| Mostly
Books, June 26, 2010
The Color of the Universe
a review by Judy Wells
The Curvature of Blue, poems by Lucille Lang Day, Cervená Barva Press, West Somerville, Massachusetts, 2009, 90 pages, $15.00, www.cervenabarvapress.com.
Lucille Lang Day’s book, The Curvature of Blue, is a sensuous and highly visual exploration of the universe by a woman who is both an outstanding poet and a trained scientist. If one reads her poems in sequence, from beginning to end, one finds that her book is actually an argument against its epigraph: “The universe is really beige. Get used to it.” (from John Noble Wilford of The New York Times, who reported that if the universe were viewed from a distance, it would appear beige, not turquoise as previously thought).
 In her universe, Day, the poet, will have none of this. She inhabits a universe of light and dark, iridescence, and above all vibrant colors, especially in this earthly realm, from the different hues of blue she observes in her own body, as in “Saturday Morning Triptych”: “Blue-green veins branch below / my dermal layer of skin, . . .” to her metaphorical description of transcendent love in “Because”: “because the heart traverses the curvature of blue.”
In a marvelous evocation of synesthesia in “Palette of the Universe,” Day can even hear color: “. . .listening / to John Sheppard’s sacred chants / for six voices, I hear cinnabar, / olive, raw umber, magenta, / violet and chartreuse / mingling in counterpoint.” Her book ends with a wonderful homage to nature’s varied reds: “the breast of the scarlet tanager,”. . . “the vine maple’s purple-red”. . . “even red ants.” (“Aubade in Red”)
Although Day’s beautiful descriptions of our earth range from the glaciers of Alaska to the ocotillo of the deserts, to the underwater world of myriad jellyfish (“In Praise of the Jellyfish”), which remind her of familiar food: “the egg-yolk jelly,” the jelly with “tentacles like curly pasta,” the poet is highly aware of our world’s fragility. “[T]he Earth / grew warmer, the air turned grayer, / and the polar ice caps crumbled into the sea,” she writes in “Letter to Send in a Space Capsule,” and in “14 Stations,” section 8, she says, “I weep for myself / and the world, forever/ greening and dying.”
I found a spiritual thrust in the concluding poems of The Curvature of Blue, such as “Because” and “Heaven on Earth,” as if Lucille Lang Day were reminding us that our scientific description of the universe is our modern way of describing what the ancients told us in myth, the Hindus in their sacred scripts, the Hebrews in the Old Testament. And perhaps what Day is really striving for in her poetically charged language is a description of love—for humans, for animals, for plants, for the entire universe. Indeed, she proclaims to her husband in her wedding poem, “Color of the Universe,” “I feel carnelian when I take your hand.” Read her and rejoice in a universe that is certainly not beige!
Judy Wells’s
poetry collections include Call Home, Everything
Irish, and a chapbook, Little Lulu Talks
with Vincent Van Gogh. Her new poetry collection
I Dream of Circus Characters: A Berkeley Chronicle
has just been published by Beatitude Press.
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Mostly Books, June 10, 2010
On June 5, 2010, San Francisco Bay
Area poet and critic Jack Foley was presented with
the Berkeley Poetry Festival’s Lifetime Achievement
Award. To celebrate that honor, June 5, 2010 was
proclaimed “Jack Foley Day” by the City
of Berkeley. Since 1988, he has produced “Cover
to Cover” book talk radio shows on Berkeley’s
KPFA; his program currently airs Wednesdays at 3:00
p.m. He also hosted several fondly remembered poetry
series in Berkeley during the 1980s, at Larry Blake’s
restaurant and at the Café Milano. His poetry
collections include Letters/Lights:Words for
Adelle, Gershwin, Adrift, and Exiles;
he edited All: A James Broughton Reader,
named “number one gay book of 2006”
by AfterElton.com. His poem, “The Skeleton’s
Defense of Carnality,” is part of Berkeley’s
Addison Street Poetry Walk. A contributing editor
of Poetry Flash magazine, he lives in Oakland,
California, with his wife Adelle.
Poetry in a Country of Exiles
a
review by Christopher Bernard
The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of
Distinctions, essays by Jack Foley, with a
Foreword by Al Young, Red Hen Press, Pasadena, California,
2008, 260 pages, $19.95 paperback, www.redhen.org.
Jack Foley’s brilliantly stimulating and eloquently
written The Dancer and the Dance is a wide-ranging
exploration of vital currents in contemporary poetry,
from the ‘new orality’, poetry slams,
and spoken word to the ‘new formalism’
of Dana Gioia and Annie Finch, with provocative
insights into the classics and sympathetic visits
to popular culture. It is essential reading for
anyone who cares about poetry in our time. And it
is a primer on the thinking of one of modern American
poetry’s essential thinkers and practitioners.
Those
of us who follow Jack Foley’s work know that
for many years he has been one of our most penetrating
critics of poetry and most adventurous of poets,
both as author and performer. Immensely erudite,
yet curiously endearing, this scholar, critic, poet,
controversialist, and radio personality continues,
in the tradition of Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth
(without the intellectual over-weaning of the one
or the bullying impulses of the other), to vitalize
the literary scene with his poems and plays and
to enlighten it with his provocative investigations
of classic and modern poetry.
With
the publication of this, together with his two other
major collections of critical essays—Foley’s
Books and O Powerful Western Star!—Foley
has established this discovery for the rest of us.
Jack
Foley is of a breed that is always said to be ‘dying’
but keeps hold from generation to generation, even
as the seeps of academicism threaten, from a suffocating
fussiness on the one hand to an envious inflation
on the other, to undermine the emotional as well
as intellectual integrity of the literary life:
the independent intellectual unattached to any academic
institution, yet able to cock a snook at the armor-plated
knights of the universities with their own most
polished weapons. He combines the best that the
academic scholar has to offer—the professionalism,
the sharpness of focus, the scrupulous standards,
the depth of learning—with an undaunted intellectual
autonomy that academia, with its careerism and its
pressures to conform to the trends of the hour and
the tyrannies of the faculty lounge, too often drills
out of its dependents.
His
new book (beautifully produced, with a handsome
reproduction on the cover of Gustav Klimt’s
celebrated portrait of Mrs. Adele Bloch-Bauer, in
graceful homage to Foley’s wife Adelle, also
a poet, with whom Foley regularly performs) opens
with an amiable introduction by Al Young, California
Poet Laureate emeritus, and two introductory essays
by Foley.
The
first of these discusses the philosophical bases
of much of Foley’s critical undertaking, including
influences from Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, and Father
Walter J. Ong to the poetry and criticism of Dana
Gioia. Foley also discusses his embrace of ideas
concerning the ‘death of God’ and the
disunity of the self* [see Endnotes] and
the place of poetry in the new media of our time—video,
the Internet, etc.—that includes an anti-Platonist
(and arguable) assertion that there is no poem apart
from the particular medium in which it exists,**
[see Endnotes] and that the mind itself
is the Ur-medium from which all other media
are derived. An arguable, but stimulating, assertion.
He also explores the sea-change from a page-based,
or visually based, poetic art to an orally based
one, which he sees as one of the most important
changes in the dissemination, even meaning, of literature
in our time, and one that curiously links us to
the most ancient experiences of poetry, stories,
literature.
The
rest of the book is in two parts: “Classics”
and “Contemporaries,” though the “classics”
Foley deals with do not go back very far: the oldest
poets, and the only ones whose major work predates
the twentieth century, being John Keats and Stephane
Mallarmé, poets of a special significance
for Foley. We are treated to a close reading of
Keats’s endlessly fascinating “Ode on
a Grecian Urn,” in which Foley discusses what
may be the most controversial—even defiantly
so—concluding lines of any lyrical masterpiece
(“Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that
is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”—“If
only we did,” as many a student has thought,
half wishfully, half mordantly, on first reading
those lines) with reference to an interpretation
from Paul de Man, and our author makes reference
to a Hegelian formulation that chimes curiously
with Foley’s notion of the disunited self—the
idea that man “ ‘sunders himself to
self-realization’—the notion that self-realization
involves a violent turning away from all those things
one earlier held dear”—though this seems
a kind of disunity our author himself, luckily for
us, does not suffer from: in this case, beauty indeed
is truth.
In
another essay, Foley submits to a close reading
two translations of Mallarmé’s brief
verse “Brise Marine” before giving his
own expansive try at it. Alas, traduttore, traditore:
translation remains, not only a tempting, but a
sweet and inescapable, traducing.
One
of the books’ most engaging essays, to my
mind, is on William Butler Yeats that reviews a
recent facsimile edition of the first edition of
Yeats’s masterly collection The Tower.
Foley discusses the significance for Yeats
and his poetic mythos of Porphyry’s Neoplatonist
reading of the Cave of the Nymphs episode in the
Odyssey and the resonance of that classic
reading and its Romantic suasion throughout Yeats’s
book. The essay also provides a novel interpretation
of Yeats’s poem “Among School Children,”
whose famous final lines suggested a title to Foley:
| |
O body swayed to music, O brightening
glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
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Foley’s unfashionably tragic interpretation
points toward the disillusionment that would overtake
Yeats’s poems in the final years of his life,
undermining the poet if not his poetry: there is
poetry, perhaps the most exquisite poetry, in the
old man’s failure and pain—in the end
little that poetry could do, perhaps because little
in the end that anyone can. And yet out of that
ultimate weakness, what poems came.
Foley
explores e.e. cummings and the “visual poem,”
the assertive multiplicities of Louis Zukofsky,
Allen Ginsberg (the early controversy involving,
and the long shadow cast by, his classic, ejaculatory
vomissement de mots “Howl”),
the graphic art of poet Robert Duncan, the shadowy
career of Weldon Kees, the “unassimilable”
achievement of Kenneth Rexroth (a poet and scholar
with whom Foley shares many characteristics, from
personal charisma to intellectual range to locale),
and an assessment of the career of Fats Waller’s
favorite, long neglected, lyricist, Andy Razaf,
author of such famous popular songs as “Ain’t
Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle
Rose.”
The
latter half of the book contains a series of essays
on “Contemporaries.” The first is a
judicious, fair-minded assessment of poetry slams,
in which the author notes both the hectic, joyful
enthusiasm for poetry that slams represent, indeed
engender, and the sometimes severe literary limitations
they encourage, even impose: that strangely conformist
culture of ‘self-expression’ that one
may notice elsewhere in American culture, where
there are fashions—the hot, the despised,
the passé—in selves and their expression,
as in many other things—even literary criticism.
Other
essays cover, with the warmly lucid intelligence—an
intelligence that enriches insights into ‘serious
literature’ through raids on other domains—that
always seems to be at Foley’s command, poets
as diverse as Adrienne Rich, Glenn Spearman, Diane
di Prima, Francisco X. Alarcon, and Annie Finch,
with two especially penetrating essays on Dana Gioia,
a poet one would at first suspect of being Foley’s
polar opposite—in form, technique, constellation
of themes and obsessions, even in his notion of
the self—conflicted but united even in the
most loving of combat—but with whom Foley
has had a characteristically rich critical dialog
over the years.
Near
the end, almost as a special treat, Foley indulges
in a tantrum. He attacks (to the spirited hurrahs
of many a silent reader) the complacencies of Garrison
Keillor as expressed in his collection Good
Poems, a book that is marred only by a series
of dismissive comments about poets Keillor seems
not to have taken the time to read with much care,
if at all, and so rejects with half-informed mockery—it’s
a little like listening to a usually intelligent
person suddenly “go creationist”: acutely
embarrassing. Foley calls Keillor on it—and
a jolly little donnybrook it is to see.
Still,
it is curious that Foley does not, as he usually
does, examine the other point of view: what, after
all, might be driving Keillor’s rejectionism?
Is it cultural, political, ‘literary’,
merely personal (laziness, a cynical sop thrown
to an dependably unsophisticated audience, an attack
on a cultural elite that doesn’t take him
seriously)? Might it even be that Keillor represents,
if not very sympathetically, a philosophically coherent
point of view: God lives, honesty is not negotiable,
the self is indivuus, even if only so conceived
(as felt and experienced, even when not as cognized:
after all, a walk is merely a controlled fall; that
does not mean nobody is moving!), the self is one
before its maker and carries the burden of his,
and her, responsibility for eternity—a series
of attitudes continuous in American culture from
Cotton Mather through the Great Awakening to William
Jennings Bryant to, heaven help us, Sarah Palin?
Even
in loftier cultural circles, what Keillor says in
Good Poems is similar to what has been
said by such critics and writers as Jonathan Franzen
(about William Gaddis), Christopher Hitchens (on
The Waste Land), and B.R. Myers (in The
Reader’s Manifesto)—there has been
a wave of rejection in some American literary circles
of modernism and postmodernism in literature—of
the literary explorations and advances of the last
century—as well as of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment
(including Romantic) ideologies in culture and politics—partly
in reaction to academic movements in literary criticism
and the ‘difficult’ writing of some
of the most important literature of the twentieth
century, to say nothing of those intellectual movements
on which such political movements as socialism and
communism were founded. This rejection is strangely,
and eerily, like the wholesale rejection of certain
forms of nineteenth century romanticism—what
one might call bourgeois or capitalist romanticism—by
the modernists themselves in the early twentieth
century.
Surely
this phenomenon merits something better than a diatribe—tempting
as it may be, and frankly sympathetic to readers
like myself. Of course, it should not even be surprising:
modernism and its children were themselves built
on a series of rejections, so that they are now
the target of the rejectionists may even show a
certain poetic justice (pun intended).
The
modernists were never meant to be comfortable, and
so we should expect, even at this late date, when
the long arm of cultural lag surely has felt its
reach, a howl from the neocons of culture. That,
say, Eliot can still irritate, or that Marianne
Moore still scandalizes an icon of Middle America,
is good news: there may be more life in them than
anybody in the stacks could have dreamed between
genteel naps.
After
this meeting of snarkiness and brimstone, I turned
with relief to Foley’s celebration of The
Hudson Review, over the last half century one
of the dependable pillars of the American poetic
establishment (such as there is one—though,
what a truly horrible phrase!).
Among
the book’s later essays is a theater review
and a bon-bon: several pages from a notebook, with
little provocative ‘flash’ essays on
such subjects as ‘language’ poetry,
the paradoxes and limitations of honesty as an exclusionary
moral value, the meaning of “love,”
and the perils of creativity. The book winds up
with a short yet penetrating talk that Foley gave
in 2003 at the University of Damascus, in Syria—an
overview of American literature delivered to an
audience for whom American literature is an extremely
exotic beast—and Foley shows why American
literature remains something of an exotic beast
to itself, as this is one of its essential themes—the
opacity of American identity to the ever-disjunctive
American mind:
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. . . “the
instability of American identity”—its
“unsettling”—is an old story,
but it is one which is continually hidden
under the rhetoric of stability and constancy,
a rhetoric which has furnished many a politician
with comforting platitudes about “family
values” and “Americanism.”
The tensions that arise out of genuine difference,
out of what may be in fact utter incompatibility,
are what Americans must simultaneously deny
and deal with on an everyday basis. It
is in fact precisely this perception of incompatibility—of
diversity, history—that American writers
are trying to escape. . . .
If, as is commonly believed, we are a country
of self-determining “individuals,”
then we are necessarily a country of outsiders,
people deeply distrustful of “belonging”
to anything. America may be in this sense
a country of permanent, self-willed exiles—how
many of its writers are precisely that?—and
the existential condition of exile is often
what its literature is about.
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As
little way stations and islands of sweetness in
this very intellectual, yet always considerate,
text, Foley provides a few of his own poems among
the essays. In a kind of double coda to the book,
he ends with his poem “Overture: Chorus”
(performed at the talk in Damascus) and a brief
memorial to Philomene Long, a figure in the literary
scene in Venice, California, which ends with the
most delicate of elegies for someone who seems to
have been a source of great joy for those who knew
her.
The
Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions
shows Jack Foley, once again, to be one of the most
challenging intellects to deal with the issues of
poetry in our day—what after all is poetry
if not the work of the sapient heart, provocative
words, the loving mind?
Christopher Bernard
has published poetry, fiction, essays, plays, film
scenarios, and criticism, as well as music and photography,
in reviews and magazines across the U.S. and in
the U.K. He is the author of a novel, A Spy
in the Ruins, the poetry chapbooks The
Dilettante of Cruelty: Deserts and Gilded
Abattoir: Wreckage from a Journey, and a number
of plays, including A Sonata for the Dead
and My Lady of Cries. He is the founder
and a co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).
Endnotes:
* Foley
sees the disunity of the self—somewhat arbitrarily,
I think—as related to the enormous cultural
displacement caused by the so-called ‘death
of God’, although the two issues are distinct:
it is entirely possible to have unified objects,
selves, etc., without a “God” as it
is to have disunited selves, objects, etc., in a
world in which God is very pointedly alive. One
might even assert plausibly that it was Jesus—or,
before him, that master of the double bind, Yahweh—who
originally divided souls (selves) within: what else
would a morality do that denied as immoral the immediate
reactions of the natural man, from sexuality to
aggression to egotism? One can hear the tearing
of man’s soul the moment he is promised immortality
at the price of crushing out the pleasures and satisfactions
of this life: there is very little more disuniting
than that.
Another
point is that running the two issues together suggests
a hypertrophy of the theological mind rather than
the attenuation I would have expected from the elimination
of its principal subject. But then, many of the
movements of modern literary criticism have their
basis in hermeneutics and the Higher Criticism of
the Bible in the nineteenth century.
** This is doubtful in the semiotic
sense that, if there is no signified for a set of
signifiers, there can be no translation between
signifiers: just as it is possible to translate
“I am hungry” as “J’ai faim”
in French and “Tengo hambre” in Spanish,
because there is a common set of signifieds between
the three languages, so is it possible to translate
the visual marks “I am hungry” with
a spoken version because they share a common set
of signifieds. And so for every medium in which
a set of words (e.g., a poem) finds itself. That
set of signifieds transcends each set of signifiers
because it is a distinct entity—without that,
signifiers would be unintelligible, and signs themselves
would be impossible.
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Mostly Books, May 5, 2010
To
the Hilt
a
review by Dawn-Michelle Baude
The Illuminations, by Arthur Rimbaud,
translated from the French by Donald Revell, Omnidawn,
Richmond, California, 2009, 119 pages, $15.95 paperback.
War Variations, by Amelia Rosselli, translated
from the Italian by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti,
Green Integer 121, Green Integer, Los Angeles, California,
2005, 392 pages, $14.95 paperback.
Let’s compare apples and oranges, or crème
glacée and gelato, Arthur Rimbaud
and Amelia Rosselli. They both have the same initials:
AR. They were both nomads, lost their fathers at
a young age, spoke several languages, had a contentious
relationship to poetry, yielded to self-destructive
tendencies, suffered from chronic disease, and forged
new poetic idioms that largely mystified their peers.
And both poets have a link to the procedures of
Surrealism—Rimbaud lionized as the precocious
hero of the unconscious and Rosselli as the crazy
cousin in the Roman attic.
Of
the two, Rimbaud is far better known in America
where the idea of a young man rising to his poetic
peak and renouncing his art by age twenty finds
fertile soil. Donald Revell’s recent translations
of Rimbaud’s The Illuminations reinvent
the nineteenth-century boy-genius and put him squarely
before us—feisty and fresh, prepared for new
generations of readers. The prose poems collected
in The Illuminations, probably written
between 1870 and 1875, suggest how Rimbaud built
on the work of Baudelaire and point towards the
coming ascendance of twentieth-century poets, from
Max Jacob to Emmanuel Hocquard, and beyond, to fin-du-siècle
writers making their mark. In this sense, Rimbaud’s
centrality to Modernism is, I would think, undisputed.
But
the edgy quality to Rimbaud’s work—the
“breathing hole” in the ceiling, the
“puling in the gutter,” the “wallow
in wounds”—has led to an unfavorable
reassessment of the poet in some literary circles.
If my reading is correct, the thoroughgoing irreverence
of Rimbaud, praised in Revell’s “Afterword,”
repels some readers, particularly in the U.K., but
also in the U.S., too. His literary associations
are partly to blame. Rimbaud is usually grouped
with the French Symbolists, such as Mallarmé
and Verlaine, and also the related groups of the
Decadent Poets and poètes maudits.
These labels have limited literary application in
terms of his work and create false expectations
with regard to his achievement.
Evocative
visual imagery, the calling card of Symbolists,
for example, doesn’t begin to describe the
engine of Rimbaud’s poems. Although the “visual
image” is almost always there in Rimbaud,
it’s not a well-behaved complex of idea, feeling
and awareness. Quite the opposite. To my mind, Rimbaud
pushed the limits of phanatos—in
the Greek sense of the word, meaning “to bring
to light,” “to make visible”—to
an unrepentant edge that has little to do with the
literary conceits or strategies of his peers. Using
that elusive area of consciousness called the “mind’s
eye,” Rimbaud seems to catalogue news of the
psychic frontier, the edge where language and imagination
probe the limits of cognition. Those who read this
boundary-testing as transformative, like Revell
does, find a wealth to admire in Rimbaud’s
staggering capacity for mental scrying.
While
reading The Illuminations, I wondered at
points if Revell’s translations—which
are excellent—had nonetheless filed the edge
just a bit. For example, “Are those wildflowers
falling out of the sky?” from “Phrases,”
is a lovely line, but the “violets”
[the flowers in the original] call to “violent,”
a linkage that is absent in the translation. Similarly,
in “Fairy,” Revell concludes the translation
with “And her eyes and her dancing ever more
excellent than jeweled lightning, than icy weather,
than all the pleasures of this peerless place and
hour” completely omits the false note of the
“décor” in the original and add
the “jewels” when there are no gems
in the original. These examples are less a criticism
than they are recognition that Revell’s word
choices were influenced by the beauty of the resulting
poems in the target language.
Writing
more than half a century later, the Italian poet
Amelia Rosselli navigated an edge familiar to readers
of Rimbaud, although her work faces much greater
difficulties in terms of audience reception and
critical assessment. The Green Integer translation
by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti of Rosselli’s
War Variations, published in 2005, was
long overdue in English where Rosselli is often
unknown outside of Italian studies. Many American
readers of poetry have never heard of Rosselli,
until recently, myself included. The Green Integer
volume was put into my hand in France by a Swedish
artist who purchased the Italian poet’s work
in Stockholm when I was readying my move to Egypt.
The international loopiness of my discovery of Rosselli
seems appropriate to the nomadic poet who was, like
Rimbaud, in an uneasy relationship to the idea of
homeland throughout her life.
Fleeing
from the Nazis, with a British mother and an Italian
father, Rosselli grew up in France with stays in
Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. before returning to
Italy where, in 1996, she jumped to her death from
her low-rise Trestevere apartment at the age of
sixty-six on the anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s
suicide. Judging from the biographic material in
the poems themselves—dissembling flecks of
referential fact—tragedy accompanied Rosselli’s
journey into poetic maturity, beginning with the
martyrdom of her anti-Fascist father and uncle at
the hands of Mussolini’s henchmen when the
poet was just a young girl.
The
war continued one way or another throughout Rosselli’s
life, an epic campaign fought in the arenas of art,
politics, relationships, languages, cultures and
the limits of her own mental faculties. In Pasolini’s
odd forward to Rosselli’s first book (included
in the Green Integer edition), he alludes to agonistic
tensions in “a nationless woman” whose
poetry is “a verdant oasis with the stupefying
and random violence of brute fact at the edge of
its domain.” The ascendant themes in Rosselli’s
work, Pasolini believes, are “Neurosis and
Mystery,” topics he declares too daunting
to broach in a short forward to the poet’s
inaugural publication.
Pasolini’s
patronizing introduction has the disastrous consequences
of foregrounding a crazy-woman narrative at the
expense of Rosselli’s prodigious literary
knowledge, rigorous intellect and exacting poetic
standards—if there wasn’t reason to
sideline her before, there is reason to keep her
at arm’s length ever after. Pasolini does
venture a more specific critical assessment when
he identifies one of the mechanisms in Rosselli’s
poetry as the Freudian slip, in the sense that the
words in her poems approximately substitute for
other words in a chain of semantic displacement,
an observation that seems to me almost quaint.
Critics
like Elizabeth Leake are more generous toward Pasolini,
linking the Freudian “slip” in Rosselli
to the similarly Freud-backed “semantic short
circuits” used by the Surrealists, a move
that shifts focus from confession to language while
preserving the notion of repressed content—a
notion that, in my opinion, is of limited applicability
in a poet whose pursuit of poetic breakthrough had
little to do with understanding her own psychology.
These “short circuits” also fall far
short of describing what is actually going on in
Rosselli’s work.
Consider
the following:
The dense linguistic structures
that pervade the poem are characteristic of much
of Rosselli’s poetry in War Variations—for
the present, we’ll have to table questions
regarding the Italian original and go with the English
version. For that reason, I will side-step the rich
and wonderful prosody in the translated poem, while
drawing attention to the fact that the prosody makes
even more compelling arguments for intent in the
Italian, where alliteration and assonance are often
something to work against rather than for.
Briefly:
the initial word “Like” hurls the first
two lines of the poem and establishes Rosselli’s
preference for morphed-pairings. The parallelism
of the two initial “like” comparisons
in line 1 and 2 transforms into their opposites,
the negative correlative conjunctions, “neither”
and “nor,” in lines 4 and 5 and the
initial modifiers “Timid” and “greedy,”
as well as the two pairs of “I” pronouns,
in lines 8, 9, 10 and 11; the “marriage”
of 2 and 7; the “danube” of 2 and 7;
the “eye” of 3 and 8; the “hand”
of 4 and 10; the “poor” of 4 and the
“poverty” of 6; the “grater”
of l1 and “grated” of 13; the “rhymed
rhymed” of 12; the “love” of 14
and 15; and “kindness” of 1 and 15,
among others. Furthermore, the “swallow”
of line 2 morphs into a “sentinel” in
line 3; the flight of the “sentinel”
in line 3 becomes the “flight” of “stairs”
in line 5; “timid” of line 8 becomes
the “tentative” of line 10; and so on.
These
linguistic patterns reflect patterns in ideas—not
as “slips” or even as “displacements,”
which emphasize breaks at the syllogistic level
of the text, but as continuations. Rosselli’s
not as interested in taking things apart as much
as she is in putting things together in a vast network
of metaphoric logic—the cognitive engine of
phanatos, again. The poem, with its numerous
references (both direct and inferred) to the body/mind
opposition, exemplifies the psychic battle in many
of Rosselli’s poems between real and imagined
experience, including an almost Vedic inquiry into
whether the separation between the two holds any
value at all.
Because
restraint is not a hallmark of Rosselli’s
work, the poems seem at times to approach the spontaneity
inherent in various forms of automatic writing.
It is almost as if she lets go of content at the
same time that the requirements of poetic form rein
her in. Since Rosselli trained extensively in music—as
a young woman, she hesitated between commitments
to music and literature—the observation that
musical strictures seem to tame emotive expression
isn’t surprising.
In
the poem above—untitled, as all the works
in War Variations—Rosselli’s
unrepentant “I” is not far from the
defiant “I” in Arthur Rimbaud’s
Le Bateau ivre and the Lettre du voyant.
Both poets embrace knowledge of the heights
and the depths with equal voracity. They own their
courage and their failures. And both poets privilege
the visual dimension of poetic composition, using
phanatos to push cognition beyond symbolism
to the edge where discovery can be made. And while
both poets can be hooked to the Surrealist camp,
their goals were not programmatic. Like Rimband,
Rosselli’s in it, for better or worse, up
to the hilt. “I wanted: I knew: I believed:
I distinguished: I could.”
Dawn-Michelle Baude’s
recent poetry books include Finally: A Calendar,
Mindmade, and The Flying House from
Parlor Press. She recently guest edited an edition
of the literary journal Van Gogh’s Ear
from French Connection Press.
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Mostly Books, April 14, 2010
Planting
a
review by Richard Silberg
Rope, by Alison Hawthorne Deming,
Penguin Poets, New York, New York, 2009, 98 pages,
$18.00 paperback.
Perhaps what I admire most about Alison Hawthorne
Deming, even above her skill, imagination, and intelligence,
is her focus on the larger, on our miraculous, suffering
human and creaturely world. She sees herself always
in proportion to the whole, wants her writing to
be of use. In the sixth section of “Definition
of Disaster” a seven-page exploration of Katrina,
she says:
Then, immediately
following that passage of self-irony, seeing herself
fiddle while New Orleans drowns, she says, in the
poem’s seventh section:
The whole poem
cuts to the marrow of that much written about disaster,
but its perceptions, startling angles, memorable
phrasings are all keyed on her relentless anti-grandiloquence,
need for mindful proportion.
But
that doesn’t make her either spare or single-pointed.
Certainly the fate of our planet is a pedal point
in the book, as in the title poem:
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The man
gathers rope with his hands,
both the rope and the hands
worn from use. The rope from hauling
up traps and trawl lines, the hands
from banging into rocks, rusted nails,
fish knives, winch gears, and bark.
The rope starts to pull apart fiber by fiber
like the glacial ice, and the man wishes
he could find a way to bind it
back together the way a cook binds
syrup or sauce with corn starch.
The rope lies in the cellar for years,
coiled, stinking of the sea and the fish
that once lived in the sea and the sweat
of the man who wishes he could save one
strand of the world from unraveling.
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Rather than
single-pointed, though, her points whirl in imaginative
abundance like fireworks. “Definition of Disaster”
is only one of several long sequence poems that
begin somewhere and end unpredictably elsewhere
having traversed astonishing swathes of detail and
idea. The first such poem in the book, as an excellent
example, is “Salt.” It begins in a hotel
room in Prague, the speaker waking from an afternoon
nap to see an embassy reception out her window where
a brass band dressed in “baby blue faux military
uniforms” lounges about, pulling beers from
a keg and taking turns peeing behind a screen of
linden trees. It then moves—I’m of course
being selective—through the sufferings of
the poor, picnic scenes, kestrels and cuttlefish
praising and loving their respective prey, salts
in the human body genetically remembering the ancient
seas’ salt content as the medium of their
evolutionary birth while the actual seas have since
multiplied their salt content by a factor of four,
the God of Abraham having made a “…religion
of salt / because it
could protect / things from spoiling,” and
it ends like this:
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Romans
paid their soldiers
in salt (their salary)
so valued were its assets.
Salt and gunpowder the
planks of civilization
not gold and books.
A city of five hundred people
needed one ton per year—
trains one-thousand-camels
long crossing the Sahara.
And now at the sad, mad
end of wealth (…let them have
dominion over the fish
of the sea)—fish gone, I read
and hold up as tithe
to the church of science-made-art
the story of the man who
swam through salt,
emerged on land to crawl
his way upright, then sat
so still in a field at wood’s edge
that the wild deer came
and licked the salt from his skin.
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In
addition to these long, free-arcing poems—the
other three are “The Andrews Forest Quintet,”
the prose poem sequence titled “Works and
Days” after Hesiod, and “The Flight,”
longest poem in the book and the final poem, in
a six-line stanza form descending stepwise across
the page—Deming moves in other poetic directions
as well. She has a series of seven poems on mythic
themes grouped in a series in the middle of the
book, most of which are persona poems. “Persephone
Speaks” begins, “My father was the Big
Guy / Generator / Energy Spill / My mother was Cereal
/ Corn / Matter Sink”; then, after she is
abducted by Hades, King of the Underworld, the poem
goes on:
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Oh beautiful
sin of falling
Under the rhythm of his need
And finding I could answer
Stroke for stroke
Be bad and claim my loving
And find the pleasure good
How could I have known
The hunger would persist
Once I had left
My mother’s threshing floor
My father’s distant light
Pulled into the underworld
I forgot what lay above
The soil drying seedless
Unable to revive
Din of lamentation
Not even the gods could abide
My husband too is a god
He struts like a jaguar
His sex is an epic poem
He loves the dead
Because they tell no lies
And yield themselves
Completely to the future
When he fed me the pomegranate
That would keep me
Coming to his dark bed
I did say thank you
My goodness married
To the limbo night inside
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I love particularly
the compressed power of those last two lines. While
the Persephone story is the Greek version of the
basic agricultural myth, I feel Deming kicking off
the traces there, moving to the egocentric side
and just getting her rocks off on the pleasures
of word and imagination.
Still,
in the larger run of contemporary poetry, among
the ironists, the confessors, the brayers and tooters
of horns, she is certainly one of the least self-involved,
choosing to turn her brilliance outward, to light
up the big picture. Two of the poems in this book
are poems about poetry. Here’s how “The
Place of Poetry” ends:
Richard Silberg is associate editor of
Poetry Flash. His most recent book of poems
is Deconstruction of the Blues.
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Mostly Books, March 7, 2010
The
Enemies of
Glass
a
review by Susan
Kelly-DeWitt
Five Prayers of
Apples, by Margaret Hoehn,
inSPIREd Poetry Series, Spire
Press, 532 LaGuardia Place, Suite
298, New York, NY 10122, 2008, 23
pages, $8.00,
www.spirepress.org.
For nearly a decade Margaret
Hoehn has been quietly
accumulating a notable list of
awards and publications. Five
Prayers of Apples, part of
the inSPIRed Poetry Series (Spire
Press, New York) is the latest of
several prize-winning chapbooks.
Her full-length collection
The Trajectory of
Sunflowers won the 2002
Readers’ Choice Award from
Backwaters Press, and in 2009 a
volume of her collected work,
Trajectories, was
published by The Legal Studies
Forum.
Hoehn
practiced law for many years
before retiring to focus on her
family and her writing. Her
training as a lawyer informs her
poetry, often through subtle
forms of argument, without
sacrificing the mystery we love
from good poetry.
Here
is a short prose poem from the
collection:
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View from the
Window
We say wish or
kiss or
ocean. Words
like these can
build a window in an
unlit room. Each
calendar
square, a chance to lean
out on the new sill of
dawn.
A woman pulls back her
drapes. It is only the
view
of her garden that keeps
her from drifting away.
A
stone, or a wind saws
through the night,
rattling
the panes. These are
enemies of glass. Say
kiss, say
wish. When a
window shatters, so much
is broken.
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I especially like how cleverly
the square of the calendar page
becomes the sill of a window the
woman leans out of—how it
is the words—wish,
kiss, ocean—that have
built the window.
The
room is “unlit” but
every day provides another chance
to start fresh, a new idea, a
moment of epiphany. The view that
keeps her from “drifting
away” is a garden, with all
its associative life and death
forces. Which is why “When
a window shatters so much is
broken.”
The
poems argue for a web of
comradeship in nature and in life—a
theme announced by the first poem
of the book, “What Softly
Calls Back”; the first
stanza explains that “damaged
sagebrush releases compounds to
which other plants respond.”
The poem then extends this
discovery:
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How the world reaches out
to comfort itself.
even the parts we thought
were mute are more poem
than we could have imagined:
the reeds leaning against each
other in wind; the redwood
sheltering trillium and fern;
the sage calling its splintered
sorrow into the star-shocked
night.…
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Hoehn
is a master of description; her poems see the world
through a blend of both naturalist’s and painter’s
eye: “…one must drown / in the sadness
and beauty of this world / in order to live…”
she tells us. (“Filling with Sky”)
There
is a quiet sadness to this little book; much precariousness
also. Things have edges, undersides, enemies, but
the poems are steadfast in their resolve to move
forward despite the dangers or the possible consequences—they
insist on pursuing a life-affirming vision—like
the little girl who puts two canned peach halves
together (which her mother has rummaged from discount
bins), “As if by will alone, [she]
could make this exquisite, / fractured world almost
whole.” (“Fragments”)
The
poems here understand the world can never be completely
whole, but they keep on trying to add something
humane to the mix.
I
guess what I like about Hoehn’s new book (and
about her work in general) is an urgency that communicates
itself—the poems are not just words on a page
meant to impress or celebritize poem or poet.
Sometimes
I have asked poetry students to think of five books
of poetry they would take with them if they were
exiled to a desert island. Hoehn’s is the
kind of book I myself might choose.
There
is much ‘between-ness’ here, many different
kinds of views, topographies, geographies, distances
(between people); there is loss, damage and brokenness,
but:
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 28,
2010
Calling
All Muses
a
review by Lucille
Lang Day
The Sister from
Below: When the Muse Gets Her
Way, a memoir with poems, by
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Fisher King
Press, Carmel, California, 2009,
248 pages, $25.00 paperback,
www.fisherkingpress.com.
The Sister from Below: When
the Muse Gets Her Way, by
poet and Jungian analyst Naomi
Ruth Lowinsky, is a multi-faceted
book. First, it is a book about
becoming a poet, about summoning
one’s muses. But it is much
more than that: it’s also a
memoir and family story, a book
about coming to terms with the
events and experiences of one’s
life. Most broadly, it’s a
book about self-realization,
finding one’s deepest self,
and discovering the connections
between one’s life and the
timeless realm of myths. For
Lowinsky, this quest includes
exploration of and learning to
embody a feminist spirituality.
Finally, for fans (and
prospective fans!) of Lowinsky’s
poetry, The Sister from
Below discusses many of the
poems from her two collections,
red clay is talking and
crimes of the dreamer,
and her chapbook, a
maze, and thus serves as a
guide to her poems and their
genesis.
The
Sister is Lowinsky’s muse
in her many guises. She can take
the form of actual people, living
or dead, mythical figures, or
individuals drawn wholly from
Lowinsky’s imagination: an
Italian nurse who tended Lowinsky
in early childhood, Lowinsky’s
grandmother who died in the
Holocaust, Sappho, Eurydice, Old
Mother India, the biblical Naomi,
and many others. The muse can
even appear as a male figure,
such as one of Lowinsky’s
early lovers or the mysterious
Shaman of the Stones.
Lowinsky’s
muses speak through her, and she
speaks to them. In “a
grandmother speaks from the other
side,” from red clay is
talking, her
grandmother/muse says:
|
|
don’t leave me
out
you don’t know how
often
I’ve touched
you
since I first felt you
leap
fish out of the blue
in the new world
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In another poem, “muse,”
from a maze, Lowinsky
speaks to this grandmother:
Ultimately, who or what is the
muse? Lowinsky suggests that the
muse could be the soul, the Self
as in Jungian psychology,
inspiration, a lover, a god or
goddess, an intermediary between
worlds, or all of the above.
Wisely, she does not try to pin
the muse down to a single
definition or explanation, but
instead focuses on conveying her
own experiences in which the muse
“lifts the veil on other realities.”
Lowinsky
was the first child born in
America to a Jewish family that
fled the Holocaust in Europe.
Many of her father’s
relatives, including his parents,
did not survive. Thus, Lowinsky
grew up surrounded by great hope,
expectation, sorrow, and fear.
Creativity also abounded around
her: her father was a brilliant
professor of music, her maternal
grandmother a painter. Lowinsky
married young, bore two children,
and traveled to India with her
husband, a Peace Corps physician.
There, they adopted a ten-month
old Indian girl who had been
abandoned by her impoverished
mother, and Lowinsky learned
about the gods, goddesses, and
sacred practices of Hinduism.
Back in the U.S., Lowinsky’s
marriage unraveled, and
ultimately, with struggle and
self-questioning, she developed
her identity as a poet and
Jungian. This is a bare-bones
outline of the rich family and
personal story that Lowinsky
tells in The Sister from
Below, and which informs her
poetry.
“Elephant
Blessing,” a poem from
red clay is talking that
recounts events from a trip back
to India with her daughter
Shanti, now an adult, concludes
ecstatically:
This poem illustrates how, for
Lowinsky, the sacred becomes
feminine and erotic. Sex, orgasm,
birth, motherhood, and milk are
all manifestations of the divine.
In a chapter entitled “The
Book of Ruth: Naomi’s
Version,” Ruth and Naomi
bring the Goddess back to
Judaism, and we learn that in the
poem “in the real story,”
from crimes of the
dreamer, the “Ur
Naomi” is speaking to
the poet:
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you are a dancing
girl
a devadesi from the
temple at Jaipur
or maybe it is Ur
the sacred fire’s
been lit
I’ve taught you
how
to catch your own sweet
pulse—
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Who
should read The Sister from
Below? Poets, feminists,
Jungians, seekers, artists of all
kinds, people interested in
alternative spirituality or
engaged in the struggle to weave
the threads of their own lives
into a beautiful, coherent whole.
It’s a unique and uplifting
journey, an inspiring read.
Lucille Lang Day’s
new book of poetry is The Curvature of Blue.
She is the founder and director of Scarlet Tanager
Books, which published two poetry books by Naomi
Lowinsky mentioned in this review, red clay
is talking and crimes of the dreamer.
Lucille Lang Day lives in Oakland, California.
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