This Connection of Everyone With Lungs by Juliana Spahr

University of California Press, 2005

Reviewed by Monica Fambrough

We begin with cells, and in beginning with cells, already we are taking on a fundamental contradiction.

      There are these things:

      cells, the movement of cells and the division of cells

Cells connect with each other—they combine to form living organisms, but they are also autonomous. They function as individual units of a whole: separate yet connected. Cells divide to become larger entities, hands and feet and lungs. Millions of cells connect and form a larger organism. As humans, we are individuals, but we contain multitudes. This kind of contradiction, which we might consider to be a paradox, can also be observed in the geographical and political make-up of the United States. Fifty individual units combine to make a nation: separate yet connected.

In This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, Juliana Spahr takes advantage of one of poetry’s great capacities: the capacity to transport contradictions from the realm of abstraction to the realm of the concrete and vice versa. Poetry can recognize a contradiction without taking sides. And as this work shows, in a complex political climate, taking sides offers dangerous comfort.

Writing as a resident of Hawaii, the state that perhaps most exemplifies the U.S.’s geographical and political paradox, Spahr explores the concept of complicity. If we are all like Hawaii, apart yet connected, in what ways are we complicit in the activities of our various contiguous parts? How responsible are the cells for the behavior of the larger organism, however far removed?

      I speak of those moments when we do not understand why we
      must be joined or separated in the most mundane ways.

      I speak of why our skin is our largest organ and how it keeps us
      contained.

As the book moves on from the abstraction and biology of these earlier statements, into more politically explicit territory, it becomes clear that our sense of separation is what renders us incapable of seeing our own complicity in the behaviors of larger systems. It makes us feel simultaneously blameless and inert. The mundane ways we often feel connected to each other make us dull to the actual potential and consequences of our actions. The warehouse and the distributor and the mall and the salesclerk separate us from the Indonesian laborer who makes our blouse, but they also connect us to her.

The accumulation of small connections, the way they make a body, a country, and a universe, comes to life in the first section of Spahr’s book: a series of repeated and accumulating phrases that form a three-page introduction to the larger second section.

      as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and
      the space around the hands in and out

      as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and
      the space around the hands and the space of the room in and out

      as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and
      the space around the hands and the space of the room and the
      space of the building that surrounds the room in and out

The tediousness of the accumulation building to large paragraphs lends the poem an “Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly” sense of irresistible inevitability. We know where we are headed (“Perhaps she’ll die…”) but we become attached to the steps necessary to getting there. And we become aware of the significance of even minute variation. From a post-structural standpoint, at least, variation within repetition is a powerful form of resistance, linguistically or socially, because it demonstrates that change is possible even in hegemonic structures.

And resistance is called for, as the second section of This Connection of Everyone With Lungs artfully announces. But it is an unexpected kind of resistance. The long piece, “Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003” stretches like an enormous skin across the remaining 64 pages of the book, which are appropriately divided by separate yet connected dated sections.

What the skin contains is a different sort of accumulation. Repetition occurs but is less restrained, erratic. The content ambitiously reaches from nature towards politics, and from geography towards pop culture. Page after page, the tone remains flat—masterfully and relentlessly consistent—emphasizing the level to which beauty and atrocity can become mundane information. The even tone helps to unite disparate elements and emotions, forcing the reader to consider how separation and connection, difference and sameness, work together to make meaning.

      While we turned sleeping uneasily Liam Gallagher brawled and
      irate fans complained that “Popstars: The Rivals” was fixed.

      While we turned sleeping uneasily the Supreme Court agreed to
      hear the case of whether university admissions may favor racial
      minorities.

      While we turned sleeping uneasily poachers caught sturgeon in the
      reed-fringed Caspian, which shelters boar and wolves, and some of
      the residents on the space shuttle planned a return flight to the US.

Reading the poems is like getting your news from the Internet. Internet news is the great equalizer. It gives us Iraq and Angelina simultaneously without taking sides. What Spahr reminds us is that Iraq and Angelina are connected. While she is occupied with Brad, and we are occupied with their exclusive Us Weekly photo spread, Iraq is occupied by the U.S.

      But the beach on which we reclined is occupied by the US military
      so every word we said was shaped by other words, every moment
      of beauty occupied.

As the book concludes, language and poetry become occupied. Everyday speech is pre-empted:

      When we talk about how the Florida nurse died of smallpox
      vaccination and how sperm may sniff their way to eggs we talk also
      of M109A6 Paladin Howitzers and the M270 multiple-launch
      rocket system.

Finally, the violence occupies the bodies of beloveds in lines that draw the seeming contradictions together, in bed with each other:

      When I wrap around yours bodies, I wrap around the USS Abraham
      Lincoln, unmanned aerial vehicles, and surveillance.

The mistrust implied by surveillance is appropriate, because the intimacy with machines of war is not entirely abstract. No matter who we are, no matter where we are from, we are connected with these things. As are the lovers who lay beside us. The end of Spahr’s book is a fantastic nightmare in which our complicity in the atrocity of war is made manifest in our bodies and language. We do not actually control what we say, and words we didn’t know we knew pour from our mouths. Involuntarily, we confess.

This Connection of Everyone With Lungs refuses to be comfortable with the expected messages and means of political expression. It knows organic language and forms, as opposed to catch phrases and direct attacks, make the most convincing arguments. It aims concerns not only at the warmongers, but also at the peacemakers. What is ultimately implied by Spahr’s poetry is that by thinking of ourselves as blamelessly on the side against the war, we prevent ourselves from acknowledging our connection to it, as well as to its victims.

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JULIANA SPAHR as born in Chillicothe, Ohio in 1966. Her books also include Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan, 2001), Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (University of Alabama, 2001), and Response (Sun & Moon, 1996). She co-edits the journal Chain with Jena Osman, and frequently self-publishes her work.

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MONICA FAMBROUGH was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Baffling Combustions, Art New England, Octopus Magazine, Weird Deer and American Weddings, among others. A chapbook, Black Beauty, is forthcoming from Katalanche Press.

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This review previously appeared in CutBank Poetry 65, 2006.

Switchback Books Call for Entries for Gatewood Prize

We here at Switchback Books are excited to announce a call for entries for our Gatewood Prize.

The Gatewood Prize is Switchback Books' annual competition for a first full-length collection of poems by a woman writing in English between the ages of 18 and 39. It is named after Emma Gatewood, the first woman to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail.

Switchback Books editors will select at least 10 finalists and a judge will select the prizewinner, who will be recognized with a cash prize of $1000 and publication by Switchback Books.

Manuscripts remain anonymous until a winner is selected.

Contest Deadline: September 1, 2006
2006 Judge: Arielle Greenberg

For complete contest guidelines, please visit our website at www.switchbackbooks.com.

We hope that you forward this on to anyone who may be interested!

Thanks much, and happy writing!

Kind regards,

Brandi Homan, Hanna Andrews, and Becca Klaver
Editors, Switchback Books

An Educated Heart by Mairéad Byrne

Palm Press, 2005

Reviewed by Erika Howsare

A heart is educated by what it encounters, absorbs, reflects, or is invaded by. Mairead Byrne’s An Educated Heart is full of readymade (as in found) evidence of the world at work, alongside crafted documentation of the author’s responses to that world. This may sound mechanical, or sophomoric; and indeed, Byrne often risks a kind of unapologetic simplicity of tone and form that, in less capable hands, would fall flat. Within Byrne’s work, though—which is often procedural in method—these two kinds of evidence blend much more seamlessly, sometimes masterfully, than that description would suggest.

For example, in “Almost,” the procedure calls for Byrne to insert the word “almost” into each of 14 Reuters headlines, always just before the words “Killed” or “Dies”: “Moscow Pool Roof Collapse Almost Kills 26, Search Goes On (REUTERS)”. The act of inserting this word becomes a kind of ritual or prayer, a sadly futile deployment of language as talisman. This recalls the use of Word as spiritual or magical instrument, as in Abracadabra or Om. And, of course, it is a commentary: If a poem cannot bring back the dead, perhaps it can through calling attention to its own innefficacy accomplish something less tangible, like conjuring hope within a matrix of sterilized, up-to-the-minute despair.

In another piece, with an even lighter touch, Byrne simply attaches the title “Long Distance Relationship” to a set of web-based driving directions from somewhere in Illinois to Providence, Rhode Island, where she lives. The directions are an evocation of our current obsession with geographical omniscience, as well as an utterly distanced (as in “objective”) representation of distance. And even as the poem suggests a personal condition of loneliness, it becomes a depersonalized function, like a spreadsheet or a satellite photo. “Relationship,” after all, can mean nothing more than finance.

Still, these poems are intensely of the heart; they map the human urge toward a bodily and soulful existence which, in Byrne’s view, strains against the grinding gears of our present condition. Everything is a dance between these opposing forces—the innermost self, wet and vulnerable, on the one hand; the machine, manifested as war or grocery-store receipt, on the other. In “The Day,” the repetitive demands of parenthood elegantly straddle these extremes; the poem consists entirely of the sentences “I step up to the mat” and “I step up to bat.” The very mechanization of the language, through repetition and simplistic rhyme, is the center in which the poem’s emotional impact resides. In “Crop,” there is a searing statement of personal loss (“I thought/ because you saw me/ sliced &/ torn open/ &/ the shining child/ dragged from me/ you would have/ stayed with us/ for life/ but not so”) embedded in lines of capital Xs. These are both visual shapes—anonymous detritus like the power lines we unconsciously delete from our vision—and textual problems that eat into (“crop”) the rightness of the lines, the integrity of their diction. Taken lyrically, they are a field of something negative that grows in rows—an agriculture of sickness.

Byrne displays not only a dadaist’s sense of the found, but a lyricist’s ear and an artist’s feel for timing. “Link,” for example, has the pared-down structure and tonal surety of a Robert Creeley jewelbox:

      “You hoist the pump of your rage
      in Minnesota 1968
            &
      in Providence 2003
      tears gush out.”

In her procedural work and collage poems, Byrne manifests the intersection of reader and writer in a single, fragile body. She also focuses on the terrible crossroads of the political and erotic that is war, as in “Headlines:” “WOMAN BRINGS MAN TO BRINK AS MISSILES LAUNCH/ NO SEX SAYS PRESIDENT SINCE 1993.” We see the great global machine spinning its furious turbines, the techno-night where computer viruses grow, the unfathomable economic groupmind as constituted by billions of dreary and forgotten transactions (“Clio wants Kids Tropicana but this is cheaper 2 @ $1.99,” from “Eastside Market”).

Yet the book is not only an account of the leading edge of angst, where trouble slices into our awareness. It is a human, maternal, sexual, responsible document of living and, the reader suspects, also supplies evidence of managing trouble, whether individual or world crises—in other words, it’s cathartic. The humor of “Reminiscence,” in which the speaker recounts a lover’s baffling renomenclature of things the speaker loves (“Well, you have beautiful hair, I said. You little ninny—that’s not hair, that’s persillis”), balances and heals the plain injury behind it. And the librarian’s project of amassing synonyms for “Broken,” “Split,” “Crushed” and so on—in a series of seemingly found poems that make up the book’s only underedited section—is an act of almost pitiful carefulness in the face of the destruction Byrne tackles: the war in Iraq and a divorce involving children, among other topics.

The fact that Byrne maintains a connection to raw emotion—again, the word “unapologetic” seems appropriate—allows her to succeed in taking on subjects that, because of their potential for overstated failure, many poets avoid. In the same way, her fondness for self-conscious form and obvious experimentation gives her license to write and imply clear narratives. When Byrne reads to an audience, her presence is large and artificial in the old-fashioned, theatrical sense. She adopts the persona of “reader” rather than pretending to reject it as so many post-language poets do; she uses her body, voice, and gestures as actors do. Similarly, in this book, she willingly dons the mantel of “storyteller,” “protestor,” “human voice.” In both cases, the risk pays off as the bravado of the performance illuminates the material. And the concepts are compelling enough so that the poems, though appreciable at a glance, continue to work long after the first encounter.

**

MAIRÉAD BYRNE immigrated to the United States from Ireland in 1994 for reasons of poetry. Her collection Nelson & The Huruburu Bird was published in 2003 by Wild Honey Press. She lives with her two daughters in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches poetry at Rhode Island School of Design.

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ERIKA HOWSARE lives in Virginia. Her work has been published in Fence, Chain and Denver Quarterly, among others. Recent projects include a multi-genre, multimedia project based on walking across Rhode Island, and an ongoing online collaboration with the formidable Jen Tynes. She teaches at Longwood University.

60 lv bo(e)mbs by Paolo Javier

O Books, 2005

Reviewed by Geraldine Kim

60 lv bo(e)mbs is a contemporary epic/net of experience that snags everything from Tagalog to Murakami to Derrida to Aaliyah to Allah to Horace—leaving the reader in a space beyond words, perhaps something of the pre-lingual/pre-conceptual—operating/exploding via the fragment, and in doing so, reinvents the fragment itself.

In “The Id Markings” section, for example, the fragment gives voice to the subconscious/pre-lingual, as suggested in the poem, “Paolo’s Silence:”

      islands blanket the sea          dulcinea coma caters to fresh cadavers

      tremble a notch          humid          invested          bases
      local mental kargador electric suggestion
      the heroic mode divided into swings
      why umbrage          adore roses          practice in doses on me

      August arrival          in medias res the last of my          Infinity
      two parallels          coo where, po?          pose to my enemy brasses

The unsaid/pre-conceived is exposed by “divid[ing it] into swings” or “brass”-knuckled fists that are hurtled at the reader, in the midst of a found rhythm, “in medias res.” The reader is left in a timeless “[i]nfinity,” caught in the “two parallels” of reading the text both sequentially/consecutively and visually/immediately.

There are also “swings” within the fragments themselves. In the line, “dulcinea coma caters to fresh cadavers,” “coma” could be the English word for a state of prolonged unconsciousness and/or the Spanish imperative, “eat.” “[D]ulcinea” or “sweetness” is like the melody of the line and “coma” splits the line into a bass tremor of unconsciousness and a soprano scream of cannibalistic horror. “[H]ear me waltz, note all kindness” is a line from “37” that also shares this musically fragmented fragment idea—where the rhythm of the three-syllable waltz is broken by the “-ness” of “kindness.”

The fragments, when repeated, also act as a computer algorithm and/or mantra/refrain. The repetition of “corzine,” “Trysteaser,” “my Alma,” “coo, where po?,” “vent Kai,” “crepuscular,” and “why hyenas” (among others) are positioned in different contexts/syntax, similar to the way Aaron Kunin’s “Sore Throat” poems work within a limited vocabulary. There seems to be some unspoken/internal/unconscious logic, some program or pattern that dictates when/where these words manifest themselves.

This algorithm idea is further amplified in “Paolo’s Lust” where, similar to “Corpse & Skull” and “My Alma,” “Paolo” is repeated, in the context of the relationship with “Alma” or “spirit.” The author becomes a character through repetition of the subject: “toddle Paolo’s verse... algorithm…si Paolo as a rule?” The word “Paolo” becomes an “algorithm[ic]” “rule” that asserts its presence through repetition.

In “English Is An Occupation,” the repeated word of choice “Paolo” “occupies” in the sense of military occupation, mental space, and/or a job/commodified labor: “today Paolo occupies you, today Paolo occupies you.” Though one would think the repetition of “Paolo” as the author’s subjective thoughts are what occupies the reader, it seems that here, English or language, is what frames our conception/perception.

These repeated fragments also signify possible censorship, as the poem, “Corpse & Skull,” seems to show:

      Interest host plebian lost Hamas tell corpse & skull
      Missile the taste of us ardent lust corpse & skull

      He must persuade Trysteaser’s corpse & skull
      Kal-El liberates all semper fi symptoms in all corpse & skull

Here, the fragment seems to point to the existence of the unsaid through the repetition of “corpse & skull” at the end of each line. Though censorship blots words out, by constantly reproducing the censored term (in this case, “corpse & skull”), the unsaid is made apparent through what covers it. In “A Tale by the Trysteaser” this trope is made completely apparent: “YOU WILL CATER TO DELETE / EXPLETIVE.” The words that are censoring are in bold and centered to promote the existence of what is deleted or censored.

For “My Alma,” a similar mechanism is used. With the repetition of the phrase “my Alma,” like a prayer, the phrase cannibalistically “access[es its] own zombies.” One must “access” one’s own spirituality; the relationship with one’s spirit is distant and electronic; the line, “emailing my Alma,” suggests that the transcendental is parallel with earthly experience, like email.

In another section, “Combat Lap,” where “lap” could be another circuit or an action of the tongue, the poem, “Gulp Air,” uses the fragment in a performative sense:

      “Honey, do we list to star a schooner’s mysterious disarray?”
      (Highest marquees act to convolute or shun hicks.

      Lusty pair knocks boots auspiciously, unless primness harasses
            their stray asses.

      Kiss n’ telling on homey Alma squanders their m.o.

      Gulp air.)

The fragments caught in the parentheses are used almost like stage directions in a play. The use of the fragment in “A Play, A Play” is also performative. Paolo, Love, Villa, and Nietzsche respond to each other:

      LOVE: Do you remember when we used to roar?
      PAOLO: I do. I remember going to church every week.
      LOVE: (in a dancehall reggae voice)
            Hey mister mentioned, ask yourself this question:
            Have you ever stopped to think what makes a girl cheat?
            Have you ever asked her if she likes only whole wheat?
            You need to check yourself before you start kicking teeth…
      VILLA, & * NIETZSCHE: (ibid)
            …cuz you’re not ready for this yet, boy!

Each speaker embodies each fragment, literalizing the polyvocal quality of the text itself. The off-handed quality of the stage direction “in a dancehall reggae voice” adds to the spontaneity of the lines, suggesting the musicality of the fragment as well.

60 lv bo(e)mbs explores the fragment and its uses by contextualizing it in different surroundings, performing it, repeating it, having it fragment itself, making music out of it, and having it expose the unsaid through censorship and through the “two parallel” readings of the visual and the sequential. This book challenges our approach to text and suggests that which is beyond our language’s conception is what we should be conscious, a paradox that is frightening and complex and open to multiple interpretations.

**

PAOLO JAVIER is the author of 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada), which received a Small Press Traffic Award. He lives in New York.

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GERALDINE KIM was born in 1983 in West Boylston, Massachusetts. A graduate of New York University, she is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction and Poetry at San Francisco State University. Her work has been published in Dicey Brown and Fourteen Hills and her play, Donning Cheadle, was chosen to be produced for the SFSU One-Act Festival and SPT Poet's Theater. Her first book, Povel, was the winner of Fence Books' 2005 Modern Poets Series and was named as one of the top 25 favorite books of 2005 by the Village Voice.

The Goddess of the Hunt is Not Herself, by Sam White

Slope Editions, 2005

Reviewed by Sandra Simonds

There is something distinctly off-kilter about the interior and exterior landscapes of Sam White’s The Goddess of the Hunt is Not Herself. Lines like “And though the hot air balloon / was an afterthought of farmland, / it contained our deepest wish / for agreement.” and “Confetti is the hand that tosses it” reveal an incongruous world where notions of unity and agreement are desired, but not fulfilled, and this schism propels the book along a strange and beautiful path. As he says in the last line of the book’s title poem, “Whatever happens next is your kiss.” “To live here” he writes in “The Cycle of Life,” “you must be celebrant. You must be equal parts water and confetti” and the book feels its way through the emptiness of its odd prescription.

White’s writing is spare but precise. Ennui is matched with mystery but a sense of humor is also present and the following long title definitely had me laughing: “Lower the Dachshund into the Mountainous Panorama; It was the Missing Segment and Now Bravely Yips into the Frontier.” White creates a place of what is out of place. What I enjoy the most about this book is the loneliness that is addressed from such unusual angles. His world is vibrant and continually transforms, as in these lines from “Creation Myth”: “In one short day the finch is swapped for an owl / the owl for a ghost” yet there is no obvious reason why. “So much goes horribly unsaid,” White says in “Announcement” and this might be the radiant crux of the world made inside these poems.

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SAM WHITE graduated from Colby College and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has published poems in such journals as The Boston Review, The Paris Review,The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, American Letters & Commentary and elsewhere. He founded and helped coordinate the Jubilat Reading Series with publisher Robert Casper in Somerville, MA. His adventures reading ten great poems to passersby in Times Square, New York City, were chronicled in Poets & Writers magazine. He currently lives at Monohasset Mill, an artist community housed in a historic mill complex in Providence, RI, where he's condo association president. He serves on the board of directors for The Steel Yard, an abutting industrial arts nonprofit. He also teaches at the University of Rhode Island, and is at work on his second book poems and a graphic novel of some proportion.

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SANDRA SIMONDS lives in Tallahassee, Florida where she is a PhD student in Creative Writing, and the editor of the forthcoming Wildlife Poetry Magazine. She graduated from UCLA in 2000 and the University of Montana in 2003. She has poems forthcoming in Volt, The Canary, Seneca Review and New Orleans Review.

Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in My Mouth) by Tenney Nathanson

O Books, 2005

Reviewed by Paul Klinger

In Tenney Nathanson’s Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in my Mouth), you will quickly notice a preoccupation with eructions, sieves, and bags (not to mention the word crenellated). What you might not notice amid all the fireworks is how far Nathanson extends the simple gesture of the poem’s subtitle. The Night Sky with Stars in my Mouth takes a syntactical cue from various self-portraits by separating the self from the subject or center of a title. The articulation of the relationship inverts the importance of the self and its surroundings. The poem follows suit, as this first move sets the stage for all manner of reflexive activities.

Moving through these 108 cantos without the help of page numbers is no small job. A broad swath of intertexts, listed as end credits, pop up in every song, but by no means does this list prove exhaustive, as you can find Frank O’Hara mixing it up with Hart Crane or Ron Silliman in a small cameo on the bus. It is the vast machinery of Nathanson's poem that demands a special attention, which must be paid out through the ear. Musical changes signal a gear shift, as the poet flops between the transmission of memories and his own commentary about the poem. The poem immediately displays a fondness for directing its own traffic. Observe:

      Commentary on this two parts. In the first the mind that is moving
      is nearly arrested by the framing portion of stuccoed brick wall, lush
            plants within a natural reticule.
      commentary from the story and then in the second part directly and
            clearly the mind is moving the foolish argument gold when playing
            for iron

Commentary and instructions aren't the only help Nathanson offers. He
anticipates multiple readings of his work, as in Canto 15 when he preempts the
dismissive reader:

      thinking this guy is weird won't get you out of this one yet    sutured
            grass your adventure in pointillism but you merged like zoom

“Pointillism” is no clumsy description of the reader’s experience. The ruptures that occur in these two lines are common and become a pleasure, as Nathanson gracefully punctuates his long poem with this comic timing. These slippages allow for various forms of bumbling to develop, including a disintegrated view of confession:

      begin    short torqued ending phrase no longer
      satisfaction if it end. think so That we are a brute

Similar in effect to these lines is each occurrence of the word "verbatim" in
the poem, as it fronts the seizure of some phrase in an effort to keep the
reader from sinking too far below the surface he is paving over these texts.
That surface is the self-portrait, as Nathanson’s effort to transmit a self drives the poem's constant shifting through the sprawling range of the poem's title.

Nathanson haunts the subjects of appropriation and transmission. His approach to the intertexts often poses trepidation as a kind of wrapping. In other words, consistent reminders of how he feels about what he is doing serve as "angels," which often preside at the outset or closing of a particular song. The following occurs towards the beginning of Canto 48:

      if use be mention, saying seeing, sewing: sueing for misappropriation
            direct experience of, the ghostly shriveled finger should scare you
            shitless:
      whenever the source dignified quiet

The quietness of his sources, or intertexts, cannot be overstated. They have
been "transmitted and waxed," though not necessarily in that order. Throughout the poem, one gets the sense of overhearing the problems of the poem's process, particularly the problems posed by the poet's long-standing relationship with
his material:

      grammatical and continuous thread, the genius of translation is necessary
            the original connected with worries, disappointments, obedience,
            clingings of the divine no hankerings speak of these passing cha-
            racters. replace the present with utmost rapidity.

The "genius of translation" fleshes out Nathanson's presentation of his sources. The task he seemingly assigns himself as translator is to "change reverence into inapproachability of truth." What he chooses to translate about each source text seems less important than the large-scale leveling of these texts into a bonded aggregate, chips off the old block.

When a chip doesn't seem to fit, that is when it approaches something easy, Nathanson jumps on the opportunity: “Who let this into the house? To macadam the macaw.” What poses as non-sequitur is a koan that lays bare an overriding concern of the poem: the translation of mimicry into self-expression. In the final canto, Nathanson says, "You end by beginning on your own. Words in your mouth." As in the subtitle, the mouth becomes a locus of authority, though Nathanson is careful to reassert the wildness that resides in the process of mouthing words with a bevy of sound effects (dings and booms galore). Towards the close of the poem, Nathanson acknowledges the effect of this wildness while surveying his finished work:

      I thought it would be different, more reflective and melodramatic
            at once - could have picked some other restaurant, book, sky, cohort,
            place, and - uh uh

With a characteristic grunt, Nathanson shuts off before he presses too long after something inapproachable. This sensitivity to duration becomes one of the more revealing gestures of a portrait which ultimately unsettles the relation of selfhood to home.

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TENNEY NATHANSON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona, where from 1993-1996 he served as Director of the PhD program in Literature and Coordinator of Graduate Studies for the Department of English. His poems have appeared in such journals as Jacket, Kenning, Antennae, can we have our ball back?,The LA Review, Social Text, The Massachusetts Review, Ironwood, Sonora Review, Caterpillar, Tamarisk, RIF/T3 and RIF/T5. He has published two chapbooks, The Book of Death (Membrane Press, 1975) and One Block Over (Chax Press, 1998), and the full-length Erased Art, also from Chax Press.

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PAUL KLINGER was born in Baytown, Texas. He is a member of Tucson's POG Collective. Some of his poems can be read at Dusie, hutt, and Snorkel. He is now at work on a website called White Buildings and an erasure of P.J. Bailey's "Festus." Check out his blog, Sea Quills, here.

The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft’s Secret Self by Joe Wenderoth

Verse Press, 2005

Reviewed by Adam Golaski

"Letters from the American Poet" is a collection of emails written by an editor at American Poet to Joe Wenderoth regarding a solicited submission. They are the letters of an editor who has no real editorial power, an editor who wishes to support a solicited author, but who must please his/her readership. The editor attempts to work with Wenderoth to edit the submission. Judging by the editor’s letters (Wenderoth does not include the emails he wrote), Wenderoth seems amenable to censoring his work, but not to the extent necessary for publication. Wenderoth’s solicited essay doesn’t run in American Poet.

The essay in question is “The Holy Spirit of Life.” The essay begins:

The question of irreverence, of course, is the question of reverence. To revere… or to refuse to revere…. From the point of view of The Authorities, to refuse to revere is a dangerous thing, a thing to be punished. This kind of thing—the censor as a punisher—is not, however, what I want to talk about in this essay. Looking at the irreverence I am given credit for, I am struck by something more important.

What Wenderoth is struck by is that “reverence [is] implicit in my alleged irreverences.” Wenderoth proceeds to write an apologia for his poetry, specifically the poem, “Semiotics: Dehiscence Is Never/Always Sought.”

“Semiotics…” features Jesus Christ as a woman “initiating an orgy of sorts” with the apostles, who are shocked to discover that Jesus is a woman. American Poet chose not to run the essay because of Wenderoth’s description of his own poem—at least that’s what the editor from American Poet tells Wenderoth. Reading the essay “The Holy Spirit of Life,” I can’t help but wonder if the editors of American Poet opted not to publish Wenderoth’s essay because it’s such a silly bit of writing.

The essay’s logic: irreverence is reverence for what The Authorities (a term left undefined) find taboo, impolite, not Christian, etc. Wenderoth’s example is the poem “Semiotics….” He writes, “One poem I wrote last year can be traced to the watching of pornography. In the pornography I’ve watched, there is sometimes a woman doubly or triply penetrated. I revere this woman.” What Wenderoth tends to do is to mock: as he says—“I understand the current rules of Conventional Reverence, and I chose to mock them…” he tries, then, to claim to do more than “merely to have mocked them.” He argues, defensively, that he has created a Jesus—a female porn actress Jesus—who is worthy of reverence, who he reveres.

He concludes his essay with a note that his essay was eventually published in Fence and that the poem “Semiotics…” was “enthusiastically accepted for publication” by Nerve.com but eventually rejected, “…due to an editor’s fear of controversy.” (Did Nerve.com give “fear of controversy” as their reason for rejecting the poem? Given the opportunity, I would have rejected the poem based on the mediocrity of Wenderoth’s language.) Wenderoth’s note concludes, “I neglected to archive the small string of email I got from Nerve.com, as they were not imbued with much more than unselfconscious cowardice.” This is petty. Publishing the emails from the editor at American Poet is petty.

To what purpose does Wenderoth include “Letters from the American Poet” in his book? My suspicion is that Wenderoth sees himself as a chastised crusader for free speech, as a writer punished for challenging the status quo, and he wants his readers to see him that way too.

The second part of Wenderoth’s book begins with another note from the author. Wenderoth feels the need to tell his readers how to read his essays—an act of cowardice on his part. He writes:

...they [the essays] are more explicitly political than the other essays in this book. For me, just residing in Marshall [Minnesota] was a kind of political activism, and perhaps the best kind: largely spontaneous and uncontrived.

In other words, any political activity on the part of the author was merely a reaction to where he found himself. He didn’t move to Marshall to confront white Christianity with his ballsy ideas, he moved to Marshall “to teach in the English Department at what was then called Southwest State University.” To claim that residing in Marshall was a form of activism is revisionist fantasy.

He berates himself for “drifting in and out of shameful silences” in the face of “capitalist, white supremacist, homophobic, Christian-privileging patriarchy.” When he snapped out of his shameful silences, he wrote little articles for the local and the campus newspaper.

“Bringing Freaks to Campus” is the best of the essays in this section, and in the book. Wenderoth is rightly annoyed that a liberal-arts university is spending money to bring in speakers who present little educational value—a former The Real World participant and a parent who lost a child during the massacre at Columbine. Wenderoth ends this essay with a vague and pitiful attempt to preserve his cool: “Please believe me when I tell you that I am not against freak shows—and not even necessarily against self-righteous superstitious freak shows.”

In “The Souls of White Folk,” he suggests we “transform our image of Martin Luther King Jr.” by producing images of MLK as Caucasian. Wenderoth is ironically suggesting that while white people like MLK, white people would love him if he were re-imaged white. As is typical of Wenderoth’s essays, he fails to go beyond his startling concept, he fails to push deeper. At this point in my reading, I began to suspect that Wenderoth fails to press beyond the superficial because he can’t: as a thinker, there’s nothing more to Wenderoth than the first spark of idea.

The provocatively titled “Twenty-Five Ways to Make Love Without Having Sex” is among the biggest disappointments in the book. Calling this piece of writing an essay is a stretch (it’s a stretch to call many of the pieces in this book essays). “Twenty-Five Ways…” is a list, a list made by a heterosexual male who has a very narrow idea of what sex is, i.e., he believes sex equals penetration of the vagina by a penis. This is evidenced by his inclusion of oral sex (“6. Eat your partner out.”) as not “having sex.” This list also displays a narrow concept of what making love is, i.e., that love-making is physical or involves watching people engaged in sexual intercourse. Call me a romantic or old-fashioned, but I believe making love includes oh-so-much more: serenading, holding hands, etc.

The press-release for The Holy Spirit of Life describes what topics Wenderoth tackles, a list that concludes, “and of course, poetics.” Of course. The third part of Wenderoth’s book is a hodge-podge of materials, some of which discuss poetry. I don’t see a real poetic presented in the book, except that for Wenderoth, poems are like magic elves that sneak up on you when you’re day-dreaming (I paraphrase, of course).

He writes about a Robert Hass poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” a well-known poem that begins with the lines, “All the new thinking is about loss./ In this it resembles all the old thinking.” Wenderoth’s description of and comments on Hass’s poems are tedious reading indeed. He writes,

When he says that ‘everything dissolves,’ he means that, in ‘thinking,’ or in poetry that is the careful articulation of the coming of a scene that can’t be kept, there is ultimately nothing meaningful—that all meaning, all being, is simply dissolved by such a poetry. 'Thinking’ ‘about loss,’ then, for those of us who always grasp the world in its truly radiant specificity, is a simple waste of time; thinking might even be implied as an irresponsibility, a failure to celebrate our good essence, our being the good keepers of the genuine realm.

Wenderoth reveals himself as one who glorifies those who do not think, who live only in the world of physical pleasure, immediate gratification and emotion. Wenderoth claims to be a clever animal, farting, fucking, and regurgitating without thought applied to any experience/reaction he has. And yet, if this were true, he would not bother to analyze a poem, he would only let us know if he liked it or didn’t. Which, in fact, he fails to do. Ultimately, his analysis comes across—in the context of this book—as a failed attempt to show intellectual gravitas, as yet another pose to impress his readers.

He then follows this essay with a parody of the Hass poem. This is an unfortunate decision. By locating the parody after a dry swipe at seriousness, Wenderoth gave me the impression that the Hass essay was only a set-up for a gag—a dumb gag. The parody inserts into Hass’s poem drugs where loss was, and mixes in some dirty words “poopy, pussy, peenie…”

Included in this section are several Wenderoth poems, the “Semiotics…” poem, the Hass parody, “Ex-Lover Somewhere,” and “Outside the Hospital.” The last two poems appear within essays; as with “Semiotics…,” he cites these poems as examples of various ideas he’s had—so, though the poems may have stood on their own somewhere, here he explains his poetry. Perhaps his own poetry is the only poetry he is capable of talking about with any intelligence and vibrancy. I find that that the essays in which he discusses his own work read like answers to interview questions: witty enough, but off-the-cuff and without depth.

Wenderoth’s collection of essays, prose nick-knacks and poems reveal the author as insecure and self-righteous, and demonstrates his inability to push an idea beyond superficiality. The Holy Sprit of Life is a book that John Ashcroft would love: he would love it because it purports to be intelligent liberal thought, but is in fact inarticulate and crude. A shot in the foot for those struggling against the ignorance and complicity of so many Americans.

I was baffled by Ben Marcus’s jacket blurb: “Joe Wenderoth is a brilliant writer, original and subversive, sensitive and strange. I read his work with awe and admiration.” I was baffled because Marcus is a much better writer than Wenderoth, and should know better. (To give Marcus the benefit of the doubt, I assume all the quotes Verse Press are using are responses to Letters to Wendy’s, Wenderoth’s previous book from Verse Press, which, while greatly overrated, produced a few real moments of quality.)

Let Ben Marcus’s blurb serve as a segue. There is brilliant, original and subversive work, doing what Wenderoth only wishes he could do. Ben Marcus’s book, The Age of Wire and String is worth reading. Diane Williamson's This is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate is flawed, but is more often than not successful. Brian Evenson’s The Wavering Knife, is also imperfect but powered by a real mind, a thinker who is forging a unique and lonely path. Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti. Anything by Mary Caponegro—who is one of the best fiction writers working today. Her The Star Café shames most contemporary fiction. Read an issue of The New York Review of Books, and you’ll see how shabby Wenderoth’s essay writing is. Read John Taggart’s Songs of Degrees, and you’ll see that essays about poetry can be direct, plainly written, and yet complex and thoughtful. Pick up some good poetry, too: Taggart’s Pastorelles, The Tunnel by Russel Edson, Ali Warren’s chapbook Hounds. Do not waste your time with Joe Wenderoth. In this world, beauty is subversive. Kindness, rare. As is reading and thinking; to be angry is not to be right; to be angry is common. To be crass is not honest. Thinking for oneself is in itself radical behavior.

***

JOE WENDEROTH grew up near Baltimore. Wesleyan University Press has published his first two books of poems: Disfortune (1995), and It Is If I Speak (2000). Shortline Editions published a chapbook, The Endearment (1999), and Verse Press published Letters to Wendys (2000). He is Associate Professor English at the University of California, Davis, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

**

ADAM GOLASKI is one-half of Flim Forum, an independant press for the publication of contemporary poetry. He also edits New Genre, a literary journal devoted to science and horror fiction. His work has been published in a number of journals including McSweeney's, LVNG, American Letters & Commentary, Supernatural Tales, word/for word and Lit. His short story "Weird Furka" appeared in the Ash-Tree Press anthology, Acquainted with the Night.

Tougher Disguises Press: Circulation Flowers by Chuck Stebelton and Telling the Future Off by Stephanie Young

Tougher Disguises, 2005

Reviewed by Geraldine Kim

Tougher Disguises Press, publishing poetry since 2002, is consistently erupting with fresh texts whose concerns range from flarf (Deer Head Nation by K. Silem Mohammad) to radio frequencies (The Frequencies by Noah Eli Gordon). Now based in San Diego, TDP has sung beyond its own octaves again with its two recent books, Circulation Flowers by Chuck Stebelton and Telling the Future Off by Stephanie Young. Both texts thrive on the contradiction and the abstraction of the conventional in (divergent yet) similar ways.

The poetry in Circulation Flowers, by Chuck Stebelton (Winner of the Jack Spicer Award,) can be best described as anti- “poems of decorative emptiness… [or against poems that appeal] to the convention” (from Chris Stroffolino’s introduction). In “TROUT LILIES ARE BULBOUS PLANTS,” the anti-decorative/conventional is replaced by the simultaneously transparent/opaque:

       Asiatic dayflower is a commelina.

       This flower grows on wooded slopes

       The fire pink is a catchfly of rocky hillsides.

       Beautiful flowers of the coral gum.

Each space between the lines is a turn, a flash, possibly an image—asking us to empty the flower of its social connotations—and focus on its flower-ness, a privileging of the quality of things over the things themselves—something (non-) imagistic. Through turning the trite into something undiscovered, the flower becomes transparent in its opacity, a contradiction that circulates back and forth with/between itself.

“The trout lily replicates a masked replica” is another line from the poem that supports this idea. Through having the flower replicate the image of itself, the process of emptying the flower from its social/conventional space transforms the flower into something more and more like a mess of molecules under an X-ray microscope—a “masked” abstraction whose process, while apparently transparent, challenges the reader with its foreign landscape.

Almost every poem in Circulation Flowers seems to share this same concern but does not necessarily deal with flowers. In “POEM (TU FU)” the subject in question is the poem itself:

       In this couplet the subjects, flowers and birds, come third
       in the line, while the following couplet compound fires

       and letters from home come at the beginning of the line.

The lines themselves are abstractions in need of focusing/concretion—this project confounds itself since the subject of the first line is “flowers and birds” when it says in the second and third line that “fires / and letters from home” should be in the first line. One can only assume “beginning of the line” refers to the first line. And how can a couplet have three lines? Regardless, neither “fires / and letters from home” nor “flowers and birds” are where they say they should be.

The irrevocability of place in a line asks us the same question of metaphor for flowers—should the metaphor and the flower occupy the same space? But how can two concepts (one imagistic and one mired in social connotation/convention) be singular? Is it possible to separate the conception of a thing from the thing itself? Circulation Flowers says “yes,” “yes,” and “yes” while it shakes its head “no.”

The call for transparency in poetry’s abstractions while being aware of the contradiction in that call is a sentiment shared by Stephanie Young’s book, Telling the Future Off. In “THERE’S LANGUAGE IN HER EYE, HER CHEEK, HER LIP—NAY, HER FOOT SPEAKS,” the last few lines demand command in the concretion of abstraction (in this case, it is the female body):

       …Exacting my labor with the spade
       and research documents passing as freely through a transparent body
       in the voidest space…
       I am the rightful owner, I demand to know the cause of your sorrow
       and appeal to the popular girls, likewise, like Marilyn
       a young woman of an artificial school
       with a message I must deliver in person
       in my loud and authoritative voice

This poem ends without punctuation, without any “sense” of command/authority. This voice that demands ownership of the female image lacks the authority/ownership of its own voice—a contradiction.

However, contradiction, while conventionally used as proof of the falsity of a statement (reductio ad absurdum), is a point of hope/a justification in this poem (as in Circulation Flowers). The labor is done with a spade/”spayed”-- something that unearths for further fertilization/erases the sex of a female object—allowing it to become something sexually neutral and consequently, a (bodiless) body with power.

Through this spaying, the body becomes abstract, again, but not in the gendered way the female body is abstracted. “It” (both the body and the poem) is bodiless, “the voidest space.” “It” is a black hole, a mathematical singularity that defies conception and observation but commands the movement of its surrounding context through its non-existence.

In “TODAY I WILL BE A MODEL OF CONSISTENCY,” the use of the contradiction as a mode of making the abstract concrete is used again, this time by replacement of semantic terms:

       I know now that I should have tried harder
       to be a body in a car
       who gestures at another body
       in another car
       stripped of artifice, conversation, a raincoat
       which if worn too long during a chemical attack
       will increase the danger of heatstroke.
       I have never seen this clothing
       but believe it is useless
       against anything
       including weather, after all

The car is “stripped” of its “artifice” and is left to become something that could be best described as not-car—something that can be easily replaced by a “conversation, a raincoat”-- which is then rendered un-raincoat since a raincoat’s existence is defined by its function against weather—leaving what (if anything)? The poem ends “to open my head / and water rushed the cavity.” Through its “cavity” or “combination of openings” (line 22), the speaker’s existence is defined by its non-existence.

While both Circulation Flowers and Telling the Future Off have analogous projects in terms of abstracting the abstract to make it concrete and use of the contradiction as justification, Telling the Future Off acts through non/presence while Circulation Flowers focuses closer and closer in the concrete to render it unimaginable (and/or vice versa).

**

CHUCK STEBELTON is the author of Precious (Answer Tag, 2005). He co-curates the Myopic Poetry Series at Myopic Books in Chicago, and works as Literary Program Manager at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee.

**

STEPHANIE YOUNG lives in Oakland and performs a wide variety of secretarial and poetic activities. She is the editor of Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2005) and has published her writing in a number of magazines and collaborative postcard poem chapbooks from Poetry Espresso. Find her online at http://stephanieyoung.durationpress.com

**

GERALDINE KIM was born in 1983 in West Boylston, Massachusetts. A graduate of New York University, she is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction and Poetry at San Francisco State University. Her work has been published in Dicey Brown and Fourteen Hills and her play, Donning Cheadle, was chosen to be produced for the SFSU One-Act Festival and SPT Poet's Theater. Her first book, Povel, was the winner of Fence Books' 2005 Modern Poets Series and was named as one of the top 25 favorite books of 2005 by the Village Voice.

CUTBANK POETRY 65

featuring the poetry of Britta Ameel, Jaye Bartell, Cal Bedient, Adam Clay, Phil Cordelli, Jennifer K. Dick, Greg Glazner, Arielle Greenberg, Kate Greenstreet, Bob Hicok, Janet Holmes, Lisa Jarnot, Kimberly Johnson, Amy King, Katy Lederer, Karen An-Hwei Lee, Jill Magi, Aaron McCollough, Gina Myers, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, John Niekrasz, Carl Phillips, D.A. Powell, Peter Richards, Elizabeth Robinson, Matthew Rohrer, Ken Rumble, Cindy Savett, Leslie Scalapino, Evie Shockley, Stacy Szymaszek, Eileen Tabios, Jon Thompson, Susan Tichy, and Greta Wrolstad

with translations of Phan Nhien Hao and Phan Huyen Thu (by Linh Dinh), Daniil Kharms (by Matvei Yankelevich and Ilya Bernstein), Pablo Neruda (by William O’Daly), Jaime Siles (by Miles Waggener), Virgil (by Kimberly Johnson)

an excerpt from a science fiction novella by Joyelle McSweeney

a long poem/chapbook by Dan Beachy-Quick

an interview with D.A. Powell

critical reviews including Craig Morgan Teicher on Andrea Baker, Adam Clay on Jen Benka, Nathan Bartel on Aase Berg, Jeremy Pataky on Suzanne Buffam, Joshua Corey on Shanna Compton, Haines Eason on Kevin Connolly, Ron Silliman on Forrest Gander, Jen Tynes on Kate Greenstreet, Anthony Hawley on Barbara Guest, Britta Ameel on Christine Hume, Helen Losse on Anne Marie Macari, Marcus Slease on Dan Machlin, Alex Lemon on Ted Mathys, Chris Dombrowski on W.S. Merwin, Chad Blair on Jane Miller, Nabil Kashyap on Ange Mlinko, Sandra Simonds on Geoffrey Nutter, Gina Myers on Jeni Olin, Monica Fambrough on Juliana Spahr, Carly Sachs on Dara Wier

and photographs by, with a tribute to, Greta Wrolstad (1981-2005), a poet, friend, artist, and former poetry editor of CutBank.

Copies are available for USD $10.00. Checks can be made payable to “CutBank” and sent to: CutBank, Attn: Poetry 65 Order, Department of English, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812.

That We Come to a Consensus by Noah Eli Gordon and Sara Veglahn

Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005

Reviewed by J'Lyn Chapman

As the grammatical structure of the title That We Come to a Consensus suggests, this collaboration is one fashioned with indefinites, provisional language, and relativity. The subordinate clause of the title is multiplied toward the end of the poem when the speakers—and even this pronouncement is ambiguous—make twenty statements, each missing its antecedent. Yet, exacting language undercuts grammatical vagueness.

             that we are not like fast machines
             that we were crossing streets
             that we exited through the kitchen

The effect of this is a wonderful, lilting imprecision that suggests that the written text performs the consensus of the “we,” and as the first line of the long poem states, the act of writing and of partnership is “to come to understanding.”

Yet, there is an implicit knowledge in the lines that follow that to come to understand is less about agreement than it is about empathy. On one hand, the voice of the poem maintains a level of innocuousness, never falling into distinguishing traits that would differentiate voice. The voice is often conversational and humorous; idiomatic lines are reminiscent of Ashbery’s. And the conversational slips into an alarming tenderness

             …say we meet at the airport
             as an appendix to an apology
             you arriving in a sombrero
             me wearing a white carnation
             a kind of greeting
             this part might be imagined

The voice of the poem has no qualms about its neutrality, and yet, it is simultaneously playful and emotive as in the lines, “I confess to about half of the worst mistakes / it was spring & I was sad.”

On the other hand, this speaker, who uses both pronouns “he” and “she” (note the strange line: “the boy was almost him or herself) and yet never identifies itself as either, is gracious and humble as it works out the seemingly incommensurate facets of the relationship. That there exists incommensurability is one thing, but what is particularly interesting is how the poem negotiates this.

There are two recurring themes throughout the poem: travel and writing. We might even identify writing as the overarching theme that includes travel, for writing in this way is characterized as both that which signifies and that which creates space for movement. For instance, signification allows the individual partners to pose themselves differently, to create the possibility of a new subjectivity

             here’s me in the summertime
             & you in late light

The speaker in these lines points to a possible world outside itself. In the following lines, the speaker posits an alternative way of being and its means call for an initial devastation

             a better way to save face might be to forget entirely
             give up the domestic plunder
             & build your own mannequin
             standard weather calls for more provocative side-trips
             redemptive cloud redemptive lake redemptive avalanche
             nothing as bright as the afternoon sun to stall a crash-landing

Further, there are trains, that semi-rapid transportation, that moving complacency, and hotels, those spaces of feigned domesticity, of temporary keeping. The fiction occurs both in the positing of the speaker and in the self-conscious realization that to write is to burgeon both possibility and containment

             Say I have a hotel catastrophe
             in a fiction the hotel collapses
             boots & rags branded & back tomorrow
             one way to assassinate the newly canonized
             is written from memory
             speaks only English in every other line
             the boy recorded somewhere
             the girl imagining pictures
             these names for partner

It would seem that signification is how partners come to agreement. As the theory of semiotics instructs us – and what we seem to know so explicitly in this poem without any overt appeal to literary theory as such – “agreement” between sign and referent is not produced through exacting mimesis as the following line suggests: “in a fiction I wrote with my left hand.” Rather, slippage produces meaning, all of those possibilities that erupt from utterance: “look at the way I write / your name in this fiction / even I’ve been called a man from behind.”

The form of the poem exacerbates this eruption of meaning by creating a visual parataxis. There are no stanza breaks, no punctuation, and the lines are short so that half of the page is text and the other is space. The poem looks harnessed, but the voice is so persistent and exploratory that there exists a smooth trajectory forward.

This is the trajectory of language to signify, and it is the trajectory of collaboration that endures the distance between otherness to produce an understanding.

***

NOAH ELI GORDON'S books include The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta Press, 2004), The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises Press, 2003), That We Come To A Consensus (in collaboration with Sara Veglahn, Ugly Duckling Press), and the e-book notes toward the spectacle (Duration Press).

**

SARA VEGLAHN is the author of two chapbooks: Another Random Heart (Margin to Margin, 2002) and Falling Forward (Braincase Press, 2003), and is co-author of the chapbook That We Come to a Consensus (Ugly Duckling Press 2006), a collaboration with the poet Noah Eli Gordon. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Conjunctions, Fence, 26 Magazine, 580 Split, POM2, Fairy Tale Review, Word for/word, Castagraf, Free Verse and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver, where she also teaches English. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2005.

**

J'LYN CHAPMAN is a Literary Studies PhD student at the University of Denver. She is currently at work on a dissertation on photography and text in the works of W.G. Sebald and a book of poetry about wild bears. Her fancy drawings can be found in A Ghost as King of the Rabbits, a chapbook by Joshua Marie Wilkinson.

DEAR FRIENDS OF THE CANARY

The Canary #5 is now available, and we couldn’t be happier. Inside it is great work by Jennifer Moxley, Alan Gilbert, Brenda Shaughnessy, Lynn Xu, Alice Notley, Samuel Amadon, Joshua Clover, Bill Manhire, Raymond McDaniel, Dara Wier, Andrew Mister, Maureen N. McLane, Anne Boyer, Michael Morse, William Fuller, Philip Jenks, Vincent Katz, Arda Collins, Bridget Cross, Joseph Donahue, Gillian Conoley, Timothy Donnelly, Carrie St. George Comer, Jasper Bernes, Matthew Zapruder, Megan Johnson, Amanda Nadelberg, James Meetze, Cyrus Console, Sandra Simonds, Rebecca Lehmann, Matthea Harvey, Robert Fernandez, Ed Go, Gina Myers, and Greta Wrolstad.

Also new are some features to our expanding website: www.thecanary.org

You can now click on each issue’s number to see who contributed; and you may purchase copies or subscribe at the new order page. Bulk orders for any sort of educational purposes are available at cost, just e-mail us at: info@thecanary.org

In about a month, we’ll begin a Close Reading page at which a few poems from the current issue will meet with their readers’ prose.

Your support is invaluable to our little magazine, so please keep it coming and tell your friends about us. Thanks!

All best wishes,

Josh, Tony, & Nick
Editors, The Canary

* P.S. Congratulations to Danielle Pafunda, whose poem “Small Town Rocker,” from The Canary #4, will appear in Best American Poetry 2006, and to by Amanda Nadelberg, whose work from #5 will be featured on Poetry Daily, on April 1.

Cutbank 63/64

featuring the poetry of Carl Adamshick, Britta Ameel, Adam Clay, Lisa Fishman, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Erika Howsare & Jen Tynes, Quinn Latimer, Mark Levine, Cate Marvin, Orlando Richardo Menes, Jonathan Minton, Sawako Nakayasu, Kathleen Peirce, and Zachary Schomburg; the prose of Donald Anderson, Jacob Appel, Michael FitzGerald, and Matthew Scott Healey; interviews with Diana Abu-Jaber and Emily Wilson; and artwork by Eben Goff

Copies are available for USD $10.00. Checks can be made payable to “CutBank" and sent to: CutBank, Attn: 63/64 Order, Department of English, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812.

The Gales by Ryan Murphy

Pound for Pound Press, 2005

Reviewed by Zachary Schomburg

The poems in Ryan Murphy’s chapbook The Gales are very quiet and fragile, cleverly turning words and phrases like haiku that unravels itself down the light blue page. I choose “haiku” for comparison here because these poems are inherently Japanese, calling on a character named Kinoko, fourth-generation Japanese-American figure skater, Kristy Yamaguchi, Nintendo, and eating jello with chopsticks. The chapbooks last line reads, “Sincerely, Hokusai,” which perhaps sets these poems on the shores of Hokusai’s The Great Wave, a widely known Japanese woodblock painting of a large blue wave curling over itself toward land. Murphy certainly dips into the same perfectly-off color palette as Hokusai when he paints the trees that “stain/the edges of the afternoon” blue. These poems also belong on that shore because Murphy is calling for “the gales” to usher in a storm to stir the lonely silences. In “City of the Big Bang”:

             First the wish for rain
             in humidity
             then rain and hail

             damaging the blossoms
             and fine cherry harvest

and in a few other poems, Hurricane Isabelle “works up the coast/coastal flooding, property damage.”

In “Florescent Flowers”, all of the narrator’s (and Kinoko’s) activities are quiet and fragile until he is caught, at the poem’s end, in a different kind of storm:

             There are few who sleep as I do
             in the Metropolitan Museum.

             Kinoko, you and I
             standing on the Bow bridge
             dressed in the purple of nightfall.

             Kinoko, you and I
             shaving our legs before the swim-meet.

             Fluorescence floral –
             It has begun to February

             in your eyes.

             The first calligraphic pen-stroke
             revealed the error of my ways.

             Drunk, Theraflu, passing through
             the pale blue snow of television.

If it were legal for Japanese storms, like tsunami’s, to marry Baseball, The Gales would be in that short line outside the courthouse. The spouses of this arrangement would not be completely foreign to one another—baseball is the national sport of Japan, though the heart of his chapbook “from Poems for Pitchers” is, interestingly, nearly the only poem explicitly un-Japanese. But there is a poem for a Jew, an African-American, a Cuban Socialist, an infamous overweight spit-baller, and Charlie Hough (Sandy Koufax, Dontrelle Willis, Fidel Castro, Gaylord Perry, and Charlie Hough).

In “Dear Charlie Hough,” Murphy compares Hurricane Isabelle to Charlie Hough’s pitching style

             The opulent ruin of rotation
             The pure delivery, the mechanism of
             Hurricane Isabel

And again, at the end of The Gales’ first poem, Murphy uses a wave (you should imagine Hokusai’s), a concept attached to both storms and baseball. Both varieties begin very small and very quietly:

             A wave is not The Wave
             when you’re the only one standing.

Like the wave, Murphy is the only one standing here, completely alone, beckoning the crowd and the sea to stand up and take action. In fact, Murphy conveys loneliness in all these poems because The Gales is written much like a letter (which itself is often a product of solitude) from the painter of The Great Wave, with its cold sea water and cold sky and absence of people or even houses, and as a letter partly to baseball pitchers, famous and dead strangers, which receives no reply. Without the promise of a wave (the baseball or storm variety) there is no cure for Murphy’s loneliness. He writes, even “too much time alone is also lonely.”

***

RYAN MURPHY is the author of Down With The Ship (Seismicity Editions 2006), and is the recipient of a Chelsea Magazine Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Denver Quarterly, The Paris Review, and other publications. He lives in New York.

**

ZACHARY SCHOMBURG other reviews can be read at Octopus Magazine. His most recent poems are forthcoming in Typo, Washington Square Review, Same Storm, Action Yes, Parakeet, CutBank, and The Hat. His chapbook, Abraham Lincoln Death Scene will be published by Horse Less Press in late 2006. He is currently a Creative Writing PhD student in Lincoln, NE, where he lives in a tiny home with A, M, S, and G.

CutBank 66: Prose

edited by Sarah Aswell and Elisabeth Benjamin,

featuring the fiction of Steve Almond, Jenny Dunning, Josh Emmons, W. Tsung-Yan Kwong, Shena McAuliffe, VIncent Precht, Joe B. Sills, and Kellie Wells; the nonfiction of William J. Cobb; an interview with Jim Shephard; and portraits by Joel Sager

Copies are available for USD $10.00. Checks can be made payable to “CutBank" and sent to: CutBank, Attn: Prose 66 Order, Department of English, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812.

Alaskaphrenia by Christine Hume

New Issues Press, 2004

Reviewed by Britta Ameel

There are 39 poems in Christine Hume’s Alaskaphrenia, 72 words between “language” and “landscape” in the Oxford English Dictionary, and Alaska is the 49th state at a latitude of 54° 40' N to 71° 50' N and a longitude 130° W to 173° E. Hume counts, maps, mines, names, explores, lists, categorizes as the surveyor of her Alaska-of-the-mind landscape. She surveys not only the literal landscape replete with bears and moose and ice caves, ocean, mountains, planes. Hume surveys the “poetic” language meant to arrange our uncontrollable internal states, our Alaska on the inside, where we “will be a bellwether bomber, you dream-bomb the last place: a dogsled dream, campfire dream, pioneer dream, pioneer, lynx, lynx, lynx.”

This surveyed Alaskan consciousness is under-punctuated, grammatically wild, written on scraps of paper edged with fire and water, folded several hundred times to fit in a pocket. Hume has “adopted an Alaskan ear long before; with it, it’s not unusual to hear from inside the hammer: stampeded terrain, yea, avalanche.” The inside of this hammer sounds, indeed, like avalanche: words shape-shift and metaphors crumble under sound:

             “Under these circulations
             You could not wear cirrus the way cows do

             Always your mange meant to be smoke
                      molting, moonglow”

This associational, sound-driven logic (lynx, lynx, lynx) powers the surveyor’s 4x4, which explores the transformative nature of consciousness. This particular Alaskan consciousness is ultimately poetic, circular, fractured, though reliant on prosaic and instructional structures: documents like brochures, diagrams, comprehension questions; indices, instructions, explanations, translations, dialogues, do’s and don’ts. These are the maps pinned under otherwise confounding experience, and Hume instructs: “If you cannot work the Eskimo yo-yo, you must walk around and create a map inside your muscles. There, a secret heat makes air remember birds. In their flight, your absurd hands go to seed. Only the other day your pacing made something stop sleeping; it made nowhere a shook-out place.” And again: “Never let what you think fool you.”

The parallel Hume draws between the surveyor’s language and poetic language feels at every turn right for complicated consciousness. Yet, what startles most is the fact that both languages are essentially inaccurate, and indeed almost violate the very areas and emotions they are meant to represent. Hume’s act of surveying, though, exposes the rich veins of landscape and mind, which, though perhaps inaccurate, are made once again original and exquisite. This reader wouldn’t want it any other way, for Hume has

             “…outened the world
             to show you real barenness:
             a void a light
             warps into want and then wants
             until it warps all it glances.”

Warp away, Hume, we’re with you on this expedition, counting as we go.

***

CHRISTINE HUME is the author of Musca Domestica (Beacon Press, 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, and Alaskaphrenia (New Issues, 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award. Her reviews and critical work has been published in American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan UP, 2002), American Letters & Commentary, Chicago Review, Context, Verse, and online for Constant Critic/Fence, How2, and Slope. The Colorado Council on the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Fund for Poetry, and the Wurlitzer Foundation have awarded her fellowships and grants.

**

BRITTA AMEEL has lived most of her life west of the continental divide. Her current stint in Ann Arbor, where she teaches and writes at the University of Michigan, makes her miss the mountains and the ocean. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in em, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Fugue.

Fascicle 2, Winter 05/06

You are invited to check out the second issue of Fascicle, an online journal that focuses on a global and historical view of innovative poetry. Included in its 400+ pages:

* A portfolio of new poems from China edited by Zhang Er, from the forthcoming Talisman Anthology of Chinese poetry. Focusing on poets born since 1960, this portfolio also features some of the most interesting contemporary poets as contributing translators, including Charles Borkhuis, Caroline Crumpacker, Mark Wallace, Rachel Levitsky and Joseph Donahue.

* A supplement to Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery's Imagining Language (MIT Press 1998), one of the most fascinating and distinctive anthologies of recent memory. The supplement, compiled by Tony Tost, includes an interview with Jed Rasula, as well as poetry, prose and art by Ronald Johnson, Kurt Schwitters, Andre Breton, Edna Sarah Beardsley, Jacob Boehme, Eugene Jolas and others.

* A selection of new collaborative work by Lyn Hejinian & Anne Tardos, Aaron McCollough & Kent Johnson, Geraldine Monk & John Donne, Hank Lazer & Pak, Brian Howe & Marcus Slease, among others.

* Critical essays and prose, including Lisa Jarnot on Robert Duncan; Tom Orange on Clark Coolidge; Dodie Bellamy on Narrative & Body Language; Laura Moriarty on A Tonalist Thinking; Clayton Eshleman on Hart Crane, Andrew Joron & Jeff Clark; Stan Mir on Brian Kim Stefans; Nate Pritts on Robert Penn Warren; Graham Foust on Poetry's Neighborly Enemy Mind; Morgan Lucas Schuldt on Harryette Mullen; and more.

* Peter Cole interviewed by Leonard Schwartz.

* Visual work by Anne Tardos, Buck Downs, Cathy Eisenhower, and Michael Winkler.

* Plays by Chris Vitiello and Andrew Schelling.

* Translations of Francis Ponge (tr. Serge Gavronsky), Laura Solórzano (tr. Jen Hofer), Ernst Herbeck (tr. Gary Sullivan), Bertolt Brecht (tr. Pauline Fan), Andrea Zanzotto (tr. Wayne Chambliss), Hans Thill (tr. Tony Frazer), among others.

* Poetry and prose by Andrew Joron, Laura Moriarty, Lee Ann Brown, Stephanie Young, Rodrigo Toscano, Brenda Coultas, JL Jacobs, Mary Burger, Carl Martin, Matthew Henriksen, Brenda Iijima, Mairead Byrne, Lance Phillips, and many others.

Hope you'll enjoy!

Sincerely,

Tony Tost, editor
Chris Vitiello, Ken Rumble, Brent Cunningham, contributing editors

GutCult Winter 2006

The new issue of GutCult is up, containing work by:

Donald Revell, Isaac Sullivan, Catherine Theis, Janet Holmes, Jared Stanley, Kent Johnson, Kathleen Peterson, Robert Strong, Lauren Levin, Broc Rossell, Jim Goar, Martin Corless-Smith, Nathan Parker, John Mercuri Dooley, Brandon Shimoda (a review of Stan Apps' Soft Hands), and Randall Williams (a review of Anna Eyre's Metaplastic)

This may well be the last issue based on zones of the calendar. In the future, look for a more open-ended set of "thematically"-based issues.

Aaron McCollough, editor

The First Composer: On Merwin's Migration: New and Selected Poems and Present Company

Copper Canyon Press, 2005

A review by Chris Dombrowski

“don’t lose your arrogance yet…/” Berryman famously tells a young Merwin, “you can do that when you’re older / lose it too soon and you may / merely replace it with vanity” (“Berryman”). Author of a stiflingly huge body of work - 24 books of poems, 22 translations, 7 prose books - and recipient of countless prizes including the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Merwin asserts with Migration that he has lost over the last half-century none of Berryman’s requisite boldness, and has found no room in his lines for vanity.

Although a practitioner of formal verse in his early years (Auden selected A Mask for Janus — only one poem from the volume is included in Migration — for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1952) and linked with the Deep Image poets of the 70’s, Merwin, who said in a 1998 Paris Review interview that “writing is something I know little about,” is our indisputably campless master. Here are the first stanzas of two poems written fifty years apart:

             TO THE SOUL

             Is anyone there
             if so
             are you real
             either way are you
             one or several
             if the latter
             are you all at once
             or do you
             take turns not answering

             *

             DICTUM

             There will be the cough before the silence, then
             Expectation; and the hush of portent
             Must be welcomed by a diffident music
             Lisping and dividing its renewals;
             Shadows will lengthen and sway, and, casually
             As in a latitude of diversion
             Where growth is topiary, and the relaxed horizons
             Are accustomed to the trespass of surprise,
             One with the mask of Ignorance will appear
             Musing on the wind’s strange pregnancy.

The reader less familiar with Merwin’s work (he dispensed with poetic punctuation in 1963 stating later that he “wanted…the movement and lightness of the spoken word”) might wonder which of the poems was published during the Korean War, and which during the current U.S invasion of Iraq. It’s curious, anyway, to note how much “Dictum,” (1952) with its density, dialogism, and formalistic leanings, resembles a good deal of what’s popular in poetry today. “To The Soul,” (2005) on the other hand, with its curious, short-lined directness, recalls Neruda’s 1954 Odas Elementales, many of which Merwin translated.

Appearing in the “New Poems” section of Migration, “To the Soul” also shows up in the 134-page volume Present Company, a collection of addresses to people (“The Surgeon Kevin Lin”), objects (“Zbigniew Herbert’s Bicycle”), places (“That Stretch of Canal”), abstractions (“Lingering Regrets”), and other nouns. Limpid, void sometimes of images, open in their form, many of these intimate pieces show Merwin at his visionary best. But as Louise Gluck has said of her own process, “What begins as vision degenerates into mannerism,” and the rhetoric of address, even when delivered by one of our finest poets, begins to age after eighty pages or so. What the reader will likely find most enduring and endearing in these poems is their infinitely generous central-consciousness; they are, like so many of Merwin’s poems, offerings: “…I do / not know that anyone / else is waiting for these / words that I hoped might seem / as though they had occurred / to you and you would take / them with you as your own” (“Cover Note”).

At the heart of Merwin’s work is a pervading sense of connectedness—to an other, be it the reader, a lark, the light in September—that links it undeniably to prayer. But not prayer in the conventional Western sense which, as Merwin has stated “is usually construed as making a connection. I don’t think that connection has to be made; it’s already there. Poetry probably has to do with recognizing that connection.” The ease with which the poet realizes this link, both perceptively and prosodically (“if you find you no longer believe/ enlarge the temple”; “every moment/ arrive somewhere”) will remain one of his work’s many major feats.

Logistically, Migration’s major feat is its length; at 529 pages, it could have been much longer — the seminal Second Four Books of Poems, for instance, totaled 300 pages when originally published. As with all such massive collections, the reader inevitably reaches a point where the poem he’s reading begins to sound much like one he read a dozen pages previous. There are many occasions in Migration where the poet “look(s) up to see” or is found “at a bright window” where “all at once” something happens, but just when the reader thinks she has the poems’ endings—with their often winged- or shadow dappled-hush—pinned, Merwin surprises with something stabbingly ironic like this from “Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pineapple Field”: “do you think there is a future in pineapple”.

“What survives of the artist,” Renoir said, “is the feeling he gives by means of objects,” and while Mewin’s objects—birds, light, stone walls, leaves, water, hills—appear recurrently, his range of emotion is limitless. With all its fluidity, grace, and fleetingness, Merwin’s poetry reminds us that it is, like the world it bows to, “always beginning as it goes” (“To This May”). In the brief “Memory of Spring” (originally published in The Carrier of Ladders and not included in Migration), Merwin hints at the privacy and devotion such a poetry requires of its maker: “The first composer/ could hear only what he could write”.

***

W.S. MERWIN was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He has written many books of poems, prose, and translations. He has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (of which he is now a Chancellor), the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry; most recently he has received the Governor's Award for Literature of the state of Hawaii, the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Merwin was recently awarded the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry for his collection Migration: New & Selected Poems.

**

CHRIS DOMBROWSKI’S work appears or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Green Mountains Review, Mid-American Review, Neo, Seneca Review, and others. He lives with his family in Missoula, Montana.

field stone by Catherine Kasper

Winnow Press, 2005

Reviewed by Jen Tynes

The stones that Catherine Kasper references in her epigraph seem solid, though illuminated, straight-shooters. But the stones that I imagine, reading these poems, are the stones of land-art: stones arranged in spirals, waves, undulating lines. In the first section of this book, minimal use of end punctuation contrasts with mostly-conventional sentence structure to create poems like snakes, stones, like waves. From “Unearthing”:

             Both boxes could fit in your hand at the same time
             tiny—but I imagine—heavy
             snakes curving in eights or lifting a cobra head
             In a glass case, Kohl sticks turn turquoise with age
             as miniature patoikos figures, green and bald

These poems are ekphrastic, of observance — of foreign places, other people, ways of being. The general “you” at the beginning of “Unearthing” becomes more specific and mysterious later in the poem: “something you meant once / like migraine flashes—“ and “I though I had lost you.” In the first fourteen poems of “Blueprints of the City,” a you that flickers between general and specific turns suddenly into “we,” and the change is explosive. These poems say “from other places we could imagine ourselves anywhere” and “in line for a single hour we notice the white imperfections in our fingernails” and “there is a game of distance played between two people.”

There are collections in these poems — museums, objects from nature, colors of paint and the further objects they resemble. The collections, like collections of stones, become guides, pathways along the “distance...between two people.” These pathways are bridges, they are equally uniting and dividing: they hold a tension between them. When, in the third section of the book, the speaker of “Number 1: Another Sunday” says “I wanted something/ more monastic” it’s the want that resonates, the outside that crackles.

***

CATHERINE KASPER is the author of Optical Projections, a chapbook of short stories (Obscure Publications, 2004). Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Ohio Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Leviathan and Is This Forever or What? (Greenwillow/Harper Collins, 2004). Her awards include a PEN Texas Award and AWP Intro Award, and a Writer's League of Texas fellowship. She is presently an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

**

JEN TYNES lives in Providence, Rhode Island and edits Horse Less Press. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, No Tell Motel, DIAGRAM and H_NGM_N. Her first full-length collection of poetry, The End of Rude Handles, will be available from Red Morning Press in early 2006.

TYPO MAGAZINE, ISSUE 7: MODERN SWEDISH VERSE

After many months of sweat and tears, TYPO 7 is alive.

Curated by Johannes Göransson, this issue highlights Modern Swedish Poetry and features the work of:

EDITH SÖDERGRAN
GUNNAR BJÖRLING
HENRY PARLAND
GÖRAN SONNEVI
GUNNAR HARDING
ANN JÄDERLUND
JACQUES WERUP
LARS MIKAEL RAATTAMAA
JOHAN JÖNSSON
AASE BERG
JAN SJÖLUND
JENNY TUNEDAL

We hope you enjoy.

yrs,
--TYPO eds.