

 

Amy De’Ath’s Erec & Enide is a small but impressive first book by a poet whose work is certain to get more attention as time goes on. While on the surface, the poems frequently create shimmering, often romantic scenes and interactions, that surface always comes along with a level of sharp political and social critique, and is often disrupted by language that is more blunt and ironic than the poems set up readers to expect. Gender dynamics within individual sexual relationships are often connected not just to individual human isolation but also to many larger scale political problems.

The poems that result have a lyrical sophistication and sometimes even a gauzy sheen, but they also feature sharper, very much non Art Deco edges that break out in unexpected places:

Said Erec to Enede, the sun burst
down on my sails and gallowing tore
my winnow North.

Said Enide to Erec, I don’t know how

to soothe you.

Said Erec to Enide, the airline strikes pulled

holes in my interior liver tissue, and

I daren’t touch a drop.

There’s humor throughout these poems too, but it’s so sneaky in its bite that it’s easy to trip up and be amused just at the moment that something dangerous is about to happen.

Ultimately, the range of tones and surprising shifts of context in Erec & Enide make for a little book with a much broader variety of concerns than might at first appear. De’Ath writes poetry capable of lyrical power, ironic rupturing, and a complex awareness of political and social ideologies, all of which she handles with an always precisely inflected literary style.

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Murat Nemet-Nejat’s poems in the The Spiritual Life of Replicants take his thorough understanding of the history of Turkish poetry and modify it in fascinating ways that respond to the cultural and media conditions of life in the contemporary United States, where he now lives. Nemet-Nejat is the foremost contemporary translator of Turkish into English, and the anthology he edited, Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, is a must read for anyone interested in the last one hundred years of Turkish poetry. Replicants features a number of usually short, often fragmented lyrics that frequently make use of characteristics of Turkish poetry and the Turkish language more generally, for instance in the way sentences and phrases slide sideway into extended sequences rather than being constantly dead-stopped by periods.

Nemet-Nejat’s exploration both of materiality and the mental procedures whereby people try to grasp phenomena develops through the poems based on an animist philosophy that doesn’t make overly simple distinctions between living and non-living matter. The poems also frequently play with and undermine the relationship between perception and that which is supposedly perceived: “the yellow of the carpet/ lurks in the yellow of my eye/ and waits.” Fascinatingly, the book also develops as an extended critique of U.S. cultural attitudes through a reading of the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner and an interrogation of what it means to be human or machine in the context of capitalist power. The boundaries between poetry and prose are also frequently undermined, although the book moves closer towards prose narrative in many of its later sections. Replicants is therefore an exploration both of cultural and aesthetic hybridity, although like the best hybrid approaches, it doesn’t seek to resolve its differences but to exploit and grow them.

The shape and formatting of the book become a bit annoying at times, and some of the fragments feel like mere wisps of language, although ultimately I concluded that even the slightest wisps were important to the author’s sense of the physical world as incredibly close and concrete, but never more than partially graspable. His sense that human desire often tries to control what it cannot hold anchors many of the problems both of individual people and of the larger cultural dynamics that develop over the course of the book. The prose sections which conclude the book become more explicitly an exploration of character, and the way people from differing cultural contexts struggle and fail to understand each other, while finding themselves part of the same often mysterious world:

“The damn guy is impossible. Do you know one day he made me sit in a chair and read a whole damn short story, for one and a half hours, about this girl in a mental asylum, Karala, Aura, or something, who had attempted suicide.”

The Spiritual Life of Replicants is a unique book of poetry with a well-considered philosophical underpinning, even and perhaps especially at those moments when it veers close to falling apart.

Janette Kim Larson and Mark Wallace: On Teaching the Poetry of Catherine Wagner

Janette Kim Larson, a former student of mine and a fine poet, is doing some research on contemporary poetry and asked me some questions about the work of Catherine Wagner (pictured above), with particular emphasis on the experience of teaching her work in the university classroom.

You can check out a recently published poem by Janette here at splinter.generation.com:

http://www.splintergeneration.com/broken-men-were-her-specialty/

And here’s our discussion:

JKL: How did you first discover Cathy and what was so striking about her work to you?

MW: It’s funny that you use the word “discover” (although not surprising) because I didn’t discover her work at all in the way that the word is usually meant.

I organized a literary reading series in Washington, D.C. from 1995-2005, The Ruthless Grip Literary Series, named after the experimental art gallery and artist co-op, Ruthless Grip, where the series was located for its first five years. The Ruthless Grip reading series, along with other D.C. reading series at Bridge Street Book and the DC/AC Arts Center, were and are known (all three still exist) for their focus on avant garde and various aesthetically and culturally extreme literature. That focus contrasted greatly with the more mainstream approaches found in the universities.

Cathy was quite a young poet (I wasn’t that old myself) when she wrote me in the late 90s and asked me for a reading in the series both for her and her husband at the time, Martin Corless-Smith, also a poet. I don’t think I’d heard of them, but Cathy had grown up in Baltimore and some of the poets I knew were aware of her work. This was several years before her first full-length book, Miss America, came out, but I think she had published a chapbook of the magazine poems that reappeared in Miss America. And Martin’s first book, Of Piscator, was either already published or came out shortly thereafter. They both gave a good reading, and there was the usual sets of poetry conversations afterwards, since a lot of writers came to those events and everybody would stay together talking for some hours. Since then, Cathy and I have been in touch many times about all sorts of literary matters, readings and conferences and so on. I invited her out to Cal State San Marcos to read in April 2007. It has been great to see her work continue to be published and to get more attention, which it deserves.

JKL: Why did you decide to include her work in a grad and undergrad contemporary lit seminar (513)? If you have assigned her elsewhere, please let me know where and why?

MW: I teach Cathy’s work quite commonly in my grad/undergrad cross-listed contemporary literature course, and I’ll be teaching it again this fall, although in the context of her work and the work of others that appears in the recent anthology Gurlesque. And I taught Miss America once in an undergraduate poetry class at American University in Washington, D.C.

Cathy’s work is rather uniquely well-suited to the needs of the students that take 513, I think. Of the full range of poetic approaches at the moment, hers is hardly the most extreme. In a time when many poems switch subjects rapidly, or undermine and critique in numerous ways the idea of a central subject, Cathy’s poems are still mainstream enough to be recognizable to students unfamiliar with contemporary poetry, simply because they often have identifiable subjects (a young woman dealing with love, or motherhood, or buying a house, etc.) commonly recognizable as archetypal American middle class and women’s issues. No all her poems do that, and some of the poems in her most recent book, My New Job, maybe veer farther away than ever from having unified central subjects, although the job is of course archetypal too.

At the same time, Cathy’s poems avoid and critique more expected ways of looking at their subjects, and she has a consciously jagged and often staccato approach to language that gives her an extremely unique style. Her poems in Macular Hole, for instance, displace the idea that human emotions are at the center of having babies and buying houses and much else. Instead the poems explore the physical and social structures that shape emotional reactions. A mother and baby have bodies that act as bodies and need to be recognized as such rather than swaddled in sentimentality, especially since sentimentality often becomes a way of ignoring and denying the kinds of problems that mothers face. This approach leads Cathy often to use more clinical language than expected in mainstream poems, and shows emotion as being conditioned by social structures rather than simply sweeping those structures aside.

The bluntness of her language is not simply an emotional bluntness, although her poems have those moments also: the bluntness raises the issue of what kind of language people use when they speak about human bodies, and women’s bodies specifically. And the playful and purposeful complexity of her word choices leads to poems that never quite present these issues with easily transparent representational imagery. Instead, the focus moves in and out and approaches the subject at many odd and yet ultimately insightful angles. She manages to make archetypal subjects strange again, and through that, reveals important issues that have often been covered up or overlooked.

Add it all up, and her work operates on an edge between mainstream and more extreme avant approaches that is very helpful for me in leading students away from conventional expectations about the language and subject matter of poems, while giving them enough grounding in familiar subjects that they don’t feel lost. From there I can I send them on to even more extreme poems. In that way, her writing is not only fantastic on its own but serves well as a gateway to the variety of challenging aesthetic approaches available in contemporary poetry.

JKL: How do students typically respond to her work? Are they horrified by her stark honesty? Pleased by the boldness in her voice? Confused and frustrated by lack of accessibility? All of the above?

MW: Teaching would be a lot easier if there was any typical student response to anything. Certainly her work has caused all of the reactions you describe, but I also have students who feel liberated by her stark honesty, upset at the boldness or bluntness of her voice, or excited by some of the difficulties her language creates. Some people read her work and are really energized by it; to others it’s just an assignment that they want to get over with. I’m happy of course when students like the work I’m teaching, and I hope my enthusiasm for that work gives people reason to believe that enthusiasm about poetry really is possible. Ultimately what I want is for students to be able to talk and write effectively about the poems I teach. When people can articulate what something is, they become more likely to be pleased by their relationship to it.

Brief Reviews: Poetry by Stephanie Balzer and Gina Myers

For many reasons, I haven’t had a lot of time for blogging or for reading new poetry this summer, but here are a couple of brief chapbook reviews to tide things over until I find more time again, and an intriguing couple of chapbooks they are.


The prose poems in Stephanie Balzer’s Faster, Faster (Cue Editions) create, in their line by line shifts and twists, an ultimately melancholy and insightful wittiness full of energy and the pleasure of words. Balzer knows both the psychological foibles of people and the structural limitations of the environments they create for themselves, but the narrator in these poems is never simply an observer. Instead she finds herself often in a perpetual in-between, trying to connect with others and not being able to, or connecting with them but needing to back off when they impose their problems on her, instead of trying to work them out in some mutual process. Balzer’s not afraid to examine political conditions either; the pieces are filled with references to the CIA, Starbucks, HBO, The New York Times, McDonald’s, and other people and organizations that create dangerous limits on human interaction. The sly rewrites of phrasing from Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs never come off as mere tributes, but reveal Balzer’s own concerns with an inevitable web of connections that frustrates even more than it promises. “I confess: my state of mind is America. ‘something to do w entropy, i think. the force of nothingness so much stronger than its opposite.’”


I really enjoyed the understatement and surface simplicity of the poems in Gina Myers’ chapbook False Spring (Spooky Girlfriend Press). A continuation from Myers’ earlier work of her moody re-envisioning of the New York School casual tone transferred to more sparse and economically depressed environments, the poems in False Spring are much more minimal than in her earlier book A Model Year, saying no more than needs to be said, but implying deeper wells of alienation than the surface elaborates. I was reminded of the various Rexroth translations of ancient Chinese poems in terms of how much a few words can evoke, yet there’s nothing indirect about these poems. They lay out the narrator’s struggles flatly and bluntly. The impression of empty rooms, missed possibilities, and unkept urban spaces kept resonating for me long after I put the book down. “Weddings & funerals in the span of a week./Each year, the family grows & shrinks./ I search the classifieds for a new job,/a new place to live, a change.”

Brief Review: Answer, by Mark Ducharme

I really enjoyed the complex, playful, sometimes impressively contorted rhythms of Mark Ducharme’s recent book of poems, Answer, published by BlazeVox. Those rhythms combine well with the book’s rich and frequently surprising vocabulary. While some lines in the book are bluntly political, more often the poems create a moody and shadowed (yet somehow also deadpan Midwestern) romanticism, one in which clarity of thought and action repeatedly finds itself deflected by misunderstanding and uncertainty.

Ducharme spins and alters the music of his lyrics in as varied a way as any lyric poet working at the moment, without ever losing their basic melodicism, as in the opening of “Imperfect World”:

To be a part
Of the treetops & furnaces
Where the only air to breathe is
Here——and we are

Stilled along the
way, to where
It is, we are going. Where is it, we
Are going

anymore? Only to where
In a moment, I’ll reappear
Ambiguous & startling
In your hair, replete, where I do not

See
You at all, or ever—or if I did
I would soon be about to go
Away. (31)

Melancholy, satirical and bemused by turns, the poems feature tight torques, subtle ellipses and, given their refusal to embrace too much drama, a surprising degree of lyrical grandeur.

Ducharme is neither a writer of conventional lyric phrasing and imagery, nor of Stephen Burt-named New Thing minimalism, although his work sometimes veers in and out of both tendencies. The poems in Answer take more risks than most lyric poetry of the present day, given many unexpected leaps in phrasing and Ducharme’s willingness to stretch language to the point that, often, meaning nearly breaks down entirely.

At times the metaphorical deflections of any too direct subject matter give the poems a sleight-of-hand that delays or withholds, usually in fascinating ways, any too easy definition of a given poem’s subject. The result is that many pieces become moody plays of visual tones and twists of sound. Yet if the book threatens maybe too often to float off into a soundtrack-like aura for a dead-ended, befogged Middle America where nobody knows anything or anyone, the language can also jolt abruptly into directness, even as it retains its quick turns, such as in these lines from “Thank You For Protecting Polar Bears”:

The centaur cannot fold. It has a new life experience
as seen on Lifetime, where, punctual
You are a modernist in a doomsday client
State—suppressing all legible offers
To become someone who cannot hum
I am reasonably sure this is private, & has
Only minimum content appeal
I am still not kidding (33)

The book is full of numerous highlights, including the section of “Crisis Sonnets,” the sudden leaps intro more extreme avant word play like in the poem “Glutton Tongue,” or the direct simplicity of the repetition in “Possible Ode.”

There’s a tendency in the book to overuse a few constructions, like replacing a direct image with the phrasing “of what,” as in the lines, “like their use at night/In the where of what can quickly swerve” (“There is Something Original About This Message”, p. 45), a construction which appears again later in the same poem and numerous times elsewhere. Ultimately though, Answer is a collection of poems that asks many significant questions and is never afraid to reformulate language in ways that will best explore or, more often, deny the answers. As it turns out, according to Ducharme, too many of the answers people willingly accept are just too easy.

Brief Review: The Odicy, by Cyrus Console

In recent years, the idea that many different aesthetic approaches can be considered to have innovative or experimental possibilities has opened up to include all sorts of approaches that, a decade or two ago, might have been dismissed out of hand as too traditional. Given that, I imagine that it was inevitable that sooner or later, a English-language writer was bound to “return” to iambic pentameter and see if new things could be done with it.

Enter Cyrus Console and The Odicy, a book-length poem in five parts, all written in variations on pentameter. The book’s back cover claims that The Odicy is a detailed attempt to “take the measure of our epoch’s cultural and ecological crises.” I don’t actually know how experimental Console imagines his take on pentameter to be. At times the book seems to be trying a genuinely unique approach, dunking the frequently high-toned pentameter in colloquial phrasing, social satire, and moments of bathos. At other times the book comes across as overly restrained, in tone if not in subject matter, with a use of pentameter that seems more conventional and almost even reverential.

Frequently, Console’s lines, with interestingly tight enjambments and torques, have a casual colloquial tone that undermines the tendency of writers of pentameter to drift towards loftiness: “Go now, Tony. Else you got to stay/ Tony. Fix a stocking to the chimney/ Decorate a tree this holiday/ Artificial is the only way to fly” (15). Perhaps just as often, the book seems to succumb to the temptation of just that sort of loftiness, occasionally with a significant degree of abstraction: “The littoral uncertainty in being/Neither continent nor boundary/ Unflixed measureless intermittent/ Crush of water macerating what/ On or near the day we lose the beachhead” (34).

The subject matter of the book wanders from idea to idea in a way that is frequently intriguing but sometimes too distant or general. The references to contemporary commodities like soda are often more vivid and memorable than the book’s philosophical framework, and by the time I reached the end of the book, its overall stance seemed a bit removed from its subject matter. Intentionally or not, the way pentameter is being used in The Odicy feels like it contains as much cultured disdain as satirical critique of the frequent absurdity of day to day life under capitalism. Whether readers will find that effective depends a great deal on how attractive the book’s shifts in tone feel to them.

I was impressed by the ambition of The Odicy. Console is a writer with big goals, both in terms of writing a book length poem and of the wide range of culture and philosophical problems addressed in it. As his work moves forward, it will be interesting to see whether and how his conception develops regarding the relation between subject matter, form, and tone. He’s trying things in The Odicy that are risky and worthy of admiration.

The result, to my mind, is a long, bold and uneven poem that is perhaps bogged down at times in the historical role of pentameter in English-language poetry. In theory, there’s nothing about pentameter that requires a high-toned grandness, but in practice The Odicy echoed that tone too often to feel fully effective. Still, Console is exploring and developing an approach in this book that many other poets would be too timid or conventionally unconventional to try. It’s important to keep in mind that when ideas about the experimental become too narrow or expected, those ideas stop being experimental at all.

Brief Review: glowball by Steven Farmer

Hardcore afficionados of poetry that stretches the materiality of language in surprising ways will love Steven Farmer’s glowball, and everybody else should read it too for the challenges it offers to overly conventional uses of language and for its insights into contemporary globalist capitalism. glowball features five poetic sequences, each quite different, but all of which interrogate how conditions of language can both reveal sociopolitical conditions and enmesh people in them.

Each of the first four sequences establishes a serial structure: jagged seven-line stanzas in “Spectacler”; isolated lines of prose occasionally disrupted by stanzas in “Jewel Box” and “Saturuate”; and the chaotic yet still somehow pleasing visual shapes in “Parts/Din.”  The final sequence, “Metacity,” varies structures more from page to page with a virtuoistic flair attuned both to shifts in language and in visual presentation. At one point, “Metacity” breaks into a kind of call and response between contemporary power structures and language dynamics and Latin (yes, Latin) versions of the same. Farmer suggests by juxtaposition that the Roman Empire remains a  relevant precursor to conditions under corporate capitalism’s present-day empire, an empire which seems more shadowy only until you challenge it.

Within these various sequences, and almost in every line of the poems, the torturous, knotty problems of the present twist and turn and result in few clear possibilities, much less solutions. “The strong station, the weaker station, the station changing messages” is just one of many moments in “Saturate” that let readers know precisely what is saturating them (68). The lines “if he stands on the bucket, we see him in the abundance/lack dichotomy” from “Jewel Box,” show humans caught in their own clownishly absurd display structures (38). There are many more thematic nuances in every part of glowball, which deserves both re-reading and a closer, fuller elucidation of all its details than I am providing here.

My only criticism of glowball is that, at times, the poems struck me as lacking a bit in energy. The book shows a world so collapsibly intertwined on its own bad intentions that its various bits and pieces of language don’t build much forward momentum, and occasionally I felt myself pushing through rather than being taken along. Of course, that’s partly because there’s so much to dwell on in each of the book’s many small parts. Besides, the gleeful rush that comes from energetic language is perhaps, in the world of glowball, no more than a desire for escape, a desperate attempt to catch some final buzz while kneeling bewildered in the ruins.

Book Review: Dieter M. Gräf’s Tussi Research

Containing poems translated from the German by Andrew Shields, Dieter M. Gräf’s Tussi Research (published by Green Integer) was a book I found consistently fascinating and worthy of re-reading, while at the same time I recognized that I was likely missing some or even many of its occasionally oblique cultural nuances.

Tussi Research features a series of poetic meditations on German culture and history, a history not just of many events over several centuries, but also of a variety of mythologies that also make German history and culture what it is. The book delves deep into the German Warrior mythos (my term, not Gräf’s)  and shows how interconnected this primally violent mythos is with German music, literature, culture, politics, and ideas about beauty, revealing that the brutality of German history and its most wildly beautiful artistic creations are so intertwined that it becomes impossible, or at least willfully naive, to think of one without the other.

The poems in Tussi Research explore these and related issues with fascinating indirectness. The poems are often elliptical, working by hints and suggestions, giving the feeling that something, as likely horrific as not, is happening just off to the side of what the poem is detailing. Then, frequently enough, the ellipsis suddenly emerges into a more direct brutality: “crown of thorns in scalp skin,/ martial eavesdropping of hammer/ blows in front of fainting:/listeners to his shattering bones” (45-46). These particular lines are by no means the most blunt moments in the book. Some of the most revolting ones highlight the fact that the brutality being describing is also part of a long history of male violence towards women.

The bluntness (and occasionally more comic shocks, like “the old/ God with a naked/ ass”(25)) inevitably comes along to disrupt the intense beauty that certain lines, with their lyrical energy, precision, and symbolic resonance, offer at moments: “autumn is over; green/wild parrots around last/leaves of the tree by the city/ woods. Warmer,/ now. More and more/ those who were killed/ dissolve, we walk on/ them, toward elsewhere, lighter,/ for meaning in the massacre/ of the eldest” (115). Many similar pastoral locations and images are also revealed as sites whose current beauty overlays some past incident of nearly unspeakable violence. Gräf’s poems frequently juxtapose the intensity of two types of physicality, one of surface beauty and another of the violation of that beauty. At a few moments, the drive for that intensity leads to a bit of overreaching: italics are used to emphasize the lyric power of words that already have enough power not to need further highlighting, with the result that the italics become unnecessary.

A lot of specific historical moments and figures are being referenced in Tussi Research, but the poems rarely let on as to exactly what those are. That’s probably one of the reasons that the book contains at its end a thirty-page glossary that provides more direct information about the people, histories, and mythologies being referenced. I read the poems the first time through without looking at the glossary and found the imagery powerful and mysterious and the rhythms complexly jagged. When I read the glossary and looked back at the poems, that dispelled their mysteries somewhat, although never entirely, mainly because Gräf’s glossary entries are often as poetic, and sometimes as elliptical, as the poems.

There may be a tendency in critical thinking about contemporary poetry to separate a materialist poetics from mythopoetics, a split in which the materialist approach considers mythopoetics too involved in flights of fancy, while mythopoetics disdains the too literal nature of the historical materialist. Whether I’m overstating the existence of that split or not, Tussi Research is fascinating also because of the way it breaks down the difference, showing readers how much historical conditions remain a function of cultural mythologies, just as those mythologies are bound to, and exposed by, the historical conditions that they are more than partly responsible for creating. If Tussi Research explores conditions too brutal to claim that reading this book will be pleasant, the poems here are ones that for that reason, and for the beauty and power they manage nonetheless, are not at all easy to forget.

Brief Reviews

 

wordlick, the latest book by Joe Ross (pictured above), pushes its astonishing linguistic pyrotechnics as far as it can go, then pushes it several steps farther. The series of five-line stanzas, each of which ends in a period, and spread out three to a page, purposefully never make clear whether we are reading one three-stanza untitled poem per page or an ongoing long poem. Each line is crammed with invented word combinations (“Casinochipped in wonderskated breezeby reserve”) that sometimes end in single words and sometimes in further word combinations.

The language of wordlick immerses readers in a social and political bog from which there’s no easy way out (“Kneeraised buttocklock in doggystyle war” is just one of many impossible to navigate morasses), and the bog just keeps coming, overwhelming and fascinating simultaneously. The poems very consciously range in the layered subjects they take up, glance at, and slide by on into the next tongue-twisted-and-numbed-and-twisted-again word package. If the poems undoubtedly revel in language play that’s meant to impress, they do so always with the purpose of showing that it’s not a game at all, but a serious evocation of what might just be more, and more manipulated, social meaning and control than any of us can stand.

It’s worth hearing Ross read these poems live, his shoes clicking, shoulders and head bobbing in some off-kilter combination of tap dancer and prize fighter. Reading them to yourself, be forewarned: even more than most contemporary avant poetry, it’s difficult to get through more than a few pages of wordlick at a time without suffering linguistic burnout. But return to the poems every so often, and the power of what Ross is doing grows and digs in, leaving readers of wordlick with the kind of elation that only exhaustion can create.

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Kathryn l. Pringle’s Right New Biology knows exactly what the central point of all political and social difficulty is: human (and other) bodies. Pringle’s book shows many and often conflicting large global forces coming to bear on that most intimate physical context. Psychology, theology, war, culture, nation states; these are only some of the pressures that human bodies encounter daily.

Right New Biology also reveals that language itself is a body, and makes readers constantly aware of the physical of language through jarring usage of capitalization, broken words, and shattered syllables wobbling unstable across the bland whiteness of the page. This fracturing of words and syllables and different mishapings of the look of the page (which works both against, and with, the fact that the whole book might be considered a single long poem) reminds me a bit of the physicality of Hannah Weiner’s work, although Pringle’s subject matter is framed much more blatantly by competing discourses of power. “broken muscle AND RIGHT/ where all langering furls from endorphins to WAR/ a FOND ignorance we calls it/ this that is sprung of METTLE/ and lending spaces/ veterans MISPLACED limbs/ that trivial uttering/ encamped unfolding/ surreptitious following.” This is a smart, challenging, and remarkable book, informed not just about poetry but about the many non-poetic tensions in which poetry is enmeshed, and bristling with insight about all of them.

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The sensitive, understated lyric surfaces of Lacey Hunter’s poems in her inaugural chapbook The Unicorn hide more deceptive angles that undermine and break up the angst of sexual and romantic desire that the poems often explore. The Unicorn acknowledges how things right in front of us, or things we seem to care about most, are filled often by what people don’t understand or fail to notice, since we’re all too busy obscuring our observations with our needs.

These are poems about the odd edges of loneliness and failed connection, and the way some moments can’t be captured by images. “She took off her danger—the house/doing the good ordinary thing / the narrow/ quiet thing all fighting to rush out together./ We were just going to take a little/and then bring out the car.” Expect to see more worthwhile future work from Hunter, a young poet currently based in Ashland, Oregon, and contact her if you'd like a copy of the chapbook.

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Robert Mittenthal’s Wax World is a crucial book of poems that, I worry, may not be read as widely as it deserves. Mittenthal, based in Seattle, writes poetry that operates at the nexus of several key approaches to contemporary poetry. Anybody interested in new developments in poetry fully informed by the theoretical, political, and aesthetic histories of language poetry and of Vancouver Kootenay School of Writing work will find Wax World as good an example of extending the power of those histories as there is in newer generations of contemporary writing.

Wax World is a brilliant mix of concreteness and abstraction operating not simply as aestheticized technique (a problem in too much contemporary experimental poetry) but as a political case study, and a fully realized instance of its own theory in action. These poems show, through their precise accrual from line to line, a world in which “the abstract power of society creates its concrete unfreedom,” in Guy Debord’s famous phrase.

Mittenthal’s poems in Wax World always risk collapsing into the oblique, dissociated haze of contemporary confusion as a necessary gesture in portraying how contemporary capitalism bewilders us with terminology and megabucks sleight-of-hand. Then certain lines twist, sharply, into moments of political clarity. Mittenthal doesn’t write the flashiest poems around, and he certainly doesn’t fetishize the new in an attempt to grab center stage in the avant poetry popularity contest of the moment. Instead he writes developed, precisely delayed word bombs designed to pinpoint the center of whatever structure he’s going after and blow it open. “Each letter a snapshot of what remains——previous occupant unknown/The body decamped, leaving its plastic bivouac/ An indistinct wave which yields no magic/ No flakes of dead skin. No DNA samples for the imagination.” Wax World also contains the poem “Value Unmapped,” which appeared in an earlier Mittenthal chapbook that I blogged about here.

A Community Writing Itself, ed. Sarah Rosenthal

My review of A Community Writing Itself, a collection of interviews with Bay Area writers conducted by Sarah Rosenthal (pictured above), is now online at Jacket 2.

I hope you'll read the review, but more importantly, I hope you'll read the book.

Brief Reviews

Beautiful poems aren’t my forté, and I’m distrustful of poems that make an uncritical attempt to be beautiful, but the genuine lyric beauty of the poems in James Meetze’s (pictured above) new book, Dayglo, brings along with it the right degree of social and political awareness to make the beauty both earned and subtly undermined whenever necessary–and it turns out to be necessary a lot. Dayglo is full of remarkable insights into the physical and social landscapes of Meetze’s southern California home. These are indeed landscape poems, but they’re very aware of all the social constructions that shape ideas about landscape; these are landscapes filled with people and their contradictions.

If The New Sincerity ever really existed (did it?), Dayglo is the epitome of what it should have been: sincere while crucially incorporating irony, lush while never taking its eye off what is also annoying and frustrating about Southern California culture and politics. The book’s title poem is a successful attempt by Meetze at a longer, more philosophical lyric that’s almost painfully well-attuned to California’s immediately powerful physicality. “Mountains of earth rise from marshland/where we live background lives/ with basketball hoops in the driveway./A sporting chance for light to fill us./ Our digital children and their rapid-fire,/ virtual dreams, I see them bug-eyed in back seats,/ combat in every eye’s reflection.”

Several of the book’s later poems continue the title poem’s big camera-eye view of California environment and culture and take it into a broader historical scope, signalling that Meetze’s ambitions, so well-realized in Dayglo, are only continuing to develop.

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Loquela, by Allyssa Wolf, the fifth number in Insert Press’ Parrot Series, reveals a somewhat more pre-Raphaelite, Victorian, Art Deco romantic sinisterness than did her earlier collection, Vaudeville, which was more consistently noirish and explicitly violent. But while Loquela may be more plaintive and decorative in the kind of longing that it exposes, its concerns remain of a piece with the ones that Vaudeville established: that separation is unavoidable, that the desire to inflict pain on others is inextricably bound with physical love, and that sexuality may very well be the best, most intimate ground for exposing the mechanics of capitalist domination and its various control fetishes.

Wolf knows not simply that love is political, but that politics itself, from its most totalizing conceptual levels to its most individual material acts, invades every aspect of the human desire to touch and be in contact with others. “Blinding silence/In the glittery beige room, and/Hymn in the thorns: “doing nothing”/ Such control of doing nothing, with strings/With each small movement, again/A bruise flowers and flowers...” These are dangerous poems, alluringly feminine, sharply self-aware, and relentless in their nearly science-like attempt to expose the most intimate corruptions that mark human confusion about love and power.

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Allison Carter’s A Fixed Formal Arrangement has two sections. The first is a compelling section of prose poems which, using commas and no periods, feel almost like they sway as they move through a series of impressions, observations and a casual and oddly unique sense of alienation and isolation arisiting from unpleasant or difficult to interpret interactions with others.

The pieces in the second section, closer to flash fiction but still with significant prose poem influenced moves in direction and development, and with several numbered running series with titles like “Public Garage” and “Garage Apartment,” have a similarly disquieting and disorienting affect, as they move through a variety of garages (yes) and related urban and suburban settings. “I saw that you opened your mouth. Now there were three places: school, the rec room, and your mouth”(64). It’s a group of pieces about all the quiet ways people don’t fit the expectations of others, and it exposes and explores a powerful uncertainty about what there might be to want in the wasteland of contemporary American post-place no-place suburban pseudo-ideality. “Who wants to clean the garage floor, everyday, forever?” (79)

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A bit of Bruce Andrews-style jamming the frequencies, a bit flarfy overt political excess, and all bristling hilarious fury that can’t hide an essential good humor, Brian Ang’s debut chapbook Paradise Now introduces a new talent whose work I think people are going to be reading for awhile. “What is Intelligent Design anyway/When quantum giggity-giggity multiverse anti-Batman/ Leads masturbation upon Übermensch Picasso/It’s 6:18 p.m. on Judgment Day/Dear Dr. Stalin Augustine Manhattan/Seneca Cloud Strife Lyotard hello/”.

The chapbook flings a wide range of reference (especially regarding the history of Chinese communism) and theory and genuinely scary wild contradictions at its readers with an abandoned and daring glee. If the poems wear their influences a bit too clearly at times, and if a few lines overreach into bits of generalized rhetoric (“alienation is played out and global capital is bullshit”), that doesn’t significantly harm the unassailably charismatic social grid feedback going on in these poems. I’m interested to see what Ang does next, and I bet I’m not the only one.

If you're in Detroit on Thursday night

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit Reading Series
Curated by K. Silem Mohammad, featuring Alli Warren and K. Lorraine Graham
Thursday, March 24th at 7PM

Please click this link for further details.

Brief Reviews

With its not-at-all-as-dumb-as-I-sound slang, all elbows humor, and pseudo-historical research, Adam Robinson and Other Poems, by Adam Robinson (pictured above), is as fun a book of poetry as I’ve read in awhile. The poems in this book (published by Narrow House) make some use of google searches in a way that recalls both Flarf and Conceptual Writing without being either. Reminiscent of a New York School matter-of-fact-poet who has gone on a consciously ironic self-aggrandizing bender, Robinson consistently and playfully puts a sense of personality center stage. The poems have a wide range of reference that they handle wryly and about which they seem to ask, in an undergraduate drunken slur, “Am I going to be tested on this?” A big plus: This book has the first poem I’ve ever seen about Judas Priest, and it’s good. From the poem “Frederick Law Olmstead”: “He didn’t go to college because sumac poisoning messed up his eyes!/He thought slavery was bad business and wrote about it when he was a journalist/Also he was like a Red Cross guy in the Civil War/He designed the park system in Milwaukee and Buffalo”


Although its title suggests a potentially exaggerated poetic sensitivity that doesn’t appeal to me that much, Louise Mathias’ chapbook Above All Else, the Trembling Resembles a Forest (Burnside Review Press) turns out to be full of subtle poems with precise, understated twists of line and subject matter. These are minimalist elliptical poems, creased by hints, suggestions, and not-quite-hidden implications that purposefully never cohere around clear central stories, although love, alienation, abandonment, danger and violence are frequently invoked. Mathias contrasts an emotional fragility, one that in a few moments feels a bit forced, with lines of blunt physicality that effectively evoke never-quite-seen brutality and an always present sense of fear. “If you ask me to loosen my grip,/ Consider the source—/My father put his right hand through the glass.” If some of the scenarios suggested in her poems run the risk of seeming too expected, what Mathias does with those scenarios is always precise and unique.


Clay Matthews’ Pretty, Rooster (Cooper Dillon Books) is a strong series of sonnets notable in their understatement and their ability to make the casual and ordinary seem significant. The chicken art, in the cartoons that frame the collection and the flashbook that runs through it, gives some whimsical pseudo-down home flair to the deadpan humor. The repetition of the last line of one poem as the first line of the next poem was often memorable, although the method starts and stops somewhat randomly. Although no one is going to call this a significantly intellectual book, a convincing world view and philosophy does emerge, one involved in the maintenance and care of the particular. “I wash the gutters, try to patch the house/ together with some caulk. I can’t say that/ without you laughing. That’s how words run south/around here. I feel today I want at/ least to say something beautiful. The dog/licks his leg and we are alive.”


I liked Laura Cherry’s Haunts from Cooper Dillon Books best in its more biting, satirical moments (“Surely your next move/will be a twenty-one bagpipe apology,/with you in a hot air balloon high above/reproach, flaunting your star-spangled manner”. Many of the precise descriptions of character were also revealing and memorable. At times the tendency towards quiet understatement (there’s even a poem titled “After Li Ch’ing Chao) was very evocative and affecting, while at other times the drive to be evocative and affecting seemed overplayed in the context of not always inventive subject matter and situations that didn’t seem as emotionally moving as the language wanted them to be. While the satirical metaphors were often fantastic, other metaphors seemed strained or too conventional in their phrasing (“when I go there/like a butterfly on a pin/of narrow want”). Still, at their best moments (and there were many), these poems effectively highlighted the subtle absurdity and often unarticulated pain of contemporary Americans stunned by their own complexity: “You’re dead and I’m here with your ex-wife. Stranger things have happened, but this one/didn’t occur to me before it occurred.”

What Is A Lyric Poem?

Lyric Poetry consists of a poem, such as a sonnet or an ode, that expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet. The term lyric is now commonly referred to as the words to a song. Lyric poetry does not tell a story which portrays characters and actions. The lyric poet addresses the reader directly, portraying his or her own feeling, state of mind, and perceptions.

A short poem with one speaker (not necessarily the poet) who expresses thought and feeling. Though it is sometimes used only for a brief poem about feeling (like the sonnet).it is more often applied to a poem expressing the complex evolution of thoughts and feeling, such as the elegy, the dramatic monologue, and the ode. The emotion is or seems personal In classical Greece, the lyric was a poem written to be sung, accompanied by a lyre.

A type of emotional songlike poetry, distinguished from dramatic and narrative poetry.

Lyric poetry is a form of poetry with rhyming schemes that express personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were meant to be played to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat.

Highly musical verse that expresses the speaker's feelings and observations. In ancient times poems were sung with accompaniment from a lyre. Modern lyric poems, although usually not sung, still possess musical qualities

A short poem of songlike quality.

Lyric Poems such as a sonnet or an ode, express the thoughts and feelings of the poet. Lyric poems do not tell a story which portrays characters and actions. The lyric poet addresses the reader directly, portraying his or her own feelings, state of mind, and perceptions.

Of or relating to a category of poetry that expresses subjective thoughts and feelings, often in a songlike style or form.

Lyrics are the written words in a song. Lyrics can be written during composition of a song or after the accompanying music is composed. Sometimes, however, music is adapted to or written for a song or poem that has already been written. Not all lyrics generally make sense or are even intelligible. This has long been a plaint about the work of rock and roll lyricists, although it doesn't pertain only to that genre of music. From the Greek, a lyric is a song sung with a lyre. Now, it is commonly used to mean a song of no defined length or structure. A lyric poem is one that expresses a subjective, personal point of view.

Through the years, three main kinds of poetry have developed: lyric, narrative, and dramatic. Lyric poetry is any short poem. Narrative poems are ones that tell stories, an epic or ballad. Dramatic poetry also tells a story, but in this case one or more of the poem's characters acts out the story.

On the ancient Greek stage, a dramatic production often featured a chorus, which was a group of speakers, who commented on the action of the play. When a single individual sang or spoke more personally and accompanied himself on a lyre, the verse was called lyric. Thus, our present designation of lyric poetry includes personal, individual emotion. The lyric does not tell a story as an epic or narrative poem does. Most poetry as we think of it is lyric poetry. There are many subdivisions of lyric poetry. The weakest form is the song, especially popular songs that are heard frequently on the radio. With the exception of the hymn and chant, most songs do not achieve the level of true poetry, even though they employ some poetic devices. The words to songs are often inaccurately referred to as “lyrics.” The entire song is the lyric. The next best-known lyric is the sonnet, which may be in the Petrarchan or Italian form, Elizabethan or Shakespearean or English form, or the American or innovative form. The Petrarchan takes its name from the 13th century Italian poet Petrarch. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of two stanzas: an octave of eight lines with the rime scheme ABBAABBA and a sestet of six lines with a varied rime scheme CDE.

A poem, such as a sonnet or an ode, that expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet. The term lyric is now generally referred to as the words to a song.

In ancient Greece, lyric poetry was sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument called a lyre, and its subject matter embraced thoughts and sentiment, rather than heroic deeds or other classical subjects. Housman's "Loveliest of Trees" provides an example of the personal insight associated with lyric poetry: "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/Is hung with bloom along the bough/And stands about the woodland ride/Wearing white for Eastertide./ Now, of my threescore years and ten,/Twenty will not come again,/And take from seventy springs a score,/It only leaves me fifty more./And since to look at things in bloom/Fifty springs are little room,/About the woodlands I will go/To see the cherry hung with snow."

Meaning: A short poem of songlike quality. Classified under: Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents. Synonyms: lyric poem; lyric. Hypernyms ("lyric poem" is a kind of...): poem; verse form (a composition written in metrical feet forming rhythmical lines). Meronyms (parts of "lyric poem"): strophe (one section of a lyric poem or choral ode in classical Greek drama); antistrophe (the section of a choral ode answering a previous strophe in classical Greek drama; the second of two metrically corresponding sections in a poem). Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "lyric poem"): ode (a lyric poem with complex stanza forms).

Lyric Poem Pictures. Click any thumbnail below to go to the full-sized version of that picture or photo.

A poem with song-like qualities, usually employing sensory details to convey an emotional experience. Lyric poems can become songs with the addition of a tune. Ballads and sonnets are popular forms of lyric poems.

Mad Hatters Review Issue 12 Now Available

The next issue of Mad Hatters Review, its 12th, is now available online.

The Mad Hatters Review was founded in 2005 by Carol Novack (pictured above), who is still the publication's Editor-in-Chief. If you don’t know her work, Novack is also an excellent writer of experimental fiction, and a performer ready to spring the unexpected on her audiences at any time.

Mad Hatters is a multi-genre journal, with poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and much else in the way of writing, and it makes innovative use of image and sound. It’s a literary journal that will talk to you, literally, and there’s as much innovation, fun, and significant insight in it as anybody could want. I hope you’ll check it out.

Some of my own pieces of flash fiction, accompanied by music from Paul A. Toth and art from Gene Tanta, can be found in the Wit & Whimsy section.

Happy reading.

Laynie Browne and Joe Ross reading at Agitprop, Saturday Feb 12, 7 p.m.

We hope you can join us on SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 12 at 7pm for a reading by Joe Ross and Laynie Browne. You can readmore about our series and view a list of upcoming events at
http://agitpropreadings.blogspot.com/

 LAYNIE BROWNE is the author of nine collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent publications include: The Desires of Letters, from Counterpath and Roseate, Points of Gold, from Dusie Books (both
2010). Other recent publications include The Scented Fox, (Wave Books 2007), Daily Sonnets (Counterpath Press, 2007) and Drawing of a Swan Before Memory, (University of Georgia Press, 2005). Her honors include: winner of the National Poetry Series, of the Contemporary Poetry Series, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Poetry, and a recent Pushcart Prize Nomination. With others she has co- curated various reading series including the Ear Inn reading series in New York, the Subtext Series in Seattle, and now the POG reading series Tucson Arizona. She has taught creative writing at The University of Washington, Bothell, at Mills College in Oakland and at the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona, where she is currently the Elementary Education Coordinator.


JOE ROSS is the recipient of a Gertrude Stein Poetry Award  and the author of numerous books, most recently Strata (Dusie, 2008) and EQUATIONS=equals (Green Integer, 2004). Ross was born in Pennsylvania and after university, moved to Washington, D.C.. In D.C., he worked at The JFK Center for the Arts, served as the President of the Poetry Board at The Folger Shakespeare Library and was the Literary Editor of the Washington Review, 1991-1997. He co-founded and directed the In Your Ear poetry reading series. In 1997 he received an NEA Fellowship for his poetry and moved to San Diego, where he worked for that city’s Commission for Arts and Culture. In 1999, he left that position to put his poetics into practice, and to work directly in politics serving as Chief of Policy for elected officials. He also co-founded the Beyond the Page reading series. In 2004, he and his wife moved to Paris, where their two children were born, and where he continues to publish while working as an educator.


Agitprop readings are free, but wine and donations to the gallery are always welcome.

We hope to see you there and for festivities before and afterward.

Agitprop Gallery
Saturday, December 4, Reading 7pm, Art Opening at 8pm
2837 University Avenue in North Park
(Entrance on Utah, behind Glenn's Market)
San Diego, CA 92104 * 619.384.7989