Competing Impulses: Joseph P. Wood on Anna Journey’s If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting

If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, Anna Journey, University of Georgia Press, 2009

If American poetry, as many critics have posited, is still wrestling with the Modernists, then one major conversation that has continued for nearly a century is how is to present the self and its inner-workings. All one needs to do is Google “School of Quietude” to witness a Dead Sea Scroll-length argument between avant-garde aesthetes and our more “mainstream” poets who repeatedly emphasize rhetorical and narrative clarity. The former group accuses the latter of dumbing down poetry by prescribing meaning and thus limiting a poem’s possibility. The latter group accuses the former of writing poetry so impenetrable that all a reader is left with is musically-informed nonsense. Both accusations imply the other camp creates art that takes no risk and that struts a received, superficial intellect. Both camps claim their writers are the ones putting themselves on the line, pushing an artistic vision that challenges both artist and audience.

But who these days is the avant and who is the mainstream? As convenient as it would be to place writers into discrete aesthetic groups, it is a small percentage of poets who bicker on internet comment threads and present themselves as uniform ideologues. More common, writers today quietly scavenge all over the poetic map and exhibit an “everything-but-the-kitchen sink” mentality when making their art. When done well, this approach results in work that feels both located in past traditions—albeit sometimes contradictory ones—and yet is entirely fresh in its idiom and intellect. One such writer embodying this democratic spirit is the up-and-coming Anna Journey, whose first book of poems If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting was selected for the National Poetry Series by Thomas Lux and was published University of Georgia Press. Journey’s book is one chock full of competing impulses: she blends readily accessible diction with syntactical obfuscation; she fuses overt rhetorical meditation into narratives that employ non-linear associative shifts; she paints landscapes that are one moment luscious and the next filled with spirits and carrion. In short, this astoundingly well-crafted collection pulls the reader through a maze of disparate landscapes and voices that strive to arrive at rhetorical and lyrical grandeur, to reveal a bared and vulnerable soul.

The book builds and hinges on a series of repeated images: floral, ornithological, bodily, and stratospheric. Journey’s genius lies in how these systems tonally and emotionally evolve over the course of the book and over the course of individual poems. In the collection’s first section, for instance, the poem, “A Rabbit Must Be Walking”, starts us on this edible tidbit:

To swallow a chicken heart whole in its glue-skinned
pericardium is to believe the pickled chill

on the way down is love. That’s why I shuddered
for no reason and knew

a rabbit must be walking on my grave—its sick
cotton a white flag, a peony. Who would believe it?

The sonic patterning in the first stanza is gluey and chewy as the imagery itself. Thus, what a masterful use of line and stanza break to launch us into a treaty on love, only then to move us to a rabbit walking on the speaker’s grave? This poem—like most in this collection—has these brilliant associative shifts from sentence to sentence, or even from phrase to phrase. Yet, in this same poem, only two stanzas later, the pace slows down, and the reader is led squarely into the speaker’s autobiography:

I believed myself at thirteen

cursed by my read hair, cursed as my aunt’s
one derelict rose—varicose coral

while the rest of the bush grew white as my scalp
under lemon juice, peroxide. My hair bleaching…

And then the poem launches skyward into a meditation on the moon. This poem—all her poems—appears the child of parents who would most certainly be divorced by now. On one hand, I see the Confessionalist-inspired work of 1980’s memory narrative—Levis, Olds, Tess Gallagher—except Journey is less burdened by narrative convention. On the other hand, I see the play of the New York School or even Lang Po, except I sense that Journey sees the speaker as more than just a whimsical or philosophical construct.

No, at the end of the day, Journey is a deadly serious poet, wanting to startle and even disturb, especially in the book’s third section where ghosts and devils enter and work over the speaker’s consciousness. Here, miscarried sisters are owls, the devil becomes a lover, or in “Elegy: I Pass by the Erotic Bakery”, a rumination that begins with “tits of lemon meringue” quickly moves into descriptions of her dead grandfather:

in the window that day
looked at first like breasts, then more like the paws of my didn’t

gnaw off his face. I’ve heard it happens. I’d like to ask the pastry chef

if his vision of whipped
egg whites and sugar meant he saw, in a dream, that mangled paw

pressed to my grandfather’s chest.
I know my grandfather

died alone, with the tv on. I need to know
he kept his face that day, in the green armchair…

Eventually the poem turns its attention to birds nervous in flight before returning back to the breasts now “caved in” and the speaker’s licking her lips and comparing herself to Christ. Let’s face it: it is a bit unnerving to think of one’s own sense of sexual identity in comparison to the death of a grandparent, but somehow, I’m not really that shaken up—and I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. In fact, as the collection progresses, the reader comes to see the work is almost so perfectly constructed—the poems’ scopes pinpoint accurate, language and metaphor highly stylized and systematic—that the poems over time feel more and more rhetorically calculated and less and less urgent.

Moreover, the book mildly suffers from two distinct tics. First, the writer overly relies on interrogatives, usually inserted into the middle of poems. They are meant to be transition and/or self-commentary, but over time, their tones and functions become redundant. Second, almost all poems end with a gesture toward a summative lyrical drama, as if some part of the human spirit was being unearthed, some great experiential truth revealed. At some point, I just wanted the poems—amazingly crafted as they were—to find a different gear, either go quieter and crazier and in the process, feel more intuitively constructed. The downside of playing the same prosodic card: what initially feels like an active imagination can over time turn into unintentional self-imitation. Perhaps the risk for the writer is not located on what is or is not revealed, what aesthetic guide is or is not employed. Rather, risk might be as simple as once a form or strategy is brought into the writer’s full conscience ceases to be elusive, that form or strategy should be modified—or better yet, abandoned.

Whatever Order We Put the World: Robert Silva on Scary No Scary by Zachary Schomburg

Scary, No Scary, Zachary Schomburg, Black Ocean, 2009

In Scary, No Scary, poet Zachary Schomburg conjures a self-made mythology populated by jaguars, black holes, hummingbirds, and Satan. From this bric-a-brac bestiary he sculpts a new and surreal mythos that, given the stale iconography of our present day—good and evil, life and death, success and failure—is rejuvenating and jarring.

In “The Darkness and the Light” (bastardized binaries riddle the book) he rewrites one tired axiom thusly:

Some people think it is Satan’s job to make what is wrong with this world, but those people are wrong. It is Satan’s job to make us choose between the only two things that are right with it.

I’m not even sure what that means, but I love it. Logic here is neither the point nor the point of departure. Schomburg swaps the magnetic poles, changing weather patterns, destroying the world.

Readers become amateur anthropologists; encountering the poems is something like discovering artifacts from an extinct race of proto-humans. Or, for that matter, future humans who traveled back into Earth’s distant past in order to escape a global apocalypse (a dying sun? a collision of a galaxies?) only to perish from flash floods or snake bites.

Which is to say, at first, we don’t understand a whole lot. A sense of disaster hangs over the poems: meteorites fall, lava flows, fire devours everything. But some things we never do get (what’s with the “wolf-spiders”?).

Myths depend on a certain cultural fluency (what’s a diamond-encrusted cross, after all, but a death machine dangling from a necklace?) so it’s not surprising that many of the poems don’t work alone. Indeed, some dead-end into clumsy punchlines (“let’s not stand here/with our fingers up our butts”), and others seem postmodern put-ons.

But as you progress, the poems begin to fit together, growing dense, pulling interstellar scrap into their gravitational field. In an early poem, arms amputated in a farm accident sprout tree branches. In a “New Kind of a Tree,” a child who climbs a tree (perhaps a former amputee?) transforms into a hummingbird. Then in “Falling Life,” a character falls from a tree and marries a hummingbird (perhaps a former tree climber?) and manages to live “a full life/while falling.”

The poems at times resemble equations, creating whole worlds out of a series of symbolic relationships. This comes to an apotheosis in “Dead Hummingbird Problem”:

Falling from trees becomes a new kind of flight. Everything that has died becomes a dead hummingbird. The dead hummingbird becomes the new atom. And the hearts of the dead hummingbird, unbeating and indivisible, become the new subatomic particle.

Enticing and fanciful as Scary, No Scary is, it drives to something universal: the religious sensibility hard-wired into our brains, our need to make meaning out of chaos and death.

Let’s not kid ourselves. We live in an imitation of life. We create meaning out of a bricolage of found parts—owl bones and twine, transistors and romance novels. We put the world in order; putting the world in order is not faithful to the world.

In “The Histories” the sweep of time is understood as a series of redecorations in a dining room. And the final, long poem “The Pond” (the book’s pinnacle, really) is something like a life simulator—a story of birth, life, and death in a vague space that feels like it was designed by aliens and constructed inside a bubble floating in outer space.

Whatever order we put on the world it will always be a false one. So perhaps what matters is the choice of illusion: Scary or No Scary?

“You should say/no scary.”

*

Robert Silva is a writer living in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared
in The Quarterly Conversation and ZYZZYVA.

Fractured States: Robert McGuire on Being Abbas el Abd by Ahmed Alaidy

Being Abbas el Abd, Ahmed Alaidy, American University in Cairo Press, 2009

Among the mentors who Ahmed Alaidy thanks in the acknowledgements to this short novel is Chuck Palahniuk, and the influence shows. Being Abbas el Abd has a theme and plot – and a twist ending – so similar to Palahniuk’s Fight Club that it almost reads as a modern dress restaging of the same story.

Set in the wildly Westernizing economy of 21st-century Cairo, the story features an alienated young narrator wandering through a wearisome cityscape that is wound to the breaking point by generational, religious and economic conflict. The environment is politically repressive, yet driven by capitalist boosterism, idolatrous of history, yet youthful and media driven, a state increasingly divided against itself. The city is so shackled to discredited pieties and commercialized antiquities, but still so unable to resist cultural pollution from outside, that the young feel they have no ground to stand on but nihilism.

The narrator comes under the tutelage of Abbas, a magnetic emotional vandal who counsels, “Don’t fight things by resisting them because they’ll strike back with a vengeance. Fight things by doing them – that way they lose their meaning.” On a lark Abbas persuades the narrator to impersonate him on two comically chaotic and simultaneous blind dates with a pair of women who share the same name, each on a different floor of the same cafe. A mistaken-identity fiasco ensues when the narrator can’t keep straight which date is which or what persona they expect him to portray.

Navigating the prank, and his eventual rebellion against Abbas, is made more difficult for the narrator by the after affects of extreme malpractice at the hands of his mad scientist psychiatrist. We also get hints that the narrator may be experiencing some kind of disassociative episode and that the high-tech mood stabilizers he is cruising on may be doing more harm than good.

But it’s hard to say for sure. Most of the plot is just plain hard to follow, broken off at points without resolution, subjected to digressions with no apparent relevance and told in a fractured narrative style meant to reflect both a corrupted state of mind and life in a corrupt State. “We are the autistic generation,” the narrator says in one of his lucid moments, “living under the same roof with strangers who have names similar to ours.”

The narrative style is the most interesting aspect of Abbas. The book is stuffed with energetic wordplay, such as when the narrator comes out on the losing end of a “dialogue of fists” and he regrets being treated “like a rug on a date with fate over the balcony railings.” Bored waiters, sycophant traffic cops, hard-hearted prostitutes, senile landlords, fundamentalist moral guardians and the urban elite all have turns around the stage to lend their characteristic voices to the urban cacophony only to have the narrator run contemptuous verbal circles around them.

I suspect only a fraction of the jokes are appreciated by a reader (like myself) unfamiliar with the linguistic heritage the author is playing on. For example, the translator, Humphrey Davies, explains in an illuminating endnote how the traditional border between classical and colloquial Arabic idioms is transgressed for ironic effect and ultimately in support of the theme of generational tension. A sentence in the classical idiom may “have at its syntactical center an undeniably colloquial verb, resulting in what, from a traditional perspective, is a disorienting sense of a breakdown of borders.”

A degree of that disorientation is likely lost in the translation, but the naughty winking energy still comes through and provides its own kind of delight. Consider the following passage:

I walk to the end of the street, where the minibus drivers have come up with a new unofficial stop.
“Ramses! Ramses! Ramses!”
As the tout shouts he waves at me and says: “Heh, mizter! Going to Ramses?”
I shake my head and make my way to the big minibus that some call ‘The Phantom.’
The tout pulls me in by the shoulder like someone dragging his drawers off the line.
Then he gets off again looking for more underwear, drumming on the paneling the while to pass the time as he shouts: “This way and watch your step! (Bam bam bam!) Ramses! (Bam bam bam!) Coming with us, miss?”
In gets a petticoat.
(Bam bam bam!)
In gets an undershirt.
(Bam bam bam!)
“You, sonny?”
In gets a pair of boxers.
“All Helpful All Wise All Giving All Gener. . . ! Something wrong, mizter?!”
“What do you think you’re doing, buddy? Whacking cockroaches with a slipper? Enough with the bang, bang, bang. Give your hand a nice dangle for a bit.”
“What’s it to you, buddy? Someone bang you?”
Have a horrible day!
“‘Someone bang you?’ Whoa! You want to try out your smartass cracks on me? Wise up. I’ve been around since before your mommy peeled your daddy’s banana.”
“Uh . . . what’s that mean?”

What layers of irony are the English-language reader missing? Something in the tout’s mispronunciations, something in his cry of “All Helpful . . . .”, something in the names of the bus lines. There are jokes here I’m not getting, I’m sure. (Actually, there are jokes that perhaps only the youth of Egypt are meant to get. The translator’s note explains how the Ramses bus line is a local pun that famously went over the head of academic readers who never expect to find the language of the street in print.)

But an inventive voice comes through nevertheless, in this passage and elsewhere, in the volatile braggadocio, the alternating innuendo and frank punning, the separatist argot of bleeding edge technology buffs, the inventive revision of traditional proverbs. Being Abbas el Abd for this reader serves as a tantalizing hint at unfamiliar depths in Arabic literature. Admittedly, this kind of literary tourism is probably unfair grounds on which to assess a book, and I do hope it gets more contextualized attention by a less naïve reader. But ultimately I doubt that a fuller appreciation of the language play is successfully going to paper over the lack of development in the story or the lack of discipline in the storytelling.

*

Robert McGuire is a freelance copywriter, teacher and aspiring novelist living in New Haven, Connecticut. Excerpts of his unpublished novel, A Wish In One Hand, can be seen at www.awishinonehand.net. He blogs about the writing process at www.workingonanovel.com.

With More Than a Little Bit of Care: James Reiss on Judith Valente’s Discovering Moons

Discovering Moons, Judith Valente, Virtual Artists Collective, 2009

A journalist’s commitment to facticity—the “who, what, when, where, why,” let alone the “how,” of a situation—is generally considered to be at odds with creative writing. Perhaps the most celebrated journalist to seriously try his hand at verse, Stephen Crane, ended up with a handful of canonical poems. Hardly anyone has argued that “The Black Riders” is on a par with “The Red Badge of Courage.” Still, Crane’s reportorial free-verse nuggets have tunneled their way into our culture, undermining many a Potemkin village of platitudes regarding religion and ethics.

In fact, if you Google the two words journalist poets without quotation marks, one of the first names on your list will be Judith Valente, who happens to cover religion and ethics for PBS and NPR. Twice she’s been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her work in “The Dallas Times Herald” and “The Wall Street Journal.” It’s true, one of her Pulitzer nominations had to do with a “soft news story” about a religious conservative dad coping with his son’s fatal AIDS. Plus, Valente is well known as an interviewer of such dyed-in-the-wool writers as the poet/editor Ron Offen on Chicago’s WBEZ. Well, I’ve heard her on public radio and she sounds as though she cares a great deal about her day job as a member of the press.

She appears to have put together her long-awaited debut volume of poems, “Discovering Moons,” with more than a little bit of care. The book’s three-part table of contents is cyclical. The first poem deals with a potentially life-threatening event, as do five of the six poems toward the end. The middle section, “Walking with Dr. Williams,” is not riotously euphoric, but it doles out mega-doses of restorative details, the mundane ones that C. S. Lewis and William Carlos Williams relished—as does Mary Oliver, who has recently endorsed Valente’s work. What’s more, some of Valente’s liveliest poems approach the kind of Frank O’Hara “I do this I do that” Personism evident in his chestnut, “The Day Lady Died.”

In “The Book of 55,000 Baby Names” Valente doesn’t so much take us through city streets as guide us through the synapses of her brain. Whereas O’Hara marched through Manhattan inevitably toward the headline in “The New York Post” announcing the death of Billie Holiday, Valente plunges through a sourcebook of monikers, discoursing on the meaning and popularity of babies’ names: “how Emily and Emma reached the top of the roster”—at least until 2007, when Emma took third place and was replaced by Isabella! Part of the impetus for Valente’s research is her stepdaughter, pregnant, who finally chooses Ava (“Portuguese for grandmother”) as her child’s name. But mainly it is Valente herself as a step-grandmother—it’s her high spirits that are responsible for the surprise end of her slant-rhymed excursion in couplets, when she locates Ava and invents a name for an anonymous infant alongside her:

Some [babies] still enter this world nameless,
like the newborn preemie, dark-haired, restless,

lying in the crib next to Ava’s in the neo-natal ward:
no crayon-colored name on his white ID card.

He punches the air with a balled fist, then lifts
his swaddled bottom. Name him, Adia, Swahili for gift.

Another scattershot Burst of Judy—herself named “after the patron / saint of hopeless causes”—full of a madcap enthusiasm as “contagious” as the hospital Dr. Williams famously rode to, erupts in her 50-line tour de force, “Inventing An Alphabet.” Valente can barely contain herself as she contemplates letters in an alphabet that forms words, literary allusions and a crazy quilt of language, including lyrics from the Crystals, as well as at least two time-honored slogans [editor's note, the second line of each couplet is indented in the original]:

Dante’s nine circles, Do ron ron ron ronda do ron ron and
Whan that the Knyght had thus his tale ytoold

Ask not what your country can do for you,
See the USA in a Chevrolet, What you want, baby I got it.

M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E and Good night, Sweet prince
Odes and onomatopoeia, haiku and heroic couplets. . .

More than two of these shotgun blasts in one book could be excessive. Accordingly, taking her lead from the superb, soft-spoken Chi Town poet, Lisel Mueller, Valente murmurs, “What happens, happens in silence.” This line from a poem by Mueller comprises the so-quiet-you-can-hear-a-pin-drop beginning of Valente’s title poem, “Discovering Moons.” The situation is simple: Valente and her husband are lying in bed one fine morning. Certain offbeat particulars provide subtle conflict, enriching the story: “We wake in a room your daughter painted // sunrise red. Daylight drips through linen / curtains, feeds us intravenously.” The image of an IV is disquieting, especially considering health issues and the number of hospital poems in the book. Yet this image is far less violent than Robert Lowell’s opening couplet in “Man and Wife”: “Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed; / the rising sun in war paint dyes us red.” Happily married, Valente finds it easy to keep a stiff upper lip appropriate for a tranquil aubade. The supine couple plays a hushed little game of charting “constellations of ceiling,” the hubby imagining a crack in the plaster is a ballerina while Valente says it “is Christ strung upon his cross.” Any possible conflict once again dissipates as lines drift toward astrophysics, which Valente prizes. The poem ends in a decrescendo; rather than proclaiming something like “Ah, love, let us be true to one another,” Valente sighs, “There is so much I want to say to you / in a language without words. We orbit each other // like the moons circling Jupiter / in unconjugated space: Europa, Callisto, Leda, Ganymede, Thebe.”

Space may be “unconjugated,” but as a child Valente conjugated Latin verbs. Her education at St. Aloysius Academy and St. Peter’s College in Jersey City has followed her all the days of her life. She is certainly not a lapsed Catholic and makes no bones about her faith in poems like “Faces of the Madonna,” though she’s far from a religious neocon and has a pagan’s appreciation of the things of this world. She’s never stopped following her freshman art teacher Mrs. Cirone’s instructions “to observe a beechwood / describe what we saw,” even if young Judy “said the branches / were the serpent tresses // of Medusa.”

Call her iconoclastic, call her late for the Last Supper: in one of her most ambitious theological meditations, “Body and Soul,” she ponders the Irish poet/philosopher John O’Donohue’s words about thinking of “death not as the breath / on the back of the neck, / but a companion with us since birth, / benign doppelganger who knows us / better than we know ourselves.” This memento mori might have been a comfort to O’Donohue, who passed away peacefully two years ago when he was 53, before Valente wrote her poem about him. Whatever the case with O’Donohue, his words have served Valente, who has had her share of run-ins with the Grim Reaper. Although she’s been continually drawn to what monks and nuns call the vita contemplativa—she is currently writing a book about the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica Monastery in Atchison, Kansas—she opts for more than the Vatican when she refers to a renowned British scientist [editor's note, the lines below are indented differently in the original] :

I prefer physics. Julian Barbour’s concept:
time, a continuous tableau of many
different nows, each a single frame
passing an all-seeing lens,
so the instant of me in my kitchen
a few minutes from now,
stirring a can of Campbell’s tomato soup
for lunch in 2001 Chicago,
rolls out in simulcast
with Andy Warhol applying a splotch
of fire-engine red to his soup labels
in 1962 New York.
We are at once fetus and 44 years old,
molting in the Big Bang
and reading this poem.

You don’t need to know New Math to see that, if Valente was 44 in 2001, she’s in her early 50s in 2010. Nowadays if 50 is “the new 40,” you might as well subtitle her book “The Prime of Ms. Judith Valente.” There are poems here that travel to Maui, Cape Hatteras, and small Midwest towns—once in tandem with her husband, Charles Reynard, an Illinois Circuit Court Judge who’s also a poet. There’s a ghazal about traveling in the desert, where Valente appears to revel in what another middle-aged first-book poet called the “essential barrenness” of things. There’s a prose poem about a Thai Festival of Lanterns, the impact of which is compounded by another of Valente’s stepdaughters describing the Festival as “[c]reepy,” “some cult worship thing.” There are several sections in poems that evoke Valente’s mother Theresa, a bottle blonde with “olive skin so dark / that when she tanned, her sisters called her // netta in Sicilian: negress” (sic). There’s a wonderful rhyming love poem which takes off from a photo by John Matt Dorn, who’s responsible for the book’s haunting cover art—as well as a gritty winter diary cobbled together from disjunct, end-stopped lines such as “Inanition. Verbing. Words as salvation.”

Sure, there’s one—thankfully only one—lead balloon, a poem with an epigraph from Rumi (let his ashes and his verse rest in the 13th century, where they belong!) Let me not, in a positive review, admit impediments!

Instead, let me bow out by raving about Valente’s first poem; it’s the only one in the book that uses the second person (“you”) point of view:

“Green” is masterly in its deployment of indented triplets, like the ones in “Body and Soul,” which segue from sentence to sentence with a signature fluid grace. This hospital poem, notable for its mystery, manages to be right on target at the same time as it’s slightly out of focus. The main character may well be the autobiographical “I,” but the use of “you” distances Valente from the experience. Similarly, the use of “they” to describe the hospital staff—nurses and aides—avoids ER clichés, just as the anesthesiologist, mentioned explicitly, has a name the “you” character can’t remember. Even the brand names of anesthetics, “Versed, Sublimaze,” go beyond knee-jerk journalistic facticity and verge on being puns. Most important, Valente doesn’t tip her hand by mentioning the exact nature of the medical procedure depicted here. It is clearly an excision, but Valente isn’t about to reveal that the surgery involves the removal of a tumor. This isn’t just another poem about The Big C. If “Green” is about cancer—and I don’t think it is—the disease plays second fiddle to other considerations, including the poem’s cozy final stanza, in which the character awakens in a recovery room:

You drift back gently to a green world:
grass-colored scrubs, aqua chairs, mint walls.

What, after all, could be more important for a poet who goes walking with the doctor who wrote “The Red Wheelbarrow” than her devotion to another physician’s “grass-colored scrubs”? At night she dreams of “a bald blue man,” seemingly a death figure luring her “to the other side.” She refuses to go with him. She makes “the sign of the cross three times” and gradually “awaken[s], a penitent / to the gray, marsupial morning.”

Whew! Put that punch line in your pouch and smoke it!

*

James Reiss currently lives in the Land of Lincoln and never asks himself, “Why oh why oh why oh did I ever leave Miami of Ohio?” http://www.jamesreiss.com/

A War With History: Kelly Lydick on Sandy Florian’s The Tree of No

The Tree of No, Sandy Florian, Action Books, 2008

The first page of Sandy Florian’s The Tree of No begins with the word “beastly” and gives readers a world bubbling and brimming and burgeoning with possibility of image and noun, “The high hitch of increase sways softly in the sun, here in our scarlet garden” and we meet the protagonist: “Beastly, I fall at Adam under the shade, un-clocked, first frocked, oven-ed at the core, from words no western man can wet.” On the second page, Sandy Florian continues “beastly” and dreamy, “replete and eaten” and I come upon a dream, a dream of a concept of time. And it is this second page that I become aware that language is related to time, which “becomes my authority.” And it is here that readers are introduced, dreamily and beastly, to the sign and signified, signifier and referent, and are reminded of Saussure’s Linguistics. Entering this world, the world of the word, the world that Florian has created, the world and word of the dream, and meet the protagonist “like wakening from sleep, like the beast” as dreamy and beastly, or moreover, human, as can be. And as the reader, I read, as this is good, and so I continue.

I continue, intrigued and enraptured, ensconced by the world on the pages, the words of this new world of protagonist and Montgomery, pulling me through time, and it is here on the fourth page that I realize “in this awkward position of…most awkward awakening” that “In the beginning was the word” and the word created the world, and the world we have entered is the kingdom of sign and signified, signifier and referent, absurd in its making, and in its abstract form, this story, this story made up of words has captured me in time, and I, I am now part of this brilliant world.

And just as God has created the world in the Bible, I soon learn that the characters here are creating, building, a city. Come on now, I am coaxed by the narrator, Let’s build ourselves a city. And in this city, let’s build a tower with its top to the heavens. Or else, we’ll be scattered namelessly all over the planet in our Euclidian screams. And so a city is built. Eve and Adam are there with Montgomery and Diana, and decide that no city would be complete without every kind of cattle nameable. And so a list is born: “Alentejana and the Allmogekor and the American and the American White Park…and the Damietta and the Dangi…and the Greek Steppe and the Groningen…and the Nelore and the Nguni.” Once again I am reminded of Saussure’s linguistics—that signifier and signified are connected arbitrarily. Here Montgomery’s list is a clear use of Florian’s hyperbole; species by species, a world is populated, word by word, letter by letter, this world, this city, is built.

In this world, there is also a flood, however this flood, unlike what is known of the traditional Noah story, is a flood of thoughts “rush[ing] in and my mind opens to the flowing tide with its ebb and flood, with is eighth, its quarter, its half moon, its half empty bowl, half full of fuller empty seas.” In creating a work parallel to the structure of the Bible itself, Florian inherently asks the unanswered questions: Who is the real author of the Bible? And how do we know, how can we prove it? Who [or what] is really the creator? And just because someone creates a work of art, does that mean they are God, or God-like? Or is this our “beastly” human arrogance:

In the first of the order books, I read the account of that first creation of this first
world, how in the beginning, the earth was void, how darkness was on the face of the deep, how the spirit of god moved on the face of the waters, like the spirit of Narcissus on the face of the lake. Then god said, Let there be light, and then there was light. Then god said let there be air, and let it distinguish the water.

Arrogant or not, the structure of The Tree of No makes it obvious that form follows function: what is language and how does one use (or overuse) it? If language is absurd, why not, then, create what we like, real or absurd alike…

Early on, Florian makes use of the following characters: Diana (30), Adam (29), Judah (22), Abraham (80), the fictitious Montgomery(2), Joseph (49), Homer (33), as if there are no differences between the characters known from Greek or Roman mythology, the characters depicted in Biblical text, fictitious characters, or actual literary figures. They are presented and regarded as the same. In this World, the world of The Tree of No, Diana is of no greater importance than Abraham, who is of no greater importance than Montgomery. In doing so, Florian invokes the questions: What do we considered canon? Where’s the literal in myth? Why are Biblical stories taken as literal, or truth? Can our canon be myth? And further: Where’s the proof?

It seems that Florian is also inherently asking: If someone can write the Bible, or specifically, a canon of any kind, and can create a world of characters, then why can’t I? And why, then, can’t my world, my fictional world, that I’ve created with sign and signifier, real and absurd, and with finite set of linguistic rules, be regarded as: Literal? Canon? Myth?

I asked my self as I read: Is Florian comparing, by way of her work, the tree of “no” to the tree of “life” or the tree of “knowledge”? But then later realized the answer: If knowledge is posited by language, and life can be described, articulated, remembered, created, or recreated by language, then, we must be able to create a fictional world through which we navigate and experience, just as Florian has done here. And if knowledge is illustrated and expressed, through language and the structure inherent in the system of language used, then, does it matter to which tree Florian is comparing?

Further into the work, Florian’s language seamlessly moves between narrative and borderline-exposition, and the reader is constantly surprised with what treatise-like prose comes next:

This is a true story. My actress is a dame, a doll, a devourer, a femme fatale. She has talons for feet, and the windstorm blows her wings and lioness hair in unambiguous cuneiform inscriptions, like the bones in the ankles of beasts. She is, of course, the beloved wife of Adam who seized the light. In my story, the husband and wife bicker in the bedroom. The she takes up lodging in the middle of a tree trunk.

And Florian’s use of language brilliantly leaves one tongue-tied:

Speech is the elegant postman of the mind. Eloquently speaking about the deliveries of Cicero. From the fiction to the failure. From the failure to the fall. From the fall to the flaw. From the monster of the body. Utility is the end of virtue. Justice the end of man. Of every act. Of every thought. Of every truth.

I read how thought is the thought of thought. How the soul is the form of forms. My legs ache. My eyes look. Plots are added to furnish the warning example that some men are birthed. Some are inspired. And since there can be no tragedy without motion, we walk side by side out of the scarlet garden as commas become signals for the sigh.

By virtue of the structure of language, one is bound and limited by the language we use. And to create—one is both liberated and confined by the very nature of la langue—by the tool we use to create. One can create infinitely with a finite set of terms: this is the paradox,

To approach the right light in spring. To sunbathe in the summer. To weave coats out of winter and snow. In the autumn, I see the comet catastrophe. Shooting between the words, Let there be, and There is. That is the local apocalypse. Presented by the universal blank.

Between creativity and creation there lies a calamity. So I may say, Let there be love, and in saying so, I imagine it and make it live.

Florian then takes this one step further. If language is absurd, and religion has been built upon the language of the Biblical canon, then religion itself must also be absurd. Florian comments on the literal biblical messages, the dogmatic constructs and societal rules that have been constructed, built, upon these meanings and taken as truth. The protagonist openly states: “I have a war with history.” And that “History is a meaningless enigma. The sooner it is stopped, the better off we are.” It’s statements such as these, that double as narrative and exposition, that brought my attention to the parallels between the absurdly fictionalized “Tree of No” world and the world in which we actually live.

As I near the end of the book, I encounter the section “Psalms.” Here the form of The Tree of No takes on a new and different tack; the linear, prosaic structure has been replaced by short, concise paragraphs, centered on the page. The narrator “Eve” sings:

I sing to give birth to the bread. I sing to give birth to the sommelier. My book is now called toward the pasture where every brother and sister will each pay a dollar for each dead page.

And prays:

At Christmas I pray so hallowed be thy name, Small turns, I take, I’m still becoming, but the sin in me says I.

And it appears, too, this comment is less about the fictional world and more a general social commentary.

Not only is The Tree of No a commentary on language and the use of language, it is a personal canon, a use of mimesis, a creative exploration, and a social commentary, through the eyes of one Sandy Florian. This work is an opportunity for Florian to vehemently state: this is the world that I have created, this is the world that I see, and that is how I see. I do not have to be bound by what has come before—NO—I can create the world—my reality—as I see fit. It can be real, it can be fictitious, it can be absurd.

And as I know this work is at “war with history” I am reminded that one is not bound by history, the reality that has come before, the city that was previously built, or rather, the literary canon that has come before. Inherent in the act of creation—in the building of this city, this tree—is hope:

Seven heads upon seven hills upon which one lone woman sits like a metropolis. I heard, Write this. Blessed are those who are invited to the supper. Then heaven opened to a new and brighter heaven and the earth to new soil, and when the oceans disappeared, I heard, Write this. I am making all things new.

In The Tree of No, where no thing is anything, the word is creation, and absurdity is normalcy, expected, surprisingly and unsurprisingly, for linguists and others alike, this book will leave you, dreamily, beastly, saying yes.

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Kelly Lydick received her B.A. in Writing and Literature from Burlington College (VT), and her M.A. in Writing and Consciousness from the New College of California (San Francisco). Her writing has appeared in Twittering Machine, the Burlington College Poetry Journal, the New College Review and ditch. Kelly’s work has also been featured on KQED’s The Writers’ Block. She is the author of the chapbook We Once Were (Pure Carbon Publishing, AZ), and the experimental work, Mastering the Dream (Second Story Books, CA). Her website is: www.kellylydick.com.

Death Speaks: Mark Danowsky on The Letter from Death by Lillian Moats

The Letter from Death, Lillian Moats, Illustrations by David J. Moat, Forward by Howard Zinn, Three Arts Press, 2009

Death finds a voice and gets right up on its high horse to put us meager humans in our place. From this height, Death’s Letter takes the tone of a moralistic edict, with a severely didactic approach, in a rant about the human condition.

That’s right. In this text Death is no abstraction but rather a sentient being not unlike us.

The Letter begins with a history of humanity’s treatment of death by various civilizations. Death then notes that readers will inevitably be wary of picking up this text for fear of being labeled “morbid”.

It seems like Death has finally decided to speak up because we have given the notion of death such a bad name. According to Death, “the fact that you [humans] will one day cease to exist is what you have turned your world upside-down to avoid.” (66)

Apparently, Death has grown over eons of dealing with humanity, particularly encountering us in the end stages of life—and in turn Death has learned lots about human nature. For instance, Death understands that humans are not always good natured when we get together in groups.

Death reminds us of the importance of trying to understand the perspective of others, writing: “It must be your isolation that makes you susceptible to distortions about humanity at large—such as the conclusion that violent aggression is hopelessly hard-wired into human nature.” (85) War is a motif throughout the Letter as well as the idea that we are our own worst enemy, however, to the dismay of Death we have a habit of deferring the blame for our own misdeeds onto hir.

“In the spreading wars over resources, I see no inevitable Armageddon”, says Death, “just another unnecessary Hell advancing on earth.” (84) There is abundant mention of hell in this text as Death reflects on the curious way we choose to think beyond death to the afterlife—and furthermore, we worry about it.

Death believes it is our fear of dying that has led to our present western conception about the nature of death: “The torments you feared from your gods, you’ve devised for your enemies, and have realized for yourselves.” (54) Here Death presents the idea of dying as non-linear, that it “occurs with a simultaneity unimaginable for you who are so bound by time.” (89)

We differ from animals, according to Death, because from an early age we live by narrative and do so in order to explain “ourself to ourself” and to others. We maintain a sense of stability by creating continuity in our lifestyles. Death also denigrates the modern western notion that humans are somehow above all other animals. In Section XVII, Death explains: “The differences I detect between you and other animals do not amount to superiority or inferiority.” (115)

Interesting apothegms are scattered throughout this Letter making it a thought provoking quick read. Just be sure your mind is open and your mood is right.

Why read this text?

What first drew me to Moats’ Letter was the premise: Death speaks. I’ve given some thought to when a person might actually think—hey, this is exactly the kind of text I want to read right now— and my answer is, well, multifaceted. I think my difficultly comes from the genre bending that occurs in the text. Here we have a letter, with mingling social and political statements, told from the perspective of a westernized other worldly, or should I say beyond worldly being. It’s academic in its treatment of the history surrounding the substance, i.e. death, and Moats even provides an extensive list of sources in a reference section—certainly atypical for a fictional text. Reading this text in a classroom setting I can definitely see. Reading this at the beach I can vaguely see myself doing. But the rest of you will have to take a moment to reflect, and consider what sort of situation is most appropriate to sit back, put up your feet, and consider the possibility of death.

More thoughts…

The premise of an embodied Death, who is omnipresent and worldly, who transcends our human time and space, is intriguing—however, Moats’ tries to make this idea carry the whole text. Unfortunately, the overall text reads flat and Death never steps down from the podium. The tone is also academic to a fault. I find myself wishing there was less history and more fantasy. I definitely buy that if Death was going to speak up, war mongering, terrorism, and nuclear weapons are justifiable reasons for doing so—but the mere notion of Death speaking to us is a leap that could use some more context, if only inklings.

Between the Ordinary & the Ecstatic: Michelle Moore on Lynn Levin’s Fair Creatures of an Hour

Fair Creatures of an Hour, Lynn Levin, Loonfeather Press

The title of Lynn Levin’s third poetry collection, Fair Creatures of an Hour, comes from Keats sonnet “When have fears that I may cease to be,” in which the poet calls his beloved a “fair creature of an hour.” Levin’s fair creatures are the characters in her poems—poems that reflect her interest in art, science, history, popular culture, and the workings of the heart, that speak with the keen wit, quiet humor, and wary optimism her readers look forward to.

Often, competing images or interests drive these poems. In “The Universe, That Big Balloon” for instance, Levin uses the triolet, a 13th-century French poetic form, to explore human separation in a cosmos where “stars drift apart / like lovers who slip from one another’s hands.” In “Munro Park,” a very down-to-earth free verse poem, the speaker yearns for more closeness with his canine companion. But the talking dog puts a different spin on the phrase “man’s best friend”:

As she scratched, I scratched.
At strange noises, we froze like computers.

“What a nuisance you are and a bad mime,
she snapped, causing my heart to cave.

“Let’s bite the pizza boy. Let’s piss on the sidewalk,”
I said, hoping to rekindle our old magic, but the pup broke

from me at Munro Park to reel with joy
over the turd-encrusted grass.

It hardly matters whether the pup is literal or figurative; what matters is the capacity “to reel with joy / over the turd-encrusted grass.” This tension between the ordinary and the ecstatic is a common theme in Lynn Levin’s poems. In “Sybarite,” the speaker claims to live “purely / for beauty and pleasure” while noting “How strange it [is] // to hold the human shape in this.” In “The Groundhog” (there are quite a few talking animals in these poems) the tunneling mammal imagines “the lightness of being / almost atmosphere, of casting off / the small back gloves I use for digging.” In “Thistledown,” three women contemplate the nature of the soul in a time-lapsed moment that follows a near-fatal car accident:

When we saw that those white puffs
in the blue air were not us
but thistledown looping like paratroopers

loathe to touch the ground, Lulu parked by the side
of the road, and we flew out, the three of us,
spinning, laughing, waving our arms
in the down that caught in our hair, our clothes.

Here, after arguing against the immortal soul, declaring that souls simply decompose with bodies, and asserting that humans are nothing more than “big apes, bald chimps,” the speaker and her companions experience a moment of transcendence.

Levin’s tone changes to mostly comic in a series of horoscope poems spoken in the voice of a sometimes compassionate, sometimes judgmental fortune teller. In “Nick Wanted to Be an Anarchist,” for instance, she warns that “six planets in air signs spell the unspeakable,” the “Taurus will hydroplane, / and you’ll fly / out the window.” In “Paula, File Clerk, Student, Receptionist, Student, Childcare Worker,” the seer predicts that when the fourth Libra moon enters Paula’s house, a “roof beam will land on [her] sister’s head.” And when “passions run high from the 6th through the 10th” in “For Eric after Four Hours of Doom,” the young man is advised not to “date anyone / from [his] co-dependency group” but to play it safe, to change to his furnace filters and pair his socks.”

The comedy aside, Lynn Levin is also adept at beautifully rendering human relationships, as she does in “The White Puzzle,” in which a sister and brother fit together the many blank pieces of a puzzle:

This was fitting for the sake of fitting.
No art in it that we could see, but we stuck to it,
and after a while the pieces began to clump together
like new snow on the lawn.
I remember the way our small talk
scribbled itself over the gathering page
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
When the white puzzle was complete
we loved the way it lay like moonlight on the floor
then sat before our conquered space,
two Alexanders wanting more.

The poem captures a magical memory and is rife with metaphoric possibilities—the white puzzle, described as snow, a page, moonlight, and space, could easily signify youth, life, innocence, the unknown, or even the poem itself.

The apostrophe “To an Exit Sign” seems perfectly placed as the closing poem in the collection. The speaker has only praise for this “good luck charm over public doors,” until its greater association with death appears in the last two lines: “If only all farewells were happy, / this world not too beautiful too leave.” Keats would have loved these lines.

Terrible Sounds: Mary Meriam on Jan Steckel’s Mixing Tracks

Mixing Tracks, Jan Steckel, Gertrude Press, 2008

Jan Steckel’s first chapbook, The Underwater Hospital, is poetry. Her second chapbook, Mixing Tracks, is exquisite prose. Both books concern the extreme distress caused by catastrophe. In The Underwater Hospital, the hospital, which should be healing patients, is flooded. In Mixing Tracks, an airplane, which should be transporting passengers, is crashed in the wilderness. Mixing Tracks is the story of the two survivors, told in a prose so deep and strong that it verges on poetry:

I had been thrown from the crash in a shower of screaming metal, but except for a few shallow cuts, the slashing fragments inexplicably neglected my flesh. Mindless and sightless I had run from that killing ground, fleeing what I might see, and worse, those terrible sounds. I ran till I tripped and fell on the forest floor, where I lay sobbing in the silence of frightened birds.

This paragraph is the poetic heart of the story. The “terrible sounds” are part of the sounds mixing throughout the story. The narrator was traveling with his rock band; the other members do not survive; and the voices and music of the band haunt the narrator. The silent birds are also part of the sound mix, as Steckel seamlessly mixes natural and man-made sounds and silences. Although the narrator escaped the crash with a few cuts, terrible and beautiful sounds, from the past and present, clash in the narrator’s mind with such force that we feel his mind crashing.

In this wilderness, this landscape of catastrophe, there is a stream of water, mixing with the stream of sounds. Steckel returns to the stream leitmotif again and again:

I followed a summer-swollen stream as far from the carcass of the plane as I could get.
…
The kid went down to the stream for a drink, and I kept an eye on him as I opened the mandolin case.
…
Jackie swam in the novelty of it, splashed in it like a child in a stream. The sounds that emerged were startlingly, extraterrestrially beautiful.
…
He flicked some ashes into the silt from the stream.
…
I pointed across the stream to where the bank sloped upward.
…
I took a running leap across the stream, then stalked up the bank toward the hill.
…
Facing away from the stream, I watched shadow swallow the valley of trees below.
…
I took off my sweaty, dirty, whisky-spattered shirt and rinsed it in the stream as the noise continued.

Steckel’s poetry flows in these lines. Like the mandolin that survives the crash unharmed, the stream goes on and on, close to us, with its life and music.

The other survivor, a young street hustler, seems to represent death, or at least the tempting seduction of death. Indeed, when night falls, and the narrator is spooked by wild howls from the wilderness, the boy seduces the narrator:

“They’re just dogs,” he said loudly. “Didn’t you ever have a dog?” I shook my head. “I didn’t really either,” he said, “But my great-aunt does. No husband or kids, just this Airedale named Lucy that she taught to say ‘mama.’ No shit. The old bag holds up a chocolate-covered cherry and Lucy sits up on her hind legs and kind of whines ‘mah-mah,’ and Auntie pops the cherry right into her mouth.” His delivery was superb. I had to smile. “When the old lady was training her she had to hold Lucy’s mouth the right way with her fingers before she could say ‘mama,’ but now she does it all by herself. Biggest hit with the mah-jongg club…” He went on and on, drowning the howling in an endless stream of calm inanity while his hand slid down my chest toward my cock.

Surviving the plane crash, and finding each other in this wilderness, is not the end of the story. But I won’t be a spoiler, except to say that the story leaves me pondering how catastrophe and survival and life mix, and if this wilderness is a dream or a nightmare or death.

Every word of the story seems to carry the weight of an insight about surviving “screaming metal” and “killing ground.” Such insights are only visible (or audible or bearable) with an equal or stronger understanding of life. The strength and beauty of Steckel’s prose is life-affirming and celebratory. In the face of the terrible distress of catastrophe, when nothing is in its proper place, Steckel’s work is a remarkable achievement.

Mixing Tracks won the 2008 Gertrude Press Fiction Chapbook Award for LGBT writers. Steckel, as she describes herself, is a “Bidyke writer and disabled former pediatrician [who] writes about poetry, fiction, sexuality, doctoring, poverty, and what it feels like to remember what kind of socks everyone at her readings wears instead of what their faces look like. Sharing the view from floor level and somewhere skew to the Kinsey Scale, the Horizontal Poet sings the Bidyke Blues while pimping her books and those of her highly unusual friends.”

*

Mary Meriam’s poems and essays have appeared in Literary Imagination, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Windy City Times, Rattle, A Prairie Home Companion, Light Quarterly, and others. Her chapbook, The Countess of Flatbroke (afterword by Lillian Faderman), was published by Modern
Metrics/Exot Books.

Eloquence in Detail: Patricia Carragon on Karen Neuberg’s Detailed Still

Detailed Still, Karen Neuberg, Poets Wear Prada Press, 2009

Detailed Still, published by Poets Wear Prada Press (2009), is a sensitive journey into Ms. Neuberg’s past. From her first poem to her last, Karen Neuberg entwines the book together using her memories as a common thread with the craftsmanship of a master weaver. For instance, in Science, Karen writes:

Science recalls an evening. The trajectory
of memory rehydrates the event, pulling it
out of an older faith, shaped like a set of
urns aligned upon horizon’s ledge.

Science’s memory is exact. The human memory “rehydrates the event,” permitting emotion to reshape it—“as anything more than an old coat that either still keeps you warm, or not.” Reading this poem, one sees two points of view: both intriguing and beautifully versed.

In The Bird, Karen takes us back to her childhood—she’s ten-years-old, and it’s spring. A bird falls from the white oak. Karen rushes outside to save it. Like a doctor, she checks the bird for signs of life and descriptively tells us what she does. But her emotions set in to prevent a burial:

Out from within
what had been breast
a mass of maggots crawled.
Backing away, I fled.
I did not bury it.

Touchingly, the acceptance of death doesn’t set in until years later, as stated in her last line; “Burying was something I learned later.”

Karen Neuberg’s Detailed Still is a provocative masterpiece of eloquence in detail. Her eighteen poems take the reader through a tapestry of logic, perspective and language, rarely seen in modern poetry. She observes and writes with a perfect balance between her analytical and artistic abilities. Detailed Still is a must read on everyone’s book list.

*

Patricia Carragon is a New York City poet and writer. Her publications include Poetz.com, Rogue Scholars, Poets Wear Prada, Best Poem, Big City Lit, CLWN WR, Chantarelle’s Notebook, Clockwise Cat, Ditch Poetry Magazine, Mobius the Poetry Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, Marymark Press, and more. She is the author of Journey to the Center of My Mind (Rogue Scholars Press). She is a member of Brevitas, a group dedicated to short poems. Patricia hosts and curates the Brooklyn-based Brownstone Poets and is the editor of the annual anthology.

The Everyday: Joy Leftow Interviews and Reviews John Yamrus

New and Selected Poems, John Yamrus, Lummox Press, 2008

John Yamrus’ poetry is very humorous. Not expecting that I was caught by surprise. While reading his book, New And Selected Poems published by Lummox Press, I found myself laughing out loud and laughing so loud that people nearby turned to look at me. Yamrus laughs at himself and us, the main theme being, we’re all in this together. He uses his humor as a tool to wipe away the artificial boundaries between us. He laughs if his muse is around or not around and will sit and write even if his muse is late. The trick of it is—if you want to be a writer you have to write. There’s no way around it:

the trick of it is
to be there
waiting
at the typewriter
when it happens.

and when it does,
if you
don’t write it down
and show it to someone

then
shame on you.

Yamrus’ poetry is about the little, everyday things that take us through a normal day, like where the dog is sitting and what he’s thinking while taking a dump or when he’s annoyed at his hemorrhoids,

This time it’s hemorrhoids,
And they’ve been
Bleeding since Sunday

The doctor
Want me to have
Surgery,
But I’ve been
Putting it off

needless to say,
It’s a real
Pain in the ass.

Poetry about hemorrhoids, hmm… Reminds me of when a neighbor bought my book and later when she met me on the elevator, said, “I expected to read beautiful lines about nature and the sky and instead I read all about your personal problems.” So I guess that makes Yamrus and I poetry brethren. How can any writer not examine himself? In my book that’s one of the prerequisites of being a writer, like it is for a therapist or social worker. If you don’t know yourself how can you write about others with knowledge and insight?

On a recent youtube video, Yamrus reads a recent poem about a person who writes to him and asks him to write without discussing poetry or poets. This poem is also in the book, “Dear John.” In Yamrus’ poem he responds to his questioner:

i’m afraid i AM a writer,
and the only subject matter I have
is me. …

you can also
feel confident of finding poems
that talk about picking my nose,
going to the fridge for a beer
and watching my dog take a dump

Well yes, what else does a writer have to contend with that has meaning other than our-selves, our reflections on our interactions and the stories in our heads.

Yamrus watches himself watching the world and reports his view, a view made see-able and more agreeable by the threads of humor running through. By the same token, many academics may not like Yamrus’ style poetry because his deviation from what we’ve been taught “real poetry” is and I really relate to that.

When I decided to take some non-matriculated poetry classes in the graduate department at CCNY, the professor in charge (now deceased and then a certifiable alcoholic), never responded to my application. I was planning a sabbatical and needed to know. I left several messages for me to call him. He didn’t so I kept calling him. Finally after several weeks I got him on the phone.

“I have my concerns,” he said authoritatively but never clarified what they were. What he did say was that I couldn’t take classes there. Usually non-matriculated students are accepted unless something’s very wrong. I got the name of the Creative Writing Chairman and spoke to him. He asked me to send a folder containing fiction, poetry, academic writings, articles, literature reviews, brochures, and more. I did. The folder had about a hundred pages all together. When I called to see if the overnight delivery had been received I was told no. I ended sending three more of these overnight folders and they were all “lost” and I hand delivered one with no response at all. Finally I made an entirely new application for matriculation listing fiction and sent ten pages of a story under my married name, Lambert. I was accepted within a week. I think prejudice may have been at work on several levels since my last name is clearly Jewish and when I used an Anglo name with the same writing samples I was accepted quickly. I must have been rejected without reading because otherwise someone would’ve recognized the story. I did get my 2nd masters degree there only because my options were limited in what I could pay and CCNY is still the cheapest deal in town. I admit I did leave out the poetry and I also admit some people hate my poetry. I guess that’s why Yamrus’ poem stories about what people say about his poetry really hit home after my experiences.

Yamrus also confronts his inner conflicts with humor. In dear anita;

The most recent poem
you sent
Is one of the best things
you’ve ever written

it’s got hear and soul,
intelligence,
warmth and wit

it’s got
everything
my poetry seems to lack

please
don’t write to me again
…
you’ve done it so
much better than me
…
I don’t need
The competition
If you write to me again
i’ll refuse to open your letter
…
From here on in
i’m only going to read
Writer who have been dead
40 years or more

at least with them
i’ll have a
fighting chance.

The poems may appear very simple but that’s the trick. Many may say, “Oh I can write like that,” but they don’t. Someone who is an expert at doing something always makes it look easy to do but that doesn’t mean it is easy. His early influences are Bukowski, who wrote narrative poetry also and Gerald Locklin who also used self-effacement effectively. Yamrus may have been influenced but he isn’t trying to be anyone else in his poetry. He takes risks, exposing himself and the reader and that’s what it’s all about.

*

Phone interview with John Yamrus by Joy Leftow done after reading Yamrus’s New and Selected Poems

JL: How long have you been writing?
JY: This is actually my 40th year doing this. It’s hard to imagine that I’m now into my 18th published book, with nearly 1,100 poems published in magazines.

JL: How old were you when you were first published?
JY: I was 19 when my first chapbook came out. Young and stupid. Now, I guess I’m just stupid.

JL: Oh really? Are there any left?
JY: Don’t even think about it! The copies I have left are boxed up somewhere and they’re gonna stay there. I can’t say that I’m ashamed of my early work. I mean, it must have been considered good enough for someone to want to publish it, but I’m in such a different place these days. A completely different writer from what I was back then. I’m ashamed of my early writing. It was so pretentious. I’d guess it wasn’t until I was in my late 40s that I actually started to hit my stride and know what I was doing with the poems. I guess it’s true, what they say…you know…walking on water wasn’t built in a day.

JL: How did you come to use humor as a device in your poetry?
JY: It didn’t start out like that. At first I was writing the same straight-faced somber quiet poetry that most poets write. I wasn’t happy with it and felt unsatisfied with my work, like something was missing. The humor part of it comes naturally to me, and it’s an honest open way for me to communicate. It’s also more interesting. I mean, god, there’s just way too many so-called writers out there who take themselves and their poems way too seriously.

JL: What’s the one thing you want people to know about your book?
JY: My poetry is real. There’s no unicorns in it. No dappled daisies…nothing but blood and guts and bone. And with the humor added to it, I can make the same points as I could in the serious stuff, but it was different. Easier to take. I think the real breakthrough for me was when I figured out how to crass that gap that exists between the writer and the reader…once I figured out how to make THEM feel they were part of the poem, it was pretty easy after that.

JL: Do you have a regimen you follow?
JY: I do. It’s not brain surgery. People ask me all the time how do you get into this…publishing poetry…being in the magazines. I tell them it’s not a big deal and it’s not a mystery. The only secret to the whole thing is you’ve got to do it every day. Do SOMETHING. Write a poem. Write a letter. Submit something somewhere. Just DO something. That’s the whole secret to the thing. There! You now owe me a million dollars.

JL: I say the same thing on my blog—I love to write when the muse strikes and if she doesn’t strike, I write anyway and then, invariably, my muse joins me.
JY: The important thing is writing. A writer writes. But, I’m not a writer. And I’m certainly not a poet. I think if I were to put a label on myself I’d have to call myself a song and dance man. Or a tight-rope walked.

JL: Is your writing political?
JY: It depends on what you mean by political.

JL: For me political means social commentary.
JY: That’s all my poetry is, is social commentary, beginning with myself as a subject.

JL: Yes like you say in your poem—the only subject matter you have is you, because everything you see is filtered through who you are.
JY: Absolutely, and this is also where I made the breakthrough – once I figured out that I’m the only subject I have…and once I figured out a way to make that subject relatable, then I was home free. And hell, if I could make someone laugh along the way? It doesn’t get any better than that.

JL: Would you choose one poem from your book NEW AND SELECTED POEMS and riff about it?
JR: Normally I hate doing this and hate especially going into an explanation and introduction that will be longer than the poem. I’ve always felt that if you’ve got to explain it, or set it up, then the poem’s a failure. But in this case, since I’m having such a good time with this interview, I’ll make an exception and make my explanation longer than the poem itself. Here’s the poem:
after work

i come home,
walk into the kitchen
and throw my wallet
on the counter.

then my pens,
my cards
and finally
my keys,
which
slide along the counter,
spin,
do a little dance
and finally
come to a stop.

some day

so will
i.
The poem (for me) kinda illustrates what I was talking about…making a connection with the reader. Crossing over to their side of the street. This is an example of one of those poems that clicked for me. I started out, like everyone else, trying to write the great poem. The one, memorable poem. And it took me years and years to learn that the great, big, memorable poem doesn’t exist anymore. Once I figured that out, that’s when I switched gears and decided that I was going to take my entire body of work and transform it into that great, big, memorable poem. Kinda like how one drop of water doesn’t really mean much, but an ocean’s a powerful thing.
Well, this poem just happened just the way it was written, but the kicker…the part that takes it (in my mind, at least) from prose to poetry, is the illumination at the end, where the speaker has that aha! moment where he puts it all together. Out of a pretty mundane moment, a bit of a universal truth emerges, something that we all sooner or later figure out. That’s when I feel I’m doing my job with my poems…when I’m keeping it small. Keeping it real. You’ll never find any dappled daisies or unicorns or babbling brooks in my poems. You’ll find everyday events that we can all relate to. Crossing the street onto the reader’s side. It was such a simple concept…but it took me 20 years to figure it out.

JL: Wow—I’m so impressed but what I’m most impressed with and this is what I want readers to know—what I’m most impressed with is how much time I spent laughing out loud when I read the book. I laughed reading on the train, in doctor’s offices and at home. Laughing is good for the soul and healing. This book did it for me. Thanks much John. I had a great time being doing this interview. Any other words for?
JY: Only a thanks for making it enjoyable, no pun intended. Oh, and I think we forgot to mention the name of my new book. It’s NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. It’s available on amazon. Christmas is coming.I’m kinda prejudiced, but I really do think it’d make a great gift for any of the readers in your life. There! That’s my shameless plug and I’m sticking to it! I’ve always made it a point to push for sales on my books. I’ve always felt that I owed it to those publishers who are crazy enough to shell out their hard-earned money to put my stupid poems in print. So, we’re back to stupid again. I guess that’s where I started and it’s as good a place as any to end.