Lucas Klein on Bin Ramke’s Tendril

Bin Ramke, Tendril, Omnidawn Publishing

 

Bin Ramke’s is a poïesis for linguists. In “An Esthetic (Ars Poetica),” the first poem of Tendril, his newest collection, words and their sound components dismantle against meaning: “wish” flushes into “wash,” a “retina” “retained,” and as for “Beautiful,”

 

someone said: aye, but buy, eat. Beauty

is as beauty used. Does its duty. Did. Used to:

be a duty.

(15)

 

While further down the page,

 

the history of future is a version, aversion is a kind

of aesthetic. As if. The beautiful is a form of that

(15)

 

the spelling of “aesthetic”—in contradistinction against the “esthetic” of the title, reminds us of the relationship of art’s dissolution of meaning with both feeling—in Greek, aisthētikos, “of sense perception”—and unfeeling, the anesthetic.

 

Tendril, whose meaning is the curlicue connective between a vine and what it grasps, often focuses on the sinews of language, connecting word to word. Appropriately, etymology is central to Tendril’s poetics, as witness “A History of Mortality”:

 

They know the code

but do not know they know

 

[a. L. codex, later spelling of caudex trunk

of a tree, wooden tablet, book, code of laws.]

 

And the light shineth in the darkness;

and the darkness comprehended it not

 

the word in Greek, comprehend, [katalaben],

second aorist tense, emphasis on punctilier action,

no regard for past, present, or future

(73)

 

And, hinting at the work’s title and the work of the poet (as Ramke says, “Poet, Greek for Maker, bricks, too” [“Never Odd or Even,” 103]), undoing the metaphor—since Ovid—of poet as seamster:

 

Mitosis is an opening, a ripping, from the Greek for thread,

mitos. Threads part, seam ripping, opening into.

(“Protein Folding and Enzyme Catalysis,” 51)

 

Yet even here the poetic act is a creative action, as mitosis is not only cell division but cellular reproduction, and the history of writing takes us from pencil to its derivatives:

 

(from Old French pincel, from a diminutive of Latin peniculus

‘brush,’ diminutive of penis)

(“Gregg Shorthand Dictionary,” 30)

 

But etymology does not occupy all of Bin Ramke’s poetic product any more than it is all of linguistic science. Slippage between words, particularly of homographs, occupies as much of Tendril’s project. Consider the proximity of “Can you touch?” to “You can’t, ouch!” introduced by the following two stanzas:

 

“Pear” and “pare” and other doublings

play in the fearful boy’s mind in the night

the light beneath the door a comfort

against lightning. The wind winds

its way down a hall

 

all waking in the night adds up

to a wound he is wound in the sheets

that tear, his tears he is a boy after all,

small. Sleep well, a deep source of darkness.

(“Social Conscience, Well Meant,” 24)

 

While linguistics may seem dry to some, and eggheaded to others, it typifies a literary paranoia (“the word fear is related to fare and it fits” [“Birds Fly Through Us,” 85]) penetrated before by Thomas Pynchon’s hyperconnectivity. Or, as Ramke defines, in “Eclogue,”

 

Paranoia, para plus nous, mind … a parallel mind,

a second mind, being of two minds, being overly

mindful, mind your manners, minded matter.

(63)

 

And, to demonstrate the pathology of recurrence, Ramke gives a rhymed—and rhyming—translation, in “The Consolations of Defeat”:

 

Might I quote myself? “a minor note, etymology—

Paranoia is para plus nous, mind … a parallel mind?

a second mind, being of two minds, being overly

mindful, minding manners: a matter of kind-

 

ness, and a manner of speaking.”

(76)

 

Tendril’s paranoia and wordplay are rooted in the individual’s personal propensity to confuse, as expressed in the section, “From the Chapter ‘Jesus Speaks to Judas Privately,’” in the closing sequence, “Tendril”:

 

I would write “sacred” for “scared” or sometimes

“scarred,” and needed no analyst

since it was only an error. Eros.

(95)

 

Confusion—fusing together—reveals profundity; further down the page, the speaker laments, after quoting a translation, “I should know the French”

 

and not rely on this carrying across, this.

But in that shadow, that shaped space

which is the wrongness of the best

translation, is asylum. The original

was wrong too. Eros.

(95)

 

In a poem about Jesus, the “carrying across” of translation has never been closer to “carrying a cross.”

 

The linguistics of etymology and homographic inquiry reach their apex in “Tendril,” the swan (or vulning pelican [“Tendril,” 105]) song of this volume. Bookish knowledge unites with personal pain in sections like,

 

“Replicate” can be pronounced several different ways—one of these, as an adjective, can refer to an insect wing folded back on itself. From the Latin plicare, to fold, also replicare, to unfold or to reply. An answer as an unfolding. To speak, for instance, to a figure with wings, and then to see the wings begin to unfold, as your answer. As in, “I love you,” and she unfolds her wings to leave you.

(“Tendril (B),” 101)

 

Following this paragraph, the line

 

Replicatory can mean, “of the nature of a reply.”

(“Tendril (B),” 101)

 

Means something it did not when appearing verbatim on the previous page: then, it was true, but here, Replicatory does not indicate response, but rather replication, and the changes that occur in seeing the same thing twice.

 

“Tendril” is an echo chamber in which not only the words of Anne Bradstreet—“Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,” from “The Author to Her Book”—can appear and reappear (“Infant,” 94; “Of the Past, the Unspeakable,” 110), but elements from earlier in the book, as well. 

 

The dew is vulnerable, the boy sleeping the girl sleeping are

vulnerable, to wound and be wounded, wound

in sleep which has elements, requirements and rewards

(“Tendril,” 107)

 

And even

 

They know the code,

but do not know they know

[codex, later spelling caudex

trunk of a tree, wooden

tablet, book, code of laws.]

(“Hard to the Touch,” 108 )

 

These echoes are tendrils, just as the etymologies and phonemes contrasted and contracted. What they reflect, what they obscure as much as they reveal, is the grasp our language has on us, and on our cling to each other inside language, the static born between “alone” and “all one.” Or, as Ramke writes:

 

alone. All one. The greatest betrayal happens

alone, always from the others and when

the very light itself delights in it, it heals. Itself.

(“From the Chapter ‘Jesus Speaks to Judas Privately,’” 96)

“Excursions: Five Short Story Collections (Recent & Vintage) that Take You Places” by Steven Wingate

Since the glossy magazines have recently come out with their summer “beach reading” list, this first installment of mine covers analogous territory: books that, while by no means escapist in their intent, offer readers an escape from their own worlds and an immersion into others. Writers are always discovering their characters (and themselves) in the combustible seams between the familiar and the unfamiliar, and readers are no different. You’ll notice in the capsule reviews below my proclivity for escaping into the combustible seams of Africa. I’ve included a bit about how each of these books ended up on my shelves—there’s always a story about how books end up on our radar and in our hands, isn’t there?

 

            Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, by Ben Fountain

            (Harper/Ecco, 2006

 

Sometimes you just meet people. At the 2008 AWP Conference in New York last year, as I searched for a place to devour my bagel and coffee between panels, I ran into a pleasant, unassuming gentleman from Texas named Ben Fountain. We talked about our books and he told me to come by the booth where he would be signing his—which his publisher, amazingly, was giving away for free! I swung by, picked up Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, and got so hooked on the first story that I had to be nudged forward twice in the signing line. Fountain’s collection has been racking up awards (PEN/Hemingway, B&N Discover Great New Writers Series, Whiting Award) and the work is so good that I’m not even jealous. It sparkles on a sentence level, and Fountain never lets his characters off the hook easily. He makes them fight their way through every trap they set for themselves, and in doing so brings us to varied international locations ranging from Haiti to Cambodia. Even the lone American-based story—which tells of a military wife who must share her husband with the Haitian voodoo goddess he has ceremonially married—resonates with the swirling world beyond.

 

            Whites, by Norman Rush

            (Knopf, 1984)

 

“You’ve got to read Norman Rush’s Mating,” a friend told me, though he refused to loan me his copy of the book. He showed it to me, though—a big, intimidating 500-ish pages that was far too thick for my mood at the time. Awhile later, I saw Rush’s Whites on sale for a dollar at a used bookstore and pounced on my opportunity to “date” Rush as an author before “Mating” him. Whites turned out to be a sock in the jaw of a book, 150 pages of humanity in its rawest state.  Rush spent time as an ex-patriot in Africa, and published these stories in the 1980s to strong, well-deserved critical acclaim. The way colonialism’s legacy has played out in the intervening quarter-century has done nothing to dim the power of his stories, since he writes less about Africa and more of human beings in extremis: the tourists of “Near Pala” coming to grips with the true value of water in the desert or the desperate wife of a bureaucrat in “Instruments of Seduction.” After finishing it, I quickly dispensed with my prohibition against huge, door-stopper novels and picked up Mating—also set in Africa—which did not disappoint.

 

            Apologies Forthcoming, by Xujun Eberlein

            (Livingston Press, 2008 )

 

I met Xujun Eberlein by mail; she sent in a wonderful nonfiction piece to divide, the magazine I was running at the time at the University of Colorado, and we knew each other virtually until meeting (where else?) at an AWP Conference in Atlanta. This collection of short stories won the 2007 Tartt Fiction Award from Livingston Press, and was published this May. My first sensation upon reading it was of getting completely lost in an alien culture—in this case, China during and after the Cultural Revolution, in which the majority of Eberlein’s stories take place. At first, when I saw its protagonists (primarily educated women “relocated” to rural areas) making decisions based on very un-American things like avoiding government scrutiny, I wanted to grab and shake them back to their senses. But by the end of the book I understood their lines of thinking and behavior, and this alone makes Apologies worth the read. At a time when the world has its eyes on China, Eberlein intimately examines the underbelly of cultural and personal change that—intentionally or not—led to the nation’s surge in world power. I often found myself feeling, as I read her collection, the sense of a national culture in tumult breathing its last before being paved over by a newer, shinier, but no less tumultuous one.

 

            Disturbance-Loving Species, by Peter Chilson

            (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)

 

I found out about Peter Chilson because I’ve been stalking him, sort of—in a literary sense. He won the fiction prize from Gulf Coast magazine, then I won it shortly thereafter; he won the Bakeless Prize for Disturbance-Loving Species, then I won it the next year. What’s up with that? Given the circumstances I had no choice but to read Species, predominantly about Americans in Africa but balanced out by stories of Africans transplanted to America. This book reads like a direct descendant of Whites in its closely-observed depiction of two complimentary cultures rubbing up against each other, and it updates the earlier book’s themes by virtue of coming out nearly two decades later. It’s amazing, reading the two collections side by side, how much the surface of the Africa/America relationship has changed without the core changing at all. The sentences throughout Species reflect the tension of its subject matter, and Chilson’s own experience in Africa (as a Peace Corps volunteer and a journalist) shines through. But my favorite pieces were those that took place in the US—especially “Toumani Ogun,” the closing story about a former West African warlord who ends up running a gas station in Portland, Oregon. 

 

            Looking for a Rain God, ed. Nadeźda Obradović

            (Simon & Schuster, 1990)

 

Back in the days before children overtook our lives completely, my wife and I liked to take turns reading aloud in bed. The last book we read in that fashion—and perhaps the first one we’ll read when we pick up the habit again—is this tremendously varied collection of tales from sub-Saharan Africa. The collection includes some authors from the continent who have made names for themselves in America, including Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe (author of Things Fall Apart) and Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o (author of The River Between), but it also offers a taste of African authors whose names will be unfamiliar to readers here. My favorite was “Heart of a Judge” by Sierra Leone’s R. Sarif Easmon, which features a colonial judge and an ingenious talking rat. Although this title is out of print (and no longer fully contemporary), it is an excellent time capsule of African literature before the turn of the century—and before Wole Sonyika’s 1986 Nobel Prize started to bring African literature to a broader audience. If you can’t find this title in your library, Obradović also edited a similar anthology for Anchor books in 2002.

 

______________________

 

Steven Wingate’s short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize for Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in July, 2008. He spends his analog time in Colorado and his digital time at www.stevenwingate.com.

The Trajectory of Free Verse in the 20th Century and Beyond by Gary Wilkens

Free verse, as we use the term today, dates to the 1910s and a small group of poets who wished to “Make it New!.” While its origins can be traced to literary precursors like the vers libre of French poets such as Gustave Kahn and Jules Laforgue, and the cadenced, KJV Bible-influenced verse of Walt Whitman, free verse’s flourishing was a by-product of the most radical changes in human life since bipedalism: between 1900 and 1920 occurred either the invention or popularization of the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the supermarket (and mass-produced consumer goods), the moving picture, the tank, and poison gas. New ways to communicate, travel, eat, entertain oneself and kill the other guy naturally lead to or encouraged new ideas: Darwinism, Freudianism, Marxism, Mechanization, Consumerism and Woman’s Liberation changed mankind’s view of itself forever.

 

Naturally young poets wanted to imitate and adapt to the New, to separate themselves from the staleness they perceived in their immediate predecessors. Literary modernism strove to break free from old forms, old subject matter, and old mores, just as technology was changing, maps were changing, and social values were changing. Modernism held that the old ways of being human and understanding humanity were dead or dying, and literature must change to remain relevant.

 

The new horrors and the new possibilities made Victorian sentimentality, prudishness, and bland writing style simply unstomachable to poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Free verse was born in the work of the Imagists, and has grown like a flower patch— or a clump of weeds, depending on your faction in today’s poetry world. It is the dominant form of poetry being written today in the world, with all the advantages and disadvantages that has brought. And yet, the situation is not quite as simple as replacement. The 20th century saw many prominent metrical poets: Auden, Berryman, Hollander, Larkin, and Wilbur, as well occasional ideological revivals like New Formalism. A strong current of poetry has even moved beyond the whole formal vs. free issue in the form of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and other avant garde movements. Indeed, the whole dusty dichotomy may be false- poets today may use meter when they feel the poem needs it, abandon it, stretch it, mix it, etc. So the question is pressing: what will happen to this unruly child as it approaches its Big 1 O O? Will it be replaced by meter, be blended with it, or join it in the Dust Bin of History? In what follows I indulge in some prognosticating on the future of the 100 year old newness.

 

Despite, as we are told, free verse having been the norm in poetry for about 100 years, both the fabled General Reader and his sister the Educated Non-Poet Reader still take for granted that poetry is metrical and rhymed. If they try to write any, say for a friend’s birthday card, it is sentimental, likely humorous, and features absolute end rhymes. How different then, from

Iseult stands at Tintagel
on the mid stairs between
light and dark symbolism
Does she stand for phonic
human overtone for outlaw
love the dread pull lothly
for weariness actual brute
predestined fact for phobic
falling no one talking too
Tintagel ruin of philosophy
here is known change here
is come crude change wave
wave determinist caparison
Your soul your separation

(Susan Howe, “Rückenfigur”)

 

Amen. “Professional” poetry’s separation from the public and from any traditional notion of poetry has been the growing trend for the last several decades, notwithstanding the occasional counter-rebellions. I will here go on record as saying this trend has no end in sight and will continue to deepen: poetry will become more and more akin alien messages on a distant planet and less like communication or the evocation of emotions that any of the rest of us actually feel. And “free verse”? It will lose what little coherence it has as a poetry technique and be replaced by unchecked experimentation and abstraction.

 

(Note: If I believe this, why do I teach and write free verse? ……martyrdom?)

 

Picture this scene: multiple squabbling factions, factions within factions, deep, unbridgeable divisions, vicious back-stabbing, cronyism, endless old arguments, talking past each other. Politics? No. The contemporary poetry “community”. As poetry gets farther from the public, the camps within it get farther from each other and in their battles no quarter is asked for or given. To attend a certain school, to publish in a certain magazine, to win a certain prize, it is necessary to write in the style of the ruling Powers of that particular venue (this is not cynicism, it’s the advice you get from experience ppets). This will only accelerate: the various methods: formal, free, confessional, avant garde, etc., will circle the wagons and have nothing to do with each other beyond the scathing book review. But Ghost of Poetry Future, must it be this way? Probably.

 

But what of the style itself, what technical innovations do I see in my crystal paperweight? None. I foresee a period of stagnation (some will say it set in about 1930), free verse having exhausted what is logically possible in its form while being overtaken by the abstract forms mentioned above. It will have a position similar to that occupied by metrical verse today, as Langpo undergoes its own “Modernist” (Postmodernist) co-option to the mainstream. Future movement: New Free Verse. Future anthology: Rebel Demons: 25 Poets of the New Free Verse.

 

I have painted a bleak picture, at least for fellow partisans. It probably won’t happen exactly this way, but the potential is definitely there for the relevance problems contemporary poetry suffers from becoming much worse. Free verse has gone from squalling toddler to rebellious teenager to anxious middleager. Will it see retirement?

 

*

 

Gary Wilkens, www.gcwilkens.com, was born in 1976 in Charleston, SC and raised in North Carolina and Arkansas graduated in 1999 from Hendrix College with a Bachelor’s Degree with Distinction in Philosophy and in 2005 earned a MA in English from Sam Houston State University. In August 2007, he started pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

“Is Stuffed, De World: On Connie Voisine’s Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream” by Sumita Chakraborty

 

Connie Voisine, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, University of Chicago Press 

 

            At its best, Connie Voisine’s Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream is a probing second volume from a gripping poet. Two of the book’s strongest poems are also among its shortest: “The Invisible Man Remained” (which charges into visibility with the word “invisible”) and “Love Poem” (which features careful tercets, ending with a proclamation about animals, who, according to Voisine, “believed this pour / was absorbed by the grasses and trees, geraniums, / air, and see how much and why I lose myself to you”).

            Too, I find myself enjoying Voisine’s typographical experiments: instead of feeling contrived, as formatting idiosyncrasies sometimes feel, Voisine’s demonstrate a useful relationship between form and content that well serves each poem that they are employed in. Take, for example, the following selection from a stanza in “The Bird is Her Reason”:

 

                                    You must know

                        how, in adulterous love,

                                    one begins to feel fatal, beautiful. The edges of your body

            become a tense meniscus and

                        in a kind of pain you fear this love

            can only lead to death—

 

            In this selection, not only do the carefully strung lines well embody the sense of “a tense meniscus,” but the word “death,” too, is effectively enacted by the dash that follows it. This language is meticulously selected: for instance, the word “pain” is usefully modified by the phrase “a kind of,” resulting in a tone that is capable of sustaining loaded words like “love,” “fatal,” “beautiful,” “body,” “death,” and even “pain” itself. This tone is significantly bolstered by Voisine’s formatting decisions. The narrative and the lyric merge here: we are always conscious that a story is being told, but the white space nestled within that story draws our attention to the silences that breed it and the well-developed lines it contains.

            At its weakest, though, Voisine’s otherwise captivating volume slips into belabored meandering. While the weaker poems in the volume do manage to display Voisine’s able grasp of the narrative poem, their shortcoming lies in the way that their reader can feel their muscles strain: the conjunction between the narrative and the lyric, in other words, is not always fully realized. Lines like, “The world was a dark scroll unrolling beneath / and the plane could become a vehicle you’d use / the way a gnat uses its wings, with a three-dimensional / fluidity and the world might feel to you / the way water must feel to a dolphin” (from “The Early Days of Aviation”) puff up, filling with the audible effort to portray a sense of the vast and crucial.

            The reason these few bloated lines strike such a discordant note is that many of Voisine’s poems do effectively convey this sense: the feeling that to read them is to teeter dangerously close to an important revelation. When Voisine successfully accomplishes this—as, in fact, she does often—it is when she does not seem to be trying, as is the case through much of “WeatherCam—the Horizon,” which begins unassumingly:

 

On the ten o’clock news, the weatherman replays the florid day on a loop

filed from the top of the News Center Building, plays and super speeds

 

that whole day. Suppose he played the real one—the man at the Rainbow Mart

singing country with K-BUL . . .

 

            We know that we are reading something quite important: yet, we are not overtly told what it is. After this opening, Voisine embarks on a lengthy catalogue, which falters in a quasi-Whitmanian landscape—although, unlike Whitman’s, Voisine’s catalogues seem unnecessary. In the stage setting of “WeatherCam—the Horizon,” there are “wet rotten leaves pulled from beds of irises in the alleyway” and there is “chaos blooming,” nestled amidst “the marrying of ketchups” and “the polishing of shoes,” drumming home—with perhaps a few more strokes of the hammer than necessary—the greater sense of an “undoing.” After a certain point that is fittingly punctuated by the word “undoing,” this poem loses itself in its megaphone, completing its overwrought terrain with a “newscaster who weeps while she announces: there are babies / just unburied, alive, you can claim them at the corner of . . .”

            The subsequent stanza slides by, and after it, Voisine deftly recaptures the reader’s attention with a sharp dash, which is followed by a new stanza that begins with the word “no”:

 

no, he shows us the day from the point of view of the WeatherCam,

pointed at the horizon: a narrow cloud or two whizzes by,

 

the blue shifts in place like a woman who cannot bear her

body, and we are overcome by how even these sterling, western

 

heavens change, how at dusk the traffic below stills to a bright sluice

as the sun abandons its chase—the skyscrapers, the highways,

 

the glowing dome of the State House.

 

            Here is Voisine’s vision and capacity for poetic storytelling crystallized into crucial details: details that fall comfortably into a category best characterized by James McMichael, who calls Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream a book that “generates and sustains a momentum all its own,” a book that is “as down to earth as what we all walk on.” In these couplets, Voisine accomplishes something rare: the feat of generating a world that is both uniquely her own and is populated with details that a broad readership could easily picture. The word “no” is a pivot: we return not only to the narrative of the weatherman, but also to the larger narrative of “shifts in place.” We leave behind the world of the overdramatized sobbing newscaster and the catalogue in which she is housed, a catalogue that seems to try too hard to become part of a Modernist–Post Modernist tradition in which there must, it seems, be at least one set of rotting leaves in every text. In leaving the earlier tone, we enter forcefully into the universal sense of a body that is “overcome,” a body which—like the WeatherCam that drives the narrative—scrolls along a horizon filled with the recognizable (“the glowing dome of the State House”) tinged with a sense of the brand new (“these sterling, western heavens,” “the traffic below stills to a bright sluice”).

            Voisine sustains this tone successfully through the rest of “WeatherCam—the Horizon.” Although she occasionally provides a few details that bog down the pace of the text instead of promoting its central actions and concerns (an “artist’s sketch of a young, / thin, Caucasian man seen leaving a truck” is one strangely politically-correct example), she deftly builds the poem toward its conclusion:

 

[ . . . ] the smaller things that we will

never mention now, take us through to the other edge of the day

 

where we will see what the weatherman knew all along: the locust

and magnolia flowers, still tender, more bud than bloom, crisp

 

and dying on a branch’s sheath of snow, the skies, again, that forgetful blue.

 

            Perhaps the secret to Voisine’s work lies in the first couplet I have printed above: the reason some of Voisine’s details are excessive is because they belong to the category of “things that we will / never mention now,” and by mentioning them, Voisine breaks her own poetic pact. The primary purpose of these “smaller things” is to “take us through to the other edge”; and yet, when Voisine names them, endows them with lengthy catalogues in which to feed and grow fat, they overcrowd her more subtle craft, which reveals itself in stanzas and lines where those such “smaller things” are notably absent.

            If there were fewer bloated details—if those details were pushed to the background, giving the reader a sense of unrest as opposed to painting a vivid, Baroque image that screams, “There is unrest here!”—Voisine would consistently dazzle, as she does in much of “WeatherCam—the Horizon,” in “Love Poem,” in “The Invisible Man Remained.” At times, too, the poems seem to work too hard to belong to the Literary Canon, with a capital L and a capital C. In “The Early Days of Aviation,” there are lines of intelligently executed perception, introspection, and revelation, such as “I could tell you this was the year that I too / flew through a darkness, but at the time / I only felt ugly, inarticulate.” However, this reader finds herself disappointed when such moments blur amidst others whose greater purpose appears to be a sort of catcall to canonized literary and philosophical motifs. Take, for example, the following lines:

 

The world was a dark scroll unrolling beneath

and the plan could become a vehicle you’d use

the way a gnat uses its wings, with a three-dimensional

fluidity and the world might feel to you

the way water must feel to a dolphin.

It was too cold in that hotel, wind

snaked through the cracked-framed windows

and faded drapes.

 

            The impulse here to define the “world,” the references to a “gnat” and a “dolphin,” the mention of an edifice in disrepair and a wind that “snaked” amidst “cracked-framed windows” and “faded drapes”: this section envisions itself within a canon where such images and references are historically engaged, and suffers from it. One gets the sense that Voisine has included so many literary references in her volume in order to anchor her world in other worlds that have somehow gained a sought-after legitimacy—in other poems, we meet hawks, snakes, apples, Isabelle Archer, David Copperfield, Marie de France, Coleridge, and Keats, to name a few—rather than including them because they are vital to her poems. In truth, in its finest moments, Voisine’s work is strong enough to stand without these allusions—their invocations, as a result, can easily be interpreted as manifestations of insecurity as opposed to necessary in themselves.

            I mentioned earlier that two of the strongest poems in this book are among the shortest ones. There is one poem that is a glaring exception to this rule: it is the book’s long poem, “First Taste.” I believe that the reason many of Voisine’s short poems are successful is because a short poem mandates excision: there is no room for excess in a piece that is so small. “First Taste” is far from a short poem—it is ten pages long, with six lengthy sections that feature tercets, with the exception of the concluding one-line stanza. It also continues to demonstrate Voisine’s ability to craft a narrative poem in a lyric voice, and is a highly intelligent text with memorable and crucial moments—Voisine’s particular gift for rich endings is especially rewarding here, as the long journey taken through the poem ends with:

           

[. . .] —but you entered it as one enters

 

water in the summer, without fear or guile—and the brief glory of the door

flung open, the whoosh of air through the subway car,

the in and through every suffering you felt fully and well,

 

this is what you try to recall, organize.

 

            In a sense, however, “First Taste” is a short text, at least compared to what it might have been: as Nicholas Christopher notes, the poem is “rich and compressed as a novella.” “First Taste” is a short novel of sorts, compressed first by verse and second by Voisine’s knack for compression. The triumph of “First Taste” is a logical extension of the triumph of other instances of reduction by pressure, a phrase that suits Voisine well, and, tellingly, is a phrase that I have taken directly from the definition of what it means to “compress.”

          In the words of Mr. Bones, the world of Voisine’s Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream is—like the title of the volume itself—stuffed. There is much to admire in this second volume from an unquestionably skilled poet, including Voisine’s aptitude for astonishing shifts, for crafting frank confessions for her speakers, and for both the narrative and the lyric sensibilities. This quality of stuffed-ness, however, accounts for both the highs and the lows of this book, which sometimes feels as though it is straining against its belt buckle with too much ingested and too much said. I found myself unable to write about this book without weaving back and forth between pleasure and critique—though I searched for a way to separate the positives from the negatives and discuss each category in turn, it is a credit to Voisine’s capacity for cohesion that such an interpretation was impossible. Voisine demands a reader who processes her poems with a full acknowledgment of the fact that her book is a complete organism: the individual poems in the volume function much like organs within a larger creature. When an organ falters, the entire organism feels it, and when an organ works well, so too does the organism. A reader of Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream must follow the instructions for reading that the book itself prescribes: to be immersed in all aspects of Voisine’s full-to-bursting volume.

 

*

 

Sumita Chakraborty is the Assistant Poetry Editor at AGNI Magazine. A resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts and a graduate of Wellesley College, she writes poems and criticism, and plans to pursue graduate studies in English literature in the future. She has a poem forthcoming in BOXCAR Poetry Review.

Catherine Pierce’s “Famous Last Words” reviewed by Patrick Kanouse

Catherine Pierce, Famous Last Words, Saturnalia

I long ago stopped keeping track of the books that received first-book competition awards, for the volume of competitions has steadily increased over the years while the quality of the offerings seemed to decline. I now trust only a few competitions, and even then they do not always meet my expectations . If, however, more of these first books were like Catherine Pierce’s Famous Last Words, I would reconsider. Pierce’s book won the 2007 Saturnalia Prize (selected that year by John Yau), but it possesses none of the signs of a first book. Her ambitions are high, but she often meets those ambitions–variety of topic with a consistency of voice, a willingness to dabble outside of the mainstream of poetry, and a substantial command of language balanced by grace and simplicity.

Famous Last Words is divided into three parts. Part one is a section of “love” poems but not sappy, sentimental verse best left to private endearments. Instead, Pierce provides us with eight poems of love to abstract topics. The titles “Love Poem to Sinister Moments,” “Love Poem to America,” and “Love Poem to a Blank Space” indicate that these are no common subjects at which we address our “love.” These poems are almost journal-like entries, dealing with private, best-left-unsaid thoughts. Yet, as voyeurs, they match our own fears, concerns, and desires. Here are a few lines from “Love Poem to a Blank Space”:

 

            You are pure as soil,

            simple as bone. The taste

 

            of you transparent. I love

            your dumb grace,

 

            your unfelt presence.

 

A concise language (notice that Pierce left out a potential “as” in front of “pure,” which is telling), simple images, and a willingness to dip into synesthesia or other abstractions are a marked distinction throughout this book. Pierce never seems to let a poem get out of her control; at the same time, no poem here seems constricted or forced or limited.

The second and longest section has no specific, overarching theme but retains many strong elements of the first section. Perhaps the strongest poem, “Apostrophe to the First Gray Hair,” of the collection is here. Again, it shows the control and concision that Pierce maintains.

 

O small silver rope by whose noose

I will, if lucky, hang—

 

You are the highway’s white stripe

dividing toward from away.

 

The hairline fracture

on a slowly swaying bridge.

 

Light plummeting earthward

years after the star has turned dark.

 

The title of the poem suggests initially something frivolous, a toss away. Most people gray and many lament, but Pierce links it to the cosmos so elegantly, with such grace that it seems implausible that we ever thought this poem was going to be anything less significant than about the death of stars and the lapse of time.

This poem shows another very strong feature of Pierce’s work–she knows how to end a poem. While delivering them out of context can hamper their effect, still the best way to understand the effects she can achieve is to quote a few of them:

 

which card will send

the house tumbling down.

            (“Love Poem to Sinister Moments”)

 

…breaking

the sky into pieces

            (“Love Poem to the Word Lonesome”)

 

…The moon

shimmers, a placebo. As it falls,

I close my mouth around it.

            (“While You Sleep, I Watch Myself Die”)

 

These are forceful, make-you-stop-and-read-again endings. A poet can do much wrong in a poem and regain everything with a strong ending. So much the better when Pierce does not do much wrong. Her weakest moments are the two prose poems: “Project Yourself Here” and “Postcards Nos 1-6.” A prose poem must be singularly lyrical to evade being just prose, while at the same time avoiding a perpetually charged language (imagine if Dylan Thomas wrote only prose poems). While Pierce possesses such skills, her strength is in using them with timing and not overly frequently to maintain their value. In longer poems, Pierce uses more prosaic lines to break a series of intense lines, for example “Domesticity”:

 

            The night slips around me

            and the bedroom is lit

            with a strand of small lights.

            My body admits to calm.

But here the definitive line breaks create the tension that the more prosaic second and third lines might lack in regular prose.

The final section is a set of poems framed around someone’s famous last words: Billy the Kid, George Appel, Marie Antoinette, Doc Holliday, Isadora Duncan, Joseph Henry Green, and Pancho Villa. Each poem’s title consists of the last words of the subject of the poem and all are in third-person view. What is really interesting in these poems is the subtlety and variety Pierce achieves and how she expands and intuits beyond the “meaning” of the last words. Each of the subjects is well visualized, but the third-person view provides Pierce an opportunity to fill in some details or hypothesize. This is a strong group of poems, but perhaps the most interesting one is Pancho Villa’s, which ends the collection overall: “Don’t Let It End Like This. Tell Them I Said Something.” While clearly appropriate for a poet to end with such flair, the poem itself is deliciously inspired. Villa’s direct thoughts or words cut into the narrative of the poem, providing a backdrop often at odds with the narrative.

 

            But he bloodied the countryside. Is rumored

            to have killed to fulfill a thirst, to have shot the priest

            who begged for mercy. Do we serve him thus?

 

                        Fuck the dogs.

                       

                        Kill them for me.

 

Yet Villa and the narrator conclude and desire the same thing:

 

            …You understand

            the need for the right words. How else

            can we live forever? How else

            can we write ourselves in?

 

On that question ends this delightful collection of poems. Pierce begins with love to abstractions and ends with a reliance on language to not only make sense of our lives but to give eternal life to our lives. Given the strength of this collection, I expect we’ve not yet read Pierce’s last words, and I look forward to her next words.

 

*

Patrick Kanouse’s poems have appeared in many journals and websites, including Smartish Pace, The Connecticut Review, The Evansville Review, and Astropoetica among others. He is a managing editor with a technology publisher in Indianapolis. You can read his poems at www.patrickkanouse.com.

 

 

 

 

 

Delight and Discretion: On Karen Rigby’s chapbook Savage Machinery, by Brooklyn Copeland

Karen Rigby, Savage Machinery, Finishing Line Press, 2008, http://www.karenrigby.com/id16.html, http://www.finishinglinepress.com

 

Karen Rigby’s second chapbook, “Savage Machinery,” opens with the quiet, unflinching ease of an haute-voyeur. While the subjects of the poems vary from the personal to the historical, they are always sensual. Rigby has a knack for letting her delight shine through while maintaining her role as the discreet recorder of all she observes and envisions.

Stylistically poised and direct, each poem is true to its title; Rigby rarely takes the opportunity to stray between-the-lines. With her boundaries clearly defined, Rigby is thorough in her exploration of a subject. Although there isn’t a bum or rough moment to be found among these poems, Rigby’s tactility and her highly original metaphors ensure there is never a predictable moment. Take, for instance, the poem Photo of an Autoerotic:

After the first shock, you have to admire the body’s hardwood cursive.

 

His face

concealing his member,

his thumb

and forefinger

hooking his head

 

to his own lip like a snake charmer,

something fabled but true:

 

the ones bowing to kiss themselves,

holding the pose for the shutter,

 

the aluminum flash.

Likewise, fine art and food quickly become tedious in the hands of a poet who writes first as a scholar or gourmet— a poet whose intimacy with such topics feels rehearsed and driven by theory. Rigby, meanwhile, writes as if she’s giving space to long-time affinities for Hopper

…His women

 

wear V-necks buttoned to the wrist.

Pace benzene autumns,

slaughterhouse cities.

His women lacquer their lips.

Over and over Hopper

 

brings you back to Bloomfield

or Brooklyn, Desdemona, Champaign.

He brings you back to the farmhouse,
the window’s crosshairs

painted on the floor. In 1931

his women have no face. No hands.
Only the brute-black field

like your mother’s kettle of herbs.

(Edward Hopper’s Women)

and certain earthy vegetables

Let the field bury crystalline skins.

Let the roots drive the green hands skyward

in spite of the earth.

Let me remember the primitive,

underground birth, and the kingdom

of sleepers. Let me consider

 

the lily’s doppelgänger.

(Song for the Onion)

Of course, Rigby’s delight and discretion are two of the strongest threads that tie this collection together. At times, her delight borders on profound ecstasy, and her discretion borders on technical restraint— usually to the best possible effect. From the first two poems, I noticed another, more minor thread that ties subject to subject in the order of almost every poem’s appearance. For instance, burning links the first and second poems, airplanes link the second and third, fingers the fourth and fifth, photos the fifth and sixth, and so on. I mention this small gesture because it impresses me to see a younger poet paying such attention to the flow of her manuscript; in “Savage Machinery,” this attention is indicative of the deliberation that went into creating a very full, accomplished collection out of just sixteen poems.

*

Brooklyn Copeland was born in Indianapolis in 1984. She is co-editor
of Taiga Press (taigapoetry.blogspot.com), which publishes the print journal Taiga, as well as the Tundra Chapbook Series. She blogs at Alsace-Lorraine (brooklyncopeland.blogspot.com).

Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy, reviewed by Juliet Cook

Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar, Copper Canyon Press

 

I loved Brenda Shaughnessy’s first poetry collection, Interior with Sudden Joy, thus was eager to partake of her second collection, Human Dark with Sugar. However, despite the two collections’ reminiscent-of-each-other titles, I thought they seemed stylistically dissimilar and Human Dark with Sugar did not immediately arouse my adoration or admiration—it was just fine, it didn’t wow or dazzle or thrill or particularly provoke. At least, that was my first impression.

 

It’s not exactly fair to compare two different collections, but why give into restraint. Shaughnessy’s last book was more interestingly opaque and ornate, whereas her current is more transparent and plain. Interior with Sudden Joy is more like a fizzy concoction crossed with suspicious elixir whereas Human Dark with Sugar is only slightly carbonated like a lo-cal seltzer. Begging the question, who wants enhanced water instead of an extra-special potion? Of course, many people do want enhanced water. Later it occurred to me that perhaps one particularly pertinent difference between the two collections is that ‘Interior’ deals more with the interiority of one particular speaker, whereas ‘Human Dark’ has somewhat more of an exterior focus, dealing with the human condition in a manner that might come across as broader and less quirky, but is ultimately no less relevant.

 

When I first started reading Human Dark with Sugar, though, I was struck by how much more plainspoken it seemed compared to what I had been anticipating. I suppose I shouldn’t enter into a new reading experience with expectations already in mind, but what can I say? I was anticipating quirkiness, obtuse eroticism, darts, and pleats. Instead I was greeted with what initially seemed like a disappointingly smooth, straightforward surface. In the first poem of the collection, “I’m Over the Moon”, the speaker clearly states, almost as if in explanation:

But my lovers have never been able to read

my mind. I’ve had to learn to be direct.

Upon which part of my mind protested, ‘No! Give me your frilly obliquity!’ In the realm of poetry, I do not tend to be drawn in by what seems overly obvious, universal, or predictable. I wish to form my own interpretations from evocative imagery and carefully-chosen yet peculiar details. I am desirous of quirky specificity.

 

Despite not being immediately titillated by the suggestion of oncoming directness, I did want to approach this book’s style and content with an open mind. I must admit that my non-enthralled regard continued throughout the collection’s second poem (“Magic Turns to Math and Back”) which informs, ‘So math, not metaphor, works’ and then goes on to speak of formulas and the third poem (“Why Is the Color of Snow?”) which instructs, “Melt yourself to make yourself more clear”. Even though that phrase is somewhat interesting to me, the references to precision and clarity were not boding well for my stylistic preferences as a reader. In tidy accompaniment to such references, the poems’ lines breaks are clean and consistent, the rhythm has a melodious flow, and there is quite a bit of rhyme. I tend to enjoy internal rhyme and assonance, but most of it falls near the ends of short lines here, imparting an effect that seemed a bit too sing-songy for my liking. Of course, the brief quotes presented so far are phrases plucked out of the context of considerably longer works. The first poem also includes some fairly explicit sexual imagery, but for some reason, even that did not pull me in—perhaps at least in part because I wasn’t sure how to contextualize it within the collection as a whole yet.

 

From the beginning of the book, the poems hint at themes associated with love, loss, the unrelenting passage of time, and some of the difficulties involved with attempting to stake out one’s own personal identity against these backdrops. Such themes continue to manifest themselves and play out as the book proceeds. I found myself wondering why this poet opted to contain such broad themes within the consistent and evenly-paced frameworks which most of the collection’s poems abide by. One theory could be that perhaps certain aspects of love, loss, and time seem so chaotic that the poet chose to exert some control over them by fitting them into neat structures of her own devising. One cannot halt the forward momentum of time, for example, but one can freeze frame certain moments of time into documents, to at least temporarily experience an illusion of control; even then, how long will it last before one realizes the relative absurdity of trying to control something larger than herself?

 

From the beginning of the book, there are references to order (both natural order and more human-imposed orders) and to the masses; there are allusions to the futility of escaping the order of things and the difficulty of setting oneself apart. Simultaneously, there is a certain sense of longing to do just that—to delineate oneself from the masses, to escape into some sort of distinction. Initially, this having-to-fit-in-yet-longing-to-break-away juxtaposition plays out in a rather generalized sense. As the collection proceeds, longing becomes more specified—the desire to set oneself apart as a woman, the desire to set oneself apart as a romantic partner, the desire to set a present version of oneself apart from a past version of oneself or try to somehow reconcile the different versions against the backdrop of lost love and passing time. Connecting many of these poems seems to be an underlying sense of low-grade horror hinting at implication within some sort of semi-numb, undifferentiated, I-am-replaceable haze yet on some level realizing that sometimes the alternatives to that fake womb may be much more acutely painful. So which state of being will one choose: numbed-out, dumbed-down lack of differentiation or painful individuation?

 

This conflict is effectively illustrated within “Parthenogenesis,” the fourth poem in the book and the first piece to intensely pique my interest. This piece explore the theme of self-control and of fitting in versus setting oneself apart within a female-centric context that resonated for me more than the somewhat more generalized context of the poems preceding it. This piece also makes use of more startling imagery and jarring juxtapositions and does so to powerful effect. The poem begins as follows:

It’s easy to make more of myself by eating,

and sometimes easy’s the thing.

 

To be double-me, half the trouble

but not lonely.

The piece then continues to create a tone of numb giving in and fitting in and dull gluttony; then suddenly takes a startling twist in the following jarringly juxtaposed couplet:

the feeling of being a natural woman,

like a sixteen-year-old getting knocked up

From there, the piece offers up some increasingly extreme visions of alternatives to overeating (i.e. mindless consumption i.e. buying into the natural order of things), alternatives like starving oneself, aborting oneself, eating glass, cutting off pieces of oneself.

 

In a way, this poem seems to be provoking a reader to consider the choices of either an easy, lazy mode of existence or else a painfully extreme mode of existence—but both of those modes seem to be rooted in self-immolation (either self-effacement or self-destruction); both of those modes seem to be dysfunctional and yielding of unhealthy results. Isn’t there a third choice, a reader might wonder.  An option that does not revolve around distracting oneself with overindulgence or adhering to extreme versions of punishing self-restraint? A choice more akin to normalcy? Well, the voice of the poem has considered that, too, and has this to say about the matter:

Sometimes I put in just the right amount,

but then I’m the worst kind of patsy, a chump

 

giving myself over to myself like a criminal

to the law, with nothing to show for it.

 

No reward, no news, no truth.

It’s too sad to be so ordinary every day.

 

Like some kind of employee.

Being told what to do…

The confusion of voice(s) in this piece seems to be the dilemma of a person who does not want to concede to ordinary truths; who wants to somehow rebel or set herself apart, but who can only seem to do so through self-destructive means. Maybe the voice in this poem is positing that there is ultimately no satisfying escape from the futility of ordinariness, from the ordinariness of the human condition, from the overall absurdity of existence, ultimately ending in the oblivion of time’s passage no matter how one might choose to assert herself.

 

Some might read “Parthenogenesis” as an eating disorder poem, but I read it as reaching beyond that into the realm of order/disorder and function/dysfunction. Perhaps even serving as a disturbing anti-consumption piece—disturbing especially because there is no satisfying solution even if one tries to manage a healthy balance or negotiate a middle ground.

 

At times while reading this collection and considering the themes it repeatedly explored, I found myself wishing that the language and structure of the poems conveyed more of a sense of urgency or dissonance, rather than being presented in such a straightforward and fairly traditional format. The short line lengths and non-surprising line breaks led me to read these pieces with a slow and careful pace that sometimes did not seem to mesh well with the thematic concerns. Perhaps the structure of these poems is trying to enact its own statement about the futility of attempting to contain oneself within ordinary and expected formats.

 

Despite language usage that sometimes seems overly obvious, many of these poems do include an underlying resistance against the obvious. In ‘Parthenogenesis,’ the speaker would rather starve herself than give in to normal eating habits. In ‘Old Bed,’ the speaker would rather deprive herself of sleep to the point of hallucination than succumb to normal patterns of sleep—and her description of the bed and resistance to sleep in this piece also seems to speak of a culture that has become overly reliant on medication, whether self-medication or societal-sanctioned remedies, as in:

This pink, synthetic honey spoiling

the tea of my life, already steeped into a stupor…

 

It’s like a fad now faded, trendy and cheap.

 

Sleep: if everyone put a spike

through their heads and wore paper pants

 

to work I’d be the one to say ‘No thanks.’

I’m not so insecure that I need

 

to be ridiculous, to dream, to belong

to the smiling group, like anyone.

 

I don’t need a cult of sleep to tell me to die

every night. I don’t trust the world…

Again the resistance to normalcy or to what a misguided society now tries to prescribe as normalcy, to complacency, to giving in. This speaker does not trust the impulse that seems to seek to turn us into zombies, into sheep, into sleepy teams, embracing what everyone else unquestioningly embraces because it’s very ubiquity has come to make it seem like some sort of collective unconscious—but is it really? Or is something more insidious than that? Something more akin to a carefully-constructed, corporate-plotted drug commercial posing as reality? And even if one somehow recognizes this, how does one resist the easy fix?  How