| Mostly
Books, November 23, 2009
Pockets
Empty, Pockets
Full
a review by
Sharon
Coleman
A Pocketful of
Voices/Un Bolsillo de Voces: The
Best of Poetry Inside Out,
2009 anthology, edited by Anita
Sagástegui and John Oliver
Simon, 197 pages. Published by
Center for the Art of
Translation, San Francisco,
California,
www.catranslation.org.
 Just
over fifteen or so years ago, U.
S. academia began discovering a
discipline that has been vibrant
across the globe for quite
awhile: translation studies.
Classes began to be sporadically
offered in various literature
departments, but more recently a
few degree programs in
translation have been developed.
Filling spots with qualified
students, those with a deep
understanding of other languages,
however, remains a problem. So
perhaps the next generation of
translators (and poets) will not
spring from prestigious or even
not-so-prestigious universities.
As so well shown in Poetry Inside
Out’s newest anthology
A Pocketful of Voices/Un
Bolsillo de Voces, that
generation is presently coming of
age in mostly public grade
schools, often under funded
schools filled by children of
immigrants and of the American
lower and middle classes.
Mariana
Reyes Cruz, 3rd grade, translates
Frederico García
Lorca:
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Horseman’s
Song
Córdoba.
So far away and
lonely.
Black pony, big
moon,
and olives in my
saddlebag.
Though I know the
roads
I’ll never get to
Córdoba.
Over the valleys, with
the wind,
black pony, red
moon.
Death is watching me
from Córdoba’s
towers.
What a long road!
What a brave pony!
How death waits for
me,
before I get to
Córdoba.
Córdoba.
So far away and
lonely.
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Yeeit
Vargas, 7th grade, translates
Alberto Blanco:
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|
Eastern
Tanka
I behold the light
of the primeval star
within me
between ocean and
atmosphere
looking glass of
words
|
This
is the seventh anthology from
Poetry Inside Out (P.I.O.), an
independent educational project
run by the Center for the Art of
Translation in San Francisco that
conducts weekly sessions with
classes at various Bay Area
schools. Started by Michael Ray,
P.I.O. is now run by Anita
Sagástegui, Instructor and
Curriculum Specialist, and John
Oliver Simon, Artistic Director.
Pocketful of Voices/Un
Bolsillo de Voces showcases
translations done the previous
two years by single student
translators or pairs of
translators or even group
translations. Students range from
third to ninth grade. Alongside
the translations are their own
poems, written sometimes in
Spanish, sometimes in English,
and either self-translated or
translated by fellow students (or
sometimes the editors). The
anthology is completely bilingual
in Spanish and English with some
poetry in Vietnamese, Basque, and
German.
But
it’s also much more than an
anthology, a collection of
student works; it puts those
works into pedagogical context.
Pocketful of Voices/Un
Bolsillo de Voces summarizes
the entire year’s
curriculum. Each chapter focuses
on one area of poetic language or
translation and then presents
several topics, each exemplified
by a well-known poet. Yeeit
Vargas’s translation of
Alberto Blanco’s Tanka is
found in the section of the
chapter “Poetic Form and
Structure” that presents “Haiku
and Tanka” with a short
biography of Blanco and examples
with translations of his work.
After translating, the students
write poems of their own, using
the poet’s work as a model.
Then they translate their words
or those of a friend.
Straightforward, methodical,
multi-faceted—the
curriculum works like Miracle Gro
for young minds, teaching them
poetic elements and forms,
translation and nuance in
meaning, other languages and
cultures, and many great writers.
It also allows schooling to
nurture children’s natural
creativity rather than to dull it
by shaping their language to be
simply conventional.
But
perhaps the most powerful aspect
of the curriculum and program is
how it shifts students’
(self) perception of living
between two languages. Too often
our institutions and teachers
operate under the assumption that
children speaking another
language at home are at a
disadvantage. And children
sometimes accept that perception.
P.I.O. activates and engages all
the knowledge of these children.
It shifts the disadvantage into
an advantage. In a mixed
classroom, all of a sudden the
bilingual children become the
experts; now they have special
and valued knowledge to share
with the other students. How
students consider themselves and
each other changes rapidly both
inside and outside the
classroom.
They
work on team translations, as did
Julian Greenhill, fourth grade,
and Jessica Cortez, fifth grade,
to come to this English version
of Maybell Lebron’s
poem:
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Without Ever
Having Seen Each
Other
Without ever having seen
each other
we recognized each
other;
and our footprints were
partners,
and our blood formed
children,
we cried with our
sadnesses,
together we knew the
clean sun,
and today,
sitting face to
face,
we admire each
other,
without knowing what to
say.
|
And the students compare their
equally excellent but quite
different translations of a
single poem as three translators
in the third grade do with “El
Sol” by Dulce María
Loynaz:
After students write their own
poems in either language, they
translate them into the other
one, or a classmate translates.
Here’s a poem written by a
fifth grader and translated by a
classmate:
Although these original poems
appear after the professional
ones that inspired them, the
anthology also includes a final
chapter “Student Voices”
dedicated just to their
poems.
P.I.O.
is about translating and
validating not only language but
also experience—the varied
experiences recent immigrants and
inner-city children go through.
As Oscar Bermeo of Lighthouse
Community Charter School in
Oakland attests, John Oliver
Simon does not hold back on or
gloss over these topics as other
teachers sometimes do. Rather,
they are presented in
professional poems and come alive
in students’ work. On the
other hand, Bermeo recounts when
a young girl protested, “But
Mr. Simon, there’s no
graffiti or gun shots where I
live. What do I write
about?” And he helped her
find topics important to her.
This
year P.I.O. has taken this
transformation of the educational
space further by setting up
classrooms into “translation
circles.” Each circle
includes both students who know
the source language and those who
do not. The students with the
source language first work
together to do a word for word
translation. Then the other
students work to make that
translation into a poem that
flows; they can check with the
native speakers to be sure they’ve
got the meaning right but only
after they guess among
themselves. Finally each circle
presents their translation and
defends the choices they made.
This process allows for greater
inclusion of those students who
do not speak the source language.
In a fourth grade class in
Sobrante Park Elementary,
Oakland, after an African
American girl with little
knowledge of Spanish got through
with a translation, the Latino
students applauded her.
P.I.O.’s
translation program can also help
students whose home language is
Spanglish, a mix of English and
Spanish, to distinguish the two
languages and to increase writing
skills in each one individually
but not separately. P.I.O. does
not encourage “code
switching,” the sudden
shift from one language to
another (although occasionally
poems that do so are presented).
When difficult words arise in
Spanish, the instructor first
gives the definition in Spanish
and then synonyms in English and
vice versa.
Beyond
the bilingual classroom, the
curriculum in this anthology can
be somewhat altered by any
instructor incorporating poetry
writing in their classes or any
poet wanting to expand her or his
poetic practice through world
poetry. It gives a wealth of
ideas for conducting poetry
workshops.
The
entire program has been so
successful in the handful of Bay
Area schools that host it that
P.O.I. has received requests from
across the country for access to
the program. As it’s
difficult to expand to multiple
locations with limited staff and
funds, P.I.O. is considering
different models such as a
residency program: educators
would come to spend some weeks
with P.I.O. instructors and
observe the classes. But for now,
it’s a gift for these
children and their future. As
third grader Zuleyma
Márquez reminds us: “Stars
are children / with invisible
names.”
Sharon
Coleman is a poet who teaches at
Berkeley City College, where she
is faculty coordinator of the
literary and art journal
Mivia Street. She is a
contributing editor to
Poetry Flash.
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Mostly
Books, November 10,
2009
A Porch
Light at Dawn
a
review by Clara
Mitchell
MOUTH, by Lisa
Chen, Kaya Press, New York City,
$13.95 paperback,
www.kaya.com.
Lisa Chen
will read from her work on
Thursday, April 1, 2010, noon, at
Lunch Poems, Morrison Library,
University of California,
Berkeley
campus.
If, as Lisa Chen herself advises in “Translator’s
Apologia,” you “. . .Enter these pages
with / The lowered expectations of a prison guard,”
you may be pleasantly surprised by the pointed coherence
that frequently emerges from Chen’s fantastic
verbiage. Similes strike, snapping ideas into sudden
focus just when the experimental structure or disjointed
syntax begins to float a poem away from the comprehensible.
For instance, Chen laments in “Songs of Gold
Mountain” that: “. . .all your / finery
on a moonless night, the joy you hide in your sleeve,
flutter / and vanish through his mind like a crumpled
theater ticket” and “In the Street”:
“. . .a sheer shirt / Slung over the lampshade
like the whole room / Got into her blouse. . . .”
In fact, much of the sparkle in Lisa Chen’s
work is generated by these crisp comparisons, by
her skillful creation of poetic detail in the everyday
and her use of such details to open fresh channels
of understanding in her very nonlinear poems. My
favorite such moment happens in the three-line poem
“The Wagon” which closes with: “.
. .The look / on his face as I leave is a porch
light left burning at dawn.”
Over and over in Mouth
we experience Chen’s
refusal to elaborate, her clear
choice to leave context behind. “The
Wagon” demonstrates this
strategy at its finest: the
spareness of the scene is its
power, the demand for
interpretation its authority, its
pull. At times, however, Chen’s
cryptic scenarios ease into
vagueness; for example, the
questions raised by the series of
non sequiturs strung together in “I
Didn’t Always Look This Way”
detract from its pleasure. By its
close, it can become a bit
wearying to keep up with Chen’s
imaginative leaps without some
kind of contextual clue on which
to regain one’s
footing:
I didn’t
always look this way
The grin on that cow that shills
for glue
I didn’t always look this
way
Stay calm. Stay very, very calm
Mouth is characterized by an overarching
tone of assertiveness: these poems are rife with
commands, as in the series of authoritative notes-to-self
in “Interior Monologue”: “Leave
house. Walk five blocks to the bus stop. / Take
bus across town. . .” or the rapid-fire delivery
of opinions as fact in “Solution”: “The
solution is to have sexual intercourse in lieu of
awkward / silences. // The solution is. . . .”
Throughout this collection, the frequent use of
end stopped lines and simple declarative sentences
show its authorial self-confidence. Lisa Chen’s
conviction in her vision does not waver from start
to finish in this book. In the end, it is the reader,
perhaps hesitant at first to trust Chen’s
method, whose confidence in Chen’s purpose
rises steadily with each poem.
Clara
Mitchell was Poetry Flash’s
summer 2009 editorial intern. She
is currently a student at Indiana
University in Bloomington,
Indiana.
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Mostly
Books, October 19, 2009
No
Tigers
a
review by Richard
Silberg
ONE
SUN STORM, by Endi Bogue
Hartigan, The Center for Literary
Publishing, Colorado State
University, Fort Collins,
Colorado, 2008, 83 pages, $15.95
paperback. Winner of the Colorado
Prize for Poetry, selected by
Martha Ronk.
Endi
Bogue Hartigan will read from her
work on Thursday, November 5,
7:30, Poetry Flash at
Moe’s Books, Berkeley,
California.
There’s a mesmeric quality
to this book, the sense of
things, states of affairs, sets
of actions held in the mind,
brought to the page and seen, and
seen, and truly seen:
The musical repetition of those
lines, as if to deepen by an
incremental restatement; the
spacious arrangement of the lines
against the white of the page—so
that, for instance, “the
chartreuse floating” does,
as we read the break, have a
long, silent way to float before
it hooks to “down the
street”—are typical
of this book as, in its
particularity, is the phrase “the
fact of its crest in the
sunlight.” That scientific
or forensic word, “fact,”
linked to “its crest”—whose
color and float we’ve
already experienced—“in
the sunlight,” sets up a
quick, subconscious contrast
between two opposite modes, dry,
empirical and imaginative,
sensual and so helps to break us
through to the condition of
wonder and indeed of love in
which these poems take their
life. As she says in the
concluding lines of “Exaggeration
Diary”: “The stone
has two holes straight through
it, made by the sea. / It is
easier to speak of the blood-red
starfish, clung. / It is safer to
speak of the stone I brought home
for my son than to speak of God.”
Or, in “Avalanches,”
she uses an epigraph from Blake,
repeated in italics throughout
the poem:
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And are not the
gifts of the Spirit
everything to
Man?
And is not the forming
of sand drifts?
And are not the winds
against which
a child works in the
sand?
And are not the
gifts of the Spirit
everything to
Man?
And are not the winds
for the gulls?
And is not the sea
house
caught winnowing,
windows falling?
|
 So
One Sun Storm can be
thought of as the poetic
conversion of ‘facts’
into ‘spirit’; these
poems are “gifts of the
Spirit” for Hartigan and
for the reader. However sappy and
Joyce Kilmer-ish that may sound,
though, there’s nothing
sappy about her work; it’s
distinguished for me by the depth
and purity of its seeing and
feeling.
Let’s
look at one more poem, “Tiger
Entries,” last in the book
and, for me, its masterpiece. The
poem, in prose paragraphs, two to
a page, the only nonlineated form
in the book, begins, “It
was suggested I go to the field
where tigers dip their heads in
tall grass and stand glowing
through it, half revealed. I have
wanted all my life to create a
field. If anything my life is to
be a field in which a person may
speak.” Here are the last
two paragraphs:
Once
I saw a whale breach a white lily
on the sea, but try to speak of
witnessing the whale and almost
anything you say will reduce the
heart and literalize. Speak and
they want to know the species,
the bay in which it was
witnessed, whether it was alone,
feeding, breeding, in calm seas
or rough, unexpected or sought,
talk about the whale and even its
breech, the still surface, then
the gesture of it sweeping the
sea is deeply embedded in man and
lost
There
were no tigers, not a single
tiger lifting his head through
the grass, I peeled open branches
in search of the tigers. I half
drowned in rivers, roamed through
shadows, stared through ice cube
fractures non-nights, fled to the
shore, touched a praying mantis
in the sand, I said I want to
encompass the tigers, I’ll
encompass tigers. But still there
were no tigers and I gave up,
thought here is a world without
tigers, and I walked through the
field without tigers and because
there were no tigers, I knew
tigers
Appropriate
echoes there of both Robert
Duncan’s The Opening of
the Field and of Blake,
though the voice and conception
are her own. We seem to be coming
on ‘fact’ in “Tiger
Entries” from the other
side of mind, from dream, and
that word “dream’ is
used a number of times through
the poem. Once (page 74) she even
says, “’This field’s
imagined, this field is death.’”
So the poem seems to turn on the
deeper knowing that grounds her
work. In the first paragraph,
then, we have “almost
anything you say will reduce the
heart and literalize”; we
have the whale’s “gesture”
“embedded in man and lost.” And in the second paragraph
tigers are known through yearning
for them, through dreaming of
them and searching for them in
their absence. “Tiger
Entries” becomes an
allegory of her writing, perhaps
of spiritual knowing in general.
But we’re in danger of ‘literalizing’
it; the poem like all fine ones
exists in its words and their
play, in what it sees and the
pure, mesmeric float of its
saying.
Richard
Silberg is Associate Editor of
Poetry Flash. His most
recent book of poetry is
Deconstruction of the
Blues; he co-translated, with
Clare You, The Three Way
Tavern by Korean poet Ko
Un.
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Mostly
Books, September 7, 2009
Ish
Klein:
UNION!
a
review by Nicole
Pollentier
UNION!
by Ish Klein, Canarium Books, Ann
Arbor, Iowa City, Shanghai,
sponsored by The University of
Michigan Creative Writing
Program, 2009, 85 pages, $14
paperback,
www.canariumbooks.org.
Like the title of her first
book UNION!, poet Ish
Klein’s name deserves to be
followed by an exclamation point.
Make that three of them. Such is
the enthusiasm I feel after
seeing her read twice during the
week of February 9-14, at
off-site events surrounding the
2009 Association of Writers &
Writing Programs conference,
hosted in Chicago this year.
At a joint reading for Make:
A Chicago Literary Magazine,
Zoland Books, and Canarium Books,
hosted by Danny’s Reading
Series, which for more than eight
years has operated out of Danny’s
Tavern in Bucktown, Klein was
part of a stellar line-up that
included poets Rebecca Wolff,
Lewis Warsh, Simone Muench and
Philip Jenks, Nick Twemlow, Chris
Glomski, and John High. A few
days later, Klein read in the
company of Rikki Ducornet, August
Kleinzahler, Robyn Schiff, and
Tod Marshall at Stop Smiling
Storefront, the headquarters for
Stop Smiling magazine in
Wicker Park. The event was titled
after one of Klein’s films,
The Mentalist’s Mental
Cabinet of Vengeance! and
was, in part, a celebration of
the launch of UNION! The
film was screened between two
sets of readings.
Klein’s work connects well
to a live audience and can even
hold its own in a tavern setting.
With an impish voice and a
captivating presence, she reads
every line of her poetry like a
declaration, with a momentum that
is contagious. Poems like, “I’m
Amazing, I’m a Fireman,”
drew big cheers from the
audience. The conversational ease
of Klein’s language is
refreshing, and the often quirky
thread of her narrative is
disarming, “I come to at
the Clinic—/ a blood test,
a boxed lunch, it’s
baloney. / It’s my mommy, I
say, / waiting, waiting, waiting,
I fade.” Ultimately,
however, what is most striking
about Klein’s poetry is the
deep lyric sensibility that
pervades her work, “I’m
a flame! // I’m a card, a
king! // A burning king card with
a heart! // With many hearts.”
Klein’s poetry is immediate
and commands attention. When she
writes, “The light through
/ her is how it all / gets
beautiful. / I’ve seen this
so I know.” (“World’s
End With Sympathy”) I
believe her. When Klein states, “Now,
out of synch with all but three
things. / That I dream and that I
am a dream and that without my
love / my soul runs into the sun.
Hey, wait for me! But no. It is a
crazy mofo.” (“My
Love Has Left Me I Have No Home”)
I get it. When she laments, “What
won’t be still inside me is
what calls to you, little birdie.”
(“There Was a Bird Out
There”) I know what that
feels like, we all do. We
know.
Like Walt Whitman’s
exclamatory “Camerado, I
give you my hand!” the
poems in Union! are an
invitation to the reader. Klein
finds a vocabulary for a poetics
of inclusion. She writes, “So
what I’m saying is if you
know someone like this, / if you
know them and you notice these
things and you like them, / why
don’t you be nice to them?
/ Because they are just about
out. // . . .it is cold at the
extremity, / blasted, vast and
echoing, / this world was not
meant to be borne alone.” (“For
the People Exposed”)
In Klein’s own words, each
poem in UNION! is “a
step towards Union!”
The collection is divided into
four sections: “Amid Ocean,”
“Dry Land,” “Hard Earth,” and “Up and
Away!” In an interview with
PhillySound, Klein
describes the concept that
informs the structure of the
book. “It begins in water
because of times when I thought I
was drowned but I came back to
life. It ends with the poem ‘Act
I: Against Death.’ That
poem is a reminder that I am a
result of other forces beyond my
ego and they have some ownership
of my territory.”
UNION! was released on
February 9, 2009. It is one of
two premiere single-author
volumes published by Canarium
Books, sponsored by The
University of Michigan Creative
Writing Program. Canarium,
established in 2008, is the
editorial project of Joshua
Edwards, Robyn Schiff, Nick
Twemlow, and Lynn Xu. Edwards and
Twemlow are former co-editors of
the journal The Canary,
where some of Klein’s
poetry originally appeared.
A graduate of Columbia University
and the Iowa Writers’
Workshop, Klein currently lives
in Philadelphia, where she
produces a You Tube show called
THE BOO SHOW! and plans
to make movies about her bike and
the birth of the soul. In
addition to writing poetry, Klein
makes films and video pieces,
constructs stage sets in her
kitchen, and creates puppets to
star in her films and “to
have little creatures to love,”
among a community of actively
creative friends.
Nicole
Pollentier is a poet and curator
whose work has appeared in or is
forthcoming from alice blue
review, Bird Dog, Fourteen Hills,
Commonweal, Border Senses, Crazy
Child Scribbler, and
Transfer Magazine, among
others. She is the author of two
book-length poems, the frog
poem project and the
place where you were foreign.
The recipient of a Fulbright
Fellowship, she spent a year
living in Reykjavík,
Iceland, and currently lives in
Chicago.
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Mostly
Books, August 17, 2009
Staying
Awake Inside:
New Books
from Airlie Press in Oregon's
Willamette Valley
a
review by Susan
Kelly-DeWitt
THE
EDDY FENCE: POEMS, by Donna
Henderson, Airlie Press, 2009, 71
pages, $15 paperback.
LAST APPLES OF LATE
EMPIRES, by Jessica Lamb,
Airlie Press, 2009, 73 pages,
$15.00 paperback.
Airlie Press, P.O. Box 434,
Monmouth, Oregon 97361,
www.airliepress.org.
The Airlee Press website says,
“We are a nonprofit publishing collective dedicated to
cultivating and sustaining fine
contemporary poetry. Our intent
is to produce beautiful and
compelling books by Willamette
Valley poets; our mission is to
offer writers working in our
particular habitat a local,
shared-work publishing
alternative.” Indeed, the
first two books, by two of the
press’s founding members,
hot off the Airlie Press press,
live up to the goals of that
mission statement.
Inside the handsome cover of The Eddy Fence,
Donna Henderson’s poems weave back and
forth between personal narrative about her mother’s
illness and death, and broader yet very personal
encounters with the natural world. The dilemmas
and calamities that befall the physical environment
become part of the inner landscape: St. Helen’s
with its amputated peak, stands in for and speaks
to the end of a love affair, “Anyone who’d
never known the top / before it blew would see a
summit. . .”; the devastating poem “Deposition,”
about a badly wounded yearling caught in a wire
fence, becomes a testimony about and against suffering
and death.
The animal is writhing in pain
when she and a companion come
upon it.
|
|
His snagged leg had
twisted about
off its hoof, and the
hoof
snapped and flipped like
a rabbit’s
foot
strung on a chain each
time he pushed off,
pushed off again.
|
She’s confronted with
the horrible reality:
|
|
And I tell you I
wanted to run from, not
to him—
But we were it
that day, the only ones
there,
and he was bleating and
lunging so explicitly
toward us—
So, while my love pried
his gristle and hide
from the wire, I held
the whole hanging rest
of the body
to keep him still.
|
When they do manage to pry him loose from
the fence, they see he’s so badly injured—“.
. .his sides—little bellows—/ heaving
and caving. . .”—they understand:
|
|
we’d have to
kill him and couldn’t—
while we couldn’t
we held him until we
could,
then while he jerked,
arched, died&
until the syrupy blood
of him cooled
and stilled we held him—
|
This poem comes near the end
of a section devoted mostly to
the mother’s death and is
followed two poems later by “My
Mother’s Teeth,”
where the speaker must force her
dead mother’s false teeth
back into her mouth before the
undertakers arrive.
|
|
. . .it shocked me a little, how
intimate this felt;
more than washing the
violet folds of her
vulva,
changing the bandage
that covered her
bedsore,
tracing the paths of her
chemo-scarred veins.
|
Each poem throbs with the
separate pain and awful duties of
death.
Another thread through the book
involves the clear-cutting of an
adjacent forest. The speaker,
forced to witness the
destruction, imagines the cut
lumber becoming something
beautiful:
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|
When I can’t
bear to hear anymore
what I cannot
stop (not without
violence) I imagine
the logs ending up in
Hokkaido,
their wood nailed into
zendos,
each with its portion of
leaf-sieved light,
the spacious cool of its
rooms, their peace,
inside of which more
monks than ever will
meditate,
watching their breath for the sake of all
beings. . .
(from
“Zazen”)
|
She chooses to concentrate on
what the felled trees may build, “watching
as violence rises and passes, /
staying awake inside.”
The last section of the three in
Henderson’s collection is
less satisfying—as though
the book needed a few more poems
to flesh out a seventy pager.
Despite that, I find here an
authentic, hard-won clarity, a
brutal and at the same time
most-loving honesty.
•
Jessica Lamb’s book,
Last Apples of Late Empires,
is about the secret
interiors of ordinary moments.
Inner landscape is everything, no
matter what the exteriors appear
to be, and the painterly cover
portrays an apple peeled away to
reveal the earth itself, alive
with swirling currents.
The second poem of the book (from which it takes
it’s title), “Night Feeding,”
sets the direction; it’s about the birth of
a son, and the speaker begins: “I don’t
recall how I came to this country / but what does
it matter? I’ve borne / a son. . .”
The second section of the poem goes on to explore
the complexity of conflicting emotions included
but not always acknowledged in that web of events.
|
|
A tulip,
purple-black, expiring
on the sill
above the sink, petals
enormously splayed.
My husband calls for a
drink. I rinse a
glass
carefully, the stigma’s
red so frankly
genital. A bead of juice
collects
in the cleft, the
anthers’ six black
fingers
dusted with dark
seeds.
|
And then
|
|
He wants me to make
love to him
somehow. I’m
listening to the hum of
things:
water turning in a
glass, tulip
bowing toward decay.
Whatever I promised
I could not have
promised this.
|
The mother in the poem has become a stranger
in a strange new land; she is alien, even to her
own body. The last section closes with a frozen
woods, “deathly still white-sheeted. . .ahum
/ with disembodied sounds,” where the “night’s
goods”—the “last apples of late
empire”—are passed along and “small
ravening lips take hold.”
It’s a collection about the
sacrifices life sometimes demands
of us as we mature into
responsibility. “First Rain”
is an example that might be read
as a précis for the book
as a whole:
|
|
Yellow plum in the
path like a lost
egg.
Being no one’s
mother this morning
I devour it as rains
begin to fall.
Pockets filled with more
than I
could ever need I dash
my spoils home
listening as the parched
earth drinks
and drinks. It isn’t
enough. The first rain
of
autumn never is. Skin
bruised, my plums
have turned a sickly
brown by afternoon.
In no time my ravenous
son
will appear at the
door.
For all I claim as mine
what more
will be asked of me?
|
The cycle of the poems begins and ends
with different forms of hunger—the basic animal
hunger of the child for the mother’s milk,
the hunger of the lovers for each other’s
bodies (“Newlyweds”), the hunger for
self-knowing as in the Neruda-esque “A Few
Questions Before I Continue”: “If this
is my one life by which door do I enter?. . .When
the waters have subsided what will I / have held?”
and finally, the hunger for life itself, despite
the obstacles:
|
|
And so I have
lasted
another winter.
Do not hold
it against me
darkness,
for I am still
your creature
though my
pitiable body
can’t help
itself
begging for always
more light
even up to the last
day’s last
hour.
(from
“Seven Days”)
|
Occasionally the poems can seem a little
cranky, as if the poet’s irritation with the
unexpected things that so often hijack us takes
over the pen. Mostly though, the poems here are,
as the book’s back cover states, “an
ear trained to rumblings beneath the placid appearances
of marriage and motherhood. . .discovering small
signs of promise.”
Susan
Kelly De-Witt is a Sacramento
poet who teaches at UC Davis
Extension. Her recent book of
poetry is The Fortunate
Islands; she is a
contributing editor of
Poetry Flash.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mostly
Books, August 3, 2009
Survivor
a
review by Susan
Kelly-DeWitt
THE
DOWNSTAIRS DANCE FLOOR, by
Taylor Graham, Robert Phillips
Poetry Chapbook Prize, Texas
Review Press, English Department,
Sam Houston State University,
Huntsville, Texas 77341-2146,
2006, 29 pages, $8.95
paperback.
It is easy to see why Taylor
Graham’s latest collection,
The Downstairs Dance Floor,
won the 2005 Robert Phillips
Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas
Review Press. Here one finds
sonnets, a villanelle, a pantoum—
‘turns’ at the ends of poems that feel visceral, like
movements on a dance floor. At
the same time the voice of these
poems is tough; the tone is wry,
ironic, gritty, wise—the
words of a survivor. As the blurb
on the Texas Review Press website
explains, these poems “are
inhabited by family survivors”
but:
In “Wed by the Justice
of the Peace,” the wedding
couple arrives to find a chaotic
scene. Here Graham’s
camera-like focus and her use of
colloquial diction frame a future
without much romance. It’s
a poem worth quoting in its
entirety.
|
|
Wed by the Justice of
the Peace
who just enjoyed a
pretty good
supper, by the looks of
it—plates
smeared with gravy on
the stained white
cloth, and drumsticks
gnawed to the bone.
As if they hadn’t
called ahead, as if
they caught the Justice
by surprise
with his vest
unbuttoned, eying
the Pope’s nose
across the platter;
his missus wiping a
child’s crumbed
face
before she clears the
table.
And does it matter, for
a bride
whose hemline’s
longer than the
fashion,
gray frock worn thin at
the collar,
her bouquet a bunch of
roadside chicory?
Let her recite her vows
before the altar
of pushed-back chairs
and crumpled
napkins. For witnesses,
stuffed bellies
already hungering for
tomorrow’s
breakfast biscuits, and
these ever-
lasting dishes. Dirty
dishes. Let her
learn right now what
marriage is about
|
Two poems later “Fire in
the Fingers” describes a
young man who refuses to stay
home and become a dairy farmer as
his family expects; instead he
moves to the city, becomes a
musician, earning his bread
tuning other people’s
pianos. The poem explores the
realities of the working
artist:
|
|
“$5 a month for
treatments for
catarrh
through the long satiric
winter in St. Paul,
1895. The Smith &
Barnes upright piano
rents for $3 a month,
music being cheaper
than health. She’s
a slattern mistress
who keeps you tuning other people’s
pianos. . .”
|
“Celebrations”
examines a black and white
photograph of a birthday party—“five
little girls / in sun-dresses”
who forget to smile when someone
poses them for the camera. The
poem’s wry conclusion
suddenly includes us:
|
|
. . .It’s somebody’s
birthday and they ought
to be glad,
there’s favors and
cake and
not just the
birthday-girl’s
getting older.”
|
Grouped together for the
photograph, the girls are told to
“look off into the distance”; the result is funny sad,
and prophetic.
Taylor Graham worked for many
years as a volunteer
search-and-rescuer. (One of her
earlier collections bears a
picture of her being lowered into
a shaft while training other
rescuers.) Not surprisingly then,
one of Graham’s themes is
isolation. Her people are cast
together upon metaphorical desert
islands where camaraderie is
haphazard if not enforced, where
the alienation of the self is
permanent. Much as one character
might reach out to another, they
remain “Lost in Two Cars,”
like the family in the poem, who
become separated while driving
across the desert. The mother in
the poem waits on the shoulder of
the highway for her “second
husband” to “miss her
in the rearview mirror”:
|
|
That’s the
thing about
traveling
in pairs. Even though my
father
turned
around at last
with enough daylight
left
to fix the flat, and
then,
late as it was, find a
motel
with a vacancy and a
double bed,
and a cot for the child—even
then,
it wasn’t the way
she intended
the trip to turn
out.
|
As we see elsewhere in the book, the child
appears almost an afterthought—a child of
older parents who have lived long lives before “the
child’s” arrival—a child described
clearly and without sentimentality in the pantoum
“An Only Daughter,” as “ancient.
. .staring from the shadow of [her] eyes.”
For the old man in the poem “Longshoreman,”
the isolation is within; here someone who “used
to have a perfect jigsaw mind” no longer remembers
anything, not even “. . .D-Day, a big bang
that shaped the world / as he knew it. . . .”
Likewise the couple in “A Pair of Photographs”
are “two faces surely meant to gaze together
/ from a single frame” but, alone together
on a mountain road, they can only photograph each
other separately; there is “no one else to
prove they stood together.”
I love the quirkiness of many of
these poems, poems like “Sky-Blue
Tiles” and “The
Diner,” which are full of
almost-surrealistic surprises—like
“Jacaranda,” where the speaker fills out “a hundred
papers” as part of an elder’s
admission to a nursing home and
then unexpectedly concludes:
|
|
Imagine her in
blue
boas, flamenco on a
breeze.
Imagine
so we can’t
forget.
At the tip of every
twig
a castanet.
|
Many of the scenes in this
book are “grainy and dark”
as the picture of the old man in “90th
Birthday”—propped up
in his hospital chair while the “oxygen
canister / stands guard” —surrounded
by good will as surfeit—in
this case, “Balloons in
bunches,” a table “heaped
with goodies / he can’t
eat.”
Although Graham’s
consistent use of contractions
adds authority to the savvy
vernacular of her speakers, one
exception is the omniscient
narrator of “A Woven Line,”
the penultimate poem of the book.
The voice here is more polished,
unabashedly lyrical, a voice that
could stand in for the poet
herself:
|
|
He wakes from dreams
of knots, or nets,
a sort of word-play in
which lines entwine
into a sling for
catching unstrung
rhymes.
The rocking sing-song
teases him from
sleep.
And so he lies here on
the dark-side of
dawn,
under a great dry ocean
of stars—those
bright
over-hands across the
intervals of night.
|
The book concludes by
imagining its main character, “Death
the Linguist,” who calls
the speaker “Querida”—the
“’d’ that sounds / like ‘th’ not quite
touching / behind the teeth,”
though “he [Death]
hasn’t even got a tongue.”
Here Death speaks for a land
where “all languages are
fluent and all genders agree,”
and the speaker is able at last
to relax—close her eyes,
open her lips and “let the
tongue float free.”
The poems are left dancing
together on the pages of this
handsome book, floating free; the
antithesis of the parents in the
first poem, “The Dead
Dancing,” who
|
|
. . .take each other’s hand
in a wordless
foxtrot, measuring out
the downstairs
dance-
floor all those
years.
|
Susan
Kelly De-Witt is a Sacramento
poet who teaches at UC Davis
Extension. Her recent book of
poetry is The Fortunate
Islands; she is a
contributing editor of
Poetry Flash.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mostly
Books, June 30, 2009
Workers
&
Wannabes
a
review by Susan
Kelly-DeWitt
ORDINARY
GENIUS, A GUIDE FOR THE POET
WITHIN,
by Kim Addonizio, W.W. Norton
& Company, New York, NY,
2009,
311 pages, $16.95
paperback.
It’s a long time (1974)
since the likes of John Frederick
Nims’ canonical book on
craft, Western Wind,
broke onto the scene, aimed
at “students and teachers”
as well as budding poets. Since
then there has been an explosion
of craft books targeted at both
academic audiences and the public
at large—including those
Kim Addonizio, in her new poetic
craft book Ordinary
Genius, calls “wannabes”—folks
who want to write but don’t
necessarily want to do the hard
work. “Maybe you’re
one of those people who writes
poems, but rarely reads them. Let
me put this as delicately as I
can: If you don’t read,
your writing is going to suck.”
Ordinary Genius is an
extraordinary mixture of personal
memoir, freshly conceived writing
prompts, and ingenious insights
into form and creative process. I
have read and used many craft
books over the years (I can count
about seventy-five on my own
shelf right now) including
The Poet’s
Companion, which Addonizio
co-authored with Dorianne Laux
some years back. This book is
different, perhaps because it
arises so directly out of
Addonizio’s own struggle
and desire to write
authentically, to master her
craft and “make it new.”
Addonizio incorporates
philosophy, spiritual fervor,
plain talk about sex and
addiction; she addresses race,
class and gender, in the service
of illuminating the work involved
in writing good poetry.
She also reminds us there will
always be an element of
mystery in mastery—we
can work and work and work, but
we cannot predict when a poem
might take that magical leap into
the kingdom of great art.
(Reading her chapter on revision,
I was reminded of a time when I
read through the many drafts of
Elizabeth Bishop’s famous
villanelle “One Art”—how
that poem struggled and straggled
along—a word changed here,
something crossed out there, and
then: That leap! A poem that
seemed to have materialized whole
upon the page.)
What I like so much about this
book is that, even when she is
breaking things down into parts
for her reader, when she is
analyzing (meter, for instance)
or systematizing (syntactical
structure), or listing her
innovative writing prompts,
Addonizio keeps her passion for
poetry (and for us, her readers)
very much alive on the page.
Ordinary Genius is an
extraordinary work—a gift
to us all.
Susan
Kelly De-Witt is a Sacramento
poet who teaches at UC Davis
Extension. Her recent book of
poetry is The Fortunate
Islands; she is a
contributing editor of
Poetry Flash.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mostly
Books, May 15, 2009
“Flashes”
brief
takes by
Dawn-Michelle
Baude
NEUTRALITY,
by Keston Sutherland, Barque
Press, 2004
Upon
returning from eighteen years
abroad, I asked two poets ten
years my junior what book I
should buy. They put
Neutrality into my
grasping hand. Hence I
encountered Sutherland’s
work for the first time and fell
in love, literally, with the
whoosh-plop-boom of that
verbal cascade. It surges from
its source with a delightful
rhythm, to the point that I
suspect the layout on the page
provides the syllogistic pretext
for the argument of the poem
without exerting a durable impact
on the prosody (this bears
further consideration). I like
the fact that this work doesn’t
take itself too seriously, an
important consideration when a
lot of what's available to read
in the U.S. seems to move from a
homogenous, self-congratulatory
careerism.
THE
BEGINNING OF BEAUTY, by Mel
Nichols, Edge Books,
2007
Nichols
is one of my favorite poets, and
this book is full of what she
does best: the insightful
quotidian of being human,
combined with a wacky, prickly
sense of humor and inflected with
a staunch political acumen—Kyger
and Notley reververate here, with
a little of Hejinian and Darragh
in the mix. Nichols is capable of
range—The Beginning of
Beauty has an acerbic wit
that takes a back seat in her “Day
Poem” series, where the
mood is quieter and engages a
flexible, compeling query into
the new humanism—I’m
a devoted fan of the “Day
Poems.” Beauty is, of
course, beautiful—a joy to
hold, with its intimate,
polysemous blue secret. That
tip-in* is so erotic.
[*
As in printing: To attach
(an insert) in a book by gluing
along the binding edge: tip in a
color plate.]
THE
NIAGARA MAGAZINE: ROBERT CREELEY—A
DIALOGUE, 1978
Oh Lord—what a gem—everything
so deeply, irrevocably Creeley,
in conversation with Kevin Power
in Buffalo in 1976. If a book had
arms, I’d want to crawl
into them here. I found this
issue which managed, somehow, to
survive the pulverizing fists of
time at a very cool secondhand
bookshop specializing in
impossibily hard-to-find poetry
publications—Heritage—in
Beacon, Lower Hudson Valley.
Maybe you can find another gem of
your own there:
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/new-england-bookstores-and-the-hermitage-beacon.
BROKEN
WORLD, by Joseph Lease,
Coffee House Press, 2007
I’ve carried this book
from country to country for the
last year an a half, picking it
up whenever I need to think—or
rather hear—the poem. Lease
has something of Palmer in him,
something of Creeley, a bit of
Spicer. The argument of the book
is chilling, and sad, and
somehow, redemptive. I’m
into reading books where I
actually feel a poet on the other
side, the flesh and blood one,
who knows when to cast identity
upon the page like a stone tossed
into the lake. I read a book like
this, and I want to borrow some
of his moves and drink a glass of
Merlot.
THE GRAND PIANO: AN
EXPERIMENT IN COLLECTIVE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, ten volumes (seven
volumes so far), by Bob Perelman,
Barrett Watten, Steve Benson,
Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron
Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn
Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted
Pearson, Mode A/This Press,
2007-2008
Basically, anywhere that
Barrett Watten’s brain has
been I want to check out. It’s
like going in for an oil change—are
we thinking? Really thinking? As
someone who’s had a voyeur’s
view of the Language Poets from
the get-go, I like to keep an eye
on them, all of them. And the
Grand Piano series is not a
disappointment. If I could
recuperate the world ‘panoptic’
to employ in a
pre-Foucaultian/Bentham sense, I
would. But the quantum viewpoint
might be better to describe this
document in collective
autobiography. At any rate for a
movement that has consistently
faced accusations of mannerism
(and a lot worse), the embodied
narratives of grand Piano provide
the waves that those hard-copy
particles need. Give a Language
Poet a hug.
LET
IT RIP, by Buck Downs,
BuckDowns.com, Washington D.C.,
2007
I came across these poems
this summer and I had to
re-read. Downs’s line is so
tight, the torque between words
so high, the potential energy
would seem a bit dangerous, were
it not for lyric commitments.
Tenderness, especially. The focus
on juxtaposition of grammatical
units functions differently from
the trajectories we’re
accustomed to follow, given the
predictable paratactic idioms of
our age. You have to read these
poems slowly, word by word, as if
the conditions of their making
required more than a casual
performative reconstruction.
There’s wit here, in
abundance, and keen social
commentary, and a kind of
revelatory intimacy, too.
WILD
FORM & SAVAGE GRAMMAR,
by Andrew Schelling,
La Alameda Press,
2003
I didn’t
know the U.S. had any kind of
Ecological movement in poetry
until I recently came across this
book. The question that Schelling
poses—how
can we have a writing that also
commits to the compelling issues
of Ecology—is
certainly worth considering, even
(or especially) at this belated
standpoint. Since Ecology is not,
as far as I can ascertain,
anywhere near the heart of
contemporary poetics, Schelling
turns often to Asia for ideas
that were waylaid in history, a
tendency that endears me to this
book since many U.S. poets have
truncated their connection to the
past as a source of meaningful
information and finally end-up
looking awfully provincial.
Schelling is a good, clear
essayist, so he took me places I
hadn’t
been before.
THE
GOLDEN AGE OF PARAPHERNALIA ,
by Ken Davies, Edge,
2008
Sharp, witty, incisive—this
book has a lot to keep me busy.
The prosody (the driving issue
for this reader) catches my eye
because Davies has a lot of
textured variation. The main
thrust, so to speak, of the poet’s
concerns is contemporary social
commentary, and this commentary
is rich and informed. But it’s
the reoccurring pig
image/references that hooked me!
Since I’ve been out of the
country for so long, Davies is a
wonderful discovery.
Dawn
Michelle-Baude’s latest
poetry collections are
Finally: A Calendar
(Mindmade Books, 2009)
and The Flying
House (Parlor Press,
2008). Her work has appeared
in First Intensity, Slope,
New American Writing, and
Verse. In February 2010,
she will be returning to the Bay
Area for a Van Gogh’s
Ear reading, the Paris-based
literary journal she has recently
guest-edited.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mostly Books, May 12,
2009
At the
Border of
Words
a
review by Richard
Silberg
THE
EARTH IN THE ATTIC, by Fady
Joudah, Yale University Press,
New Haven, 2008, 77 pages, $16;
winner of the 2007 Yale Series of
Younger Poets competition,
selected by Louise
Glück.
|
|
Say
I found you and god
On the same day at the
border
Of words, better two
late birds than
The stone that hit
them.
Say the stone is my
death, when we met,
You and I, near the
cross
Of the iv pole and
fell
In love with the
other
Side of the
hammer…
(from
“Love Poem”)
|
The
velocity of Fady Joudah’s
language, the leaps he makes and
the lovely conceptions entailed
in those dizzy spaces, seem to me
the signature of his lyric voice.
But it’s a complex voice,
as well, an amalgam of elements.
For one, he sees with the eye of
a medical doctor—viz. that “iv
pole”—a field member
of Doctors Without Borders. For
another, he’s a
Palestinian-American. These two
condition everything in the book:
|
|
Children cheering on
both sides
Of the upright road.
Which goes along
With a story about my
mother
When she was a newborn:
They
Ran back to the tent
And found her cooing,
next
To a bomb that didn’t
explode. And so
They named her the
amusing one.
I do not say the
shelling
Scattered them, I do not
say
What Daniel my friend
told me: how
He fled across four
borders,
And with each
A cerebral malaria that
nearly killed him.
The ducks, however,
Get it right from the
first time.
The goats, less so,
run
Straight ahead of the
car for a while.
Before they find their
sidestep. The
drivers
Slow down, or gun it,
and grin.
(from
“Landscape”)
|
Still moving fast, past to
present, story to story, this
poem clings closer to the earth,
to its people and creatures, than
the first. We can feel the
speaker’s connection to
this land of his mother’s
birth; we can feel his empathy
and his keen eye, ducks versus
goats, and particularly that
wonderful last line and a half,
the alliteration “gun it,
and grin,” catching and
swiftly opening out the drivers’
playful machismo. It’s not
that common to find the high,
word-flown lyricism of the first
quote and the savvy detail of the
second between the covers of the
same book.
Along with the swiftness that
characterizes The Earth in
the Attic, its elliptic
flights, comes a concision, a
sense of the powerfully under
said. And in this cut-back mode
Joudah is able to fuse two more
qualities not often found in a
single book, let alone a debut,
namely deeply felt emotion and
the tang of philosophy, of
intellectual overview. Let’s
close, then, with one more quote,
the ending of “Moon Grass
Rain,” that wreathes this
all together:
|
|
14.
The translation of a
medical interview
Is not a poem to be
written
Come recite a verse from
childhood with me
I see you’re
unable to weep, does
love
Have no command over
you?
The sea’s like
the desert
Neither quenches the
thirst
15.
Here, dry grass burns
the moon
Here, a clearing of
grass is a clearing of
snakes
16.
And the rain has already
been cleansed from the
sky
The clinic is empty,
soon
The earth will unseal
like a jar
Harvest is the season
that fills the belly
17.
Here, I ride my bicycle
invisible
Except for a crescent
shadow and the Milky
Way
Is already past
18.
And a mirror gives the
moon back to the
moon
Home is an epilogue:
Which came first
Memory or words?
|
Richard
Silberg is Associate Editor of
Poetry Flash. His most
recent book of poetry is
Deconstruction of the
Blues; he co-translated, with
Clare You, The Three Way
Tavern by Korean poet Ko
Un.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mostly
Books , March 12, 2009
Elegiac
Poetry by Northwest Poets:
Two New Books
a
review by Susan
Kelly-DeWitt
TO
CURVE, by Michael Daley, Word
Press, P.O. Box 541106,
Cincinatti, OH 45254-1106, 2008,
92 pages, $18,
www.word-press.com.
The
poems in Michael Daley's new
book, To Curve, are full
of what inhabits so many of us in
the last half of life: Regret.
In
“The
Moon & Mt. Ranier,”
Daley imagines picking up two
hitchhikers, ghosts of a former
time alluded to earlier in the
collection:
|
|
Just
so the days
pass like geese
startled by
cloudburst.
Everything comes
back,
trudging over frozen
ground
of decades. I could be
the girl
thumbing a ride, the
boy
behind her in windy
light.
Now they're huddled in
my back seat.
Christ, they sound so
hopeless.
I'm no help. I suggest
things
even I would never
do.
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Looking
back, seeing what one didn’t
see but should have, is a theme
that loops and threads through
Daley's book. What redemption
there is arises from a fellowship
and presence to the fleeting
world: geese, clouds, a bushtit,
the moon—and
from our ability to consciously
enter into it. Whatever wisdom
there is resides there: “I
pass a mare and colt loose in the
road./ So right. So assured their
place along the shadow./ Stepping
light, keeping close.”
(“Driving
Home in Fog”)
The fog is spiritual of course,
and the poems are about finding
one’s way through and out
the labyrinths of it.
Least
successful are the poems about
family relationships in the first
section of the book. Too
self-referential, private and
diary-esque, they fail to lead
somewhere that includes us. The
third section manages better with
poems like “Preparing
the Emergency Kit for My Son in
Kindergarten,”
which captures the interior panic
any parent in the nuclear age, in
earthquake, flood or fire
country, in tornado or cyclone
weather, cannot help but feel,
along with an irrational,
stubborn hope:
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The
instructions help me see
him with survivors.
When I turn on the news
they pull him
from rubble; each photo
is peeled from his
skin;
he waves from the
stretcher;
a bomb gives up the
sleeve of his
shirt.
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To
Curve includes several
powerful poems with
political-historical
underpinnings: “Fallen”
refers to Kennedy’s
assassination and the speaker's
Catholic childhood when “…Father
Cardillo climbed the stairs, /
out of breath, and entered
American / Literature with Dallas’
news,” and “Hibakusha”
about the ordeal of the Hiroshima
survivors (“A great light
from the sky / crushed the house,
the city fell down.”)
The speaker is running from the
city with many others.
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The
gums bleed, hair falls
out,
then purple spots like
snakebites
along the skin. My
sister, her mouth
closing around a small
cake of coal,
and my husband who had
never
been to the dentist. A
set of teeth
in perfect
condition.
They could have been
his.
I buried the teeth in
his grave.
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The
poems reenter the momentous with
humility and empathy.
Many shorter, more straightforward
poems leap from the ‘natural’ world—“Nettles,”
“Cloud Work,”
“Dunlins,”
“Luna,”
for example; there’s a clarity of vision in
these that I admire, but also a quirkiness that
sets the apart in an engaging way.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
TO
THE ARCHAEOLOGIST WHO FINDS
US, by Gary Thompson, Turning
Point Press (Word Press), P.O.
Box 541106, Cincinnati, OH
45254-1106, 2008, 800 pages, $18,
www.word-press.com.
Let me
say up-front: Gary Thompson and I
are old friends—the
kind of old friends who see each
other every decade or so, catch
up briefly, then part again
warmly, promising to stay closer
in touch, which we never seem to
do. The work is different though.
I have followed Thompson’s
work over decades, from his first
chapbook, Hold Fast,
published in 1984, to this latest
collection, To the
Archaeologist Who Finds Us;
which is full of the dilemma and
layered complexity one comes to
expect from Thompson’s
work. The poems here acknowledge
that “Sadness
Comes”—“It
inches in, drifts / like fog he
watches cross the
Sound/…”
But
mornings like the one in “Charm”
also arrive, when the “Scotch
broom’s sudden-yellow /
charms the black dog off our
usual path…”
though they have their own
underlayers of question built
in:
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Isn’t
yellow, in books, the
color of
grief, and black,
despair? How is it we
are dancing?
Charm, I suppose, and
charmed, and maybe it's
true
that we—dog,
crows, buttercup, and
broom—are
mere trinkets dangling
from the wrist of the
goddess,
and she jangles us as
she pleases, but aren’t
we
beautiful this
day?
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We need
such charm(s), plural—for
aren't they talismans as
well?—especially
when we acknowledge, as “This
Morning's Shiver”
does:
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It
turns out we were made
small
animals shivering
over this earth with
hearts
that pump blue
stars.
Our frail gravity, at
birth,
was buried like seeds in
our eyes.
That is our
right.
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Claiming
that right—to
wholeness—to
the shiver and the charm—and
claiming also the right to
capture it inside language, is
what Thompson’s book is
about.
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I
was thinking about
words
and how they can skip
off the water and
you
were tanned and
splashing your hand—
the two of us, father
and daughter,
afloat in something we
created
and believe
in.
(“The
Book”)
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This
right to claim our truths in
language is especially important
when doublespeak is everywhere:
on TV news, in commercials, in
the Senate and the House of
Representatives. A culture that
perverts and debases language,
one that fails to honor the
history of our words, is bound to
end up as artifact; as the title
poem says:
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We
used language
up. Words broke
or collected decades of
dust
and had to be
trucked
off to the dump
with the rest of our
refuse.
(“To
the Archaeologist Who
Finds Us”)
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Thompson’s
poems look ahead by looking back;
they refuse to throw things away;
they insist on finding a language
that remakes, renews, something
that incorporates the
losses—to
love, to time, to
death.
One poem
that I find particularly touching
is “Dear
Chrysalis.”
In it the speaker approaches his
elderly mother, who barely
recognizes him at first. I’ll
end with this poem in its
entirety:
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Dear
Chrysalis
I
enter the room
my mother has
become,
dear chrysalis that she
is.
I
am a familiar face,
and hers, a face of blue
eyes
staring back, searching
mine
to discover my name—
who exactly I
am.
We
slide by on silence,
the vaguely awkward and
re-lived silence
of a mother and
son's
faint kiss.
Gary
I whisper.
Her face empties
slowly,
but then something
flickers—
Oh Gary, she says,
and her eyes crinkle
blue
in
this moment,
the room we are
in.
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Susan
Kelly De-Witt is a Sacramento
poet who teaches at UC Davis
Extension. Her recent book of
poetry is The Fortunate
Islands; she is a
contributing editor of
Poetry Flash.
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Mostly
Books, January 10,
2009
Books of
Peace
a
review by Sharon
Coleman
The Fifth Book of
Peace, a fusion of dance,
theater, and music presented by
Danse Lumière, conceived
and choreographed by Kathryn
Roszak: October 24-26, 2008,
Dance Mission Theater, San
Francisco, California, and
November 6, 2008, Dominican
University, San Rafael,
California. These productions
were co-sponsored by Poetry
Flash, and were adapted from
and inspired by The Fifth
Book of Peace, a book by
Maxine Hong Kingston.
EVEN IF THE TROOPS WERE CALLED
BACK FROM THE
occupation of Iraq tomorrow, it
would take a lifetime to insure
no soldier, man or woman, is left
behind. The psychological toll on
soldiers changes with each war as
new technologies and strategies
render unexpected results,
another version of “friendly
fire.” With the Vietnam
War, soldiers were trained into “killing
machines” as never before,
and their target became
civilians, more and more. Add to
that chemical warfare and
guerilla tactics and drug
addiction and demoralization and
then a Veterans Health
Administration unprepared and
sometimes unwilling to treat our
mental casualties. A few veterans
turned to writing. A noted
example is the writing group of
Vietnam vets facilitated by East
Bay writer Maxine Hong Kingston,
and which she describes in her
memoir, The Fifth Book of
Peace. Their work is
anthologized in Veterans of
War, Veterans of Peace,
which she edited. As history
repeats itself, their writings’
value is self-evident.
This fall the poems and stories
of this group escaped the bound
pages of the book and transformed
into a mixed- media performance
of dance, theater, music,
lighting, followed by discussion.
Danse Lumière, directed by
performer and choreographer
Kathryn Roszak, is dedicated to
mounting literary works into
dance and theater productions.
The Fifth Book of Peace
is perhaps the company’s
most ambitious project, both in
its current social context and in
its multilayered, multifaceted
production. It brings together a
Bay Area panoply of artists and
writers. LINES Ballet and
Dominican University’s
program in dance provided
talented young dancers able to
well carry out the depth of
acting demanded of the roles,
which is rare in dancers so
young. Ron van Leeuwaard, a
composer originally from Suriname
who has collaborated with a
number of world music bands and
theater companies, created a
score based on electronic music,
ambient sounds of helicopters,
bullets and ocean waves,
traditional Asian music, flute,
percussion, and rifts of popular
music of the time period. The
script, adapted by Katherine
Roszak, is based on the writings
of Maxine Hong Kingston, on the
stories of award-winning novelist
James Janko and other
participants of Kingston’s
Vietnam vet writing group, and on
the written testimony of Pauline
Laurent in Grief Denied, a
Vietnam Widow’s Story.
Daniel Ellsberg, revealer of
the “Pentagon Papers”
and renowned nonfiction author,
held a post-performance
discussion at the November
performance. And the list of
those involved goes on.
On stage, The Fifth Book of
Peace poetically narrates
the journey “back home”
of an “Old Vet.”
Played by actor Steve Ortiz, the
Old Vet exists in a psychic no
man’s land and is guided to
tell his story, to exorcise the
memories, by the female and male
incarnations of Kwan Yin, the
Bodhisattva of compassion, whose
twin aspects are played by
Kathryn Roszak and martial artist
Ben Tang. Tableaux of the Old Vet’s
flash backs are danced so that
actors and dancers double the
older and younger selves. Whether
narrative, gesture, pure emotion,
abstract movement or symbolic
action, the dance with its poetic
subtlety and range truly carries
the performance. Add costumes
silkscreened by Kaibrina Sky Buck
that transform dancers into a
forest or a ghost to the
choreography (also by Roszak),
and the visuals are enthralling.
Perhaps the most captivating
parts are when the ensemble
dances the role of the jungle.
They become an array of
symmetrical and asymmetrical
moves morphing from ballet to
modern to animal-like steps, a
place of unexpected lyrical
motion and mortal danger. If
there is one critique, it’s
that the script lacks the nuance,
range, and lyricism of the
choreography and that the words
are delivered in almost uniform
tones of declaration and
command.
But the message and stories are
clear: clear and, unfortunately,
enduring.
Sharon
Coleman is a poet who teaches at
Berkeley City College. She is an
editor of Poetry
Flash.
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