tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11828730834816166072024-03-13T12:00:38.640-07:00Galatea Resurrects #19 (A Poetry Engagement)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger61125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-56937569612127782522012-12-17T18:02:00.000-08:002012-12-21T18:39:13.317-08:00Issue No. 19 TABLE OF CONTENTS <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-outline-level: 3;">
<i><span style="color: #474b4e; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">[N.B. You can scroll down on blog or click on highlighted titles or names to go directly to the referenced article.]</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br /><strong>EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION</strong></span><span style="color: #474b4e; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="color: black; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/editors-introduction.html">Eileen Tabios</a></strong></span><br /><br /><br /><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">NEW REVIEWS</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">John Herbert Cunningham </span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/four-books-by-clarice-lispector.html"><strong>Four Books <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">by Clarice Lispector: NEAR TO THE WILD HEART <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">(Perto de selvage),</i> translated by Alison Entrekin; THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">(A Paixăo segundo G.H.),</i> translated by Idra Novey; AQUA VIVA <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">(Áqua Viva),</i> translated by Stefan Tobler; A BREATH OF LIFE<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> (Um sopro de vida; pulsações), </i>translated by Johnny Lorenz</span></strong></a></span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><o:p></o:p></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
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Ed Zahniser reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/william-bronk-bursts-of-light-collected.html">WILLIAM BRONK: BURSTS OF LIGHT THE COLLECTED LATER POEMS</a></strong>, edited by David Clippinger<o:p></o:p></span>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Eileen Tabios engages <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-collected-poems-of-lucille-clifton.html">THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LUCILLE CLIFTON 1965-2010</a></strong><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">,</i> edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Sunnylynn Thibodeaux reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/fault-tree-by-kathryn-l-pringle.html">FAULT TREE</a></strong> by kathryn l. pringle<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Judith Goldman reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/fault-tree-by-kathryn-l-pringle_13.html">FAULT TREE</a></strong> by kathryn l. pringle<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Micah Cavaleri reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/still-of-earth-as-ark-which-does-not.html">STILL: OF THE EARTH AS THE ARK WHICH DOES NOT MOVE</a></strong></span></em><em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> </span></em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">by Matthew Cooperman <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Guillermo Parra reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/uncertain-time-by-richard-caddel.html">UNCERTAIN TIME</a></strong><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>by<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Richard Caddel, with an introduction by Aaron Tieger <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Jeff Harrison engages <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/letters-to-madeleine-tender-as-memory.html">LETTERS TO MADELEINE: TENDER AS MEMORY</a></strong> by <strong><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Guillaume Apollinaire, edited by Lawrence Campa, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith</span></strong><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Bill Scalia reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/maybe-painter-by-christina-fisher.html">MAYBE A PAINTER</a></strong> by Christina Fisher<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Jean Vengua reviews <em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/ring-of-bone-lew-welch-collected-poems.html">RING OF BONE: LEW WELCH COLLECTED POEMS</a></strong></span></em>, edited by Donald Allen<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Burt Kimmelman reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/divine-madness-by-paul-pines.html">DIVINE MADNESS</a></strong> by Paul Pines<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Lucy Biederman reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/re-by-kristi-maxwell.html">RE-</a></strong> by Kristi Maxwell<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Eileen Tabios engages <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/may-apple-deep-by-michael-sikkema.html">MAY APPLE DEEP</a></strong> by Michael Sikkema<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">jim mccrary reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/captain-poetrys-sucker-punch-by-kenneth.html">CAPTAIN POETRY’S SUCKER PUNCH: A GUIDE TO THE HOMERIC PUNKHOLE, 1980-2012</a></strong> by Kenneth Warren<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Lucy Biederman reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/negro-league-baseball-by-harmony-holiday.html">NEGRO LEAGUE BASEBALL</a></strong> by Harmony Holiday <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Garrett J. Brown reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/map-of-hydrogen-world-by-steve-halle.html">MAP OF THE HYDROGEN WORLD</a></strong> by Steve Halle<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Jaime Townsend reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/hart-island-by-stacy-szymaszek.html">HART ISLAND</a></strong> by Stacy Szymaszek <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Tom Hibbard reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/four-paintings-by-guy-beining.html">FOUR PAINTINGS</a></strong> <strong><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">by Guy Beining</span></strong><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Bill Scalia reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/body-of-water-by-erin-m-bertram.html">BODY OF WATER</a></strong> by Erin M. Bertram<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Eileen Tabios engages <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/angles-of-incidents-by-jon-curley.html">ANGLES OF INCIDENTS</a></strong> by Jon Curley<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Tom Beckett reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/deck-of-deeds-by-rodrigo-toscano.html">DECK OF DEEDS</a></strong> by Rodrigo Toscano<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Allen Strous reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/it-can-be-solved-by-walking-by-jennifer.html">IT CAN BE SOLVED BY WALKING</a></strong> by Jennifer Wallace<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Patrick James Dunagan reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/beyond-chameleons-skill-by-darius-cooper.html">BEYOND THE CHAMELEON’S SKILL</a></strong> by Darius Cooper<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Eileen Tabios engages <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/bending-at-elbow-by-matyei-yankelevich.html">BENDING AT THE ELBOW</a></strong> <strong><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">by Matyei Yankelevich</span></strong><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Jeannine Hall Gailey reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/every-dress-decision-by-elizabeth-austen.html">EVERY DRESS A DECISION</a></strong> <strong><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">by Elizabeth Austen</span></strong><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Edric Mesmer reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/publications-editedby-brian-ang-rae.html">publications by, or edited by, BRIAN ANG, RAE ARMANTROUT, G.N. GABBARD, YVONNE REDDICK, BUCKY FLEUR, ROBERT DUNCAN, rob mclennan, VINCENT CERVONE, JOHN CUTTITO, PAIGE MELIN, ALBERT GLOVER, JOHN C. CLARKE, and j/j hastain<o:p></o:p></a></strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Bill Scalia reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/absolute-elsewhere-by-james-davies-and.html">ABSOLUTE ELSEWHERE</a></strong> by James Davies and Simon Taylor<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Gayle Romasanta reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/for-city-that-nearly-broke-me-by.html">FOR THE CITY THAT NEARLY BROKE ME</a></strong> by Barbara Jane Reyes<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Bill Scalia reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-silver-book-by-jen-bervin.html">THE SILVER BOOK</a></strong> by Jen Bervin<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Eileen Tabios engages <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/common-time-by-chris-pusateri.html">COMMON TIME</a></strong> by Chris Pusateri<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Tom Beckett reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/portrait-and-dream-new-and-selected.html">PORTRAIT AND DREAM: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS</a></strong> by Bill Berkson <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Bill Scalia reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/rust-or-go-missing-by-lily-brown.html">RUST OR GO MISSING</a></strong> by Lily Brown<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Eileen Tabios engages <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/ardor-poems-of-life-by-janine-canan.html">ARDOR: POEMS OF LIFE</a></strong> by Janine Canan<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Henry W. Leung reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/phyla-of-joy-by-karen-hwei-lee.html">PHYLA OF JOY</a></strong> by Karen An-hwei Lee<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Neil Leadbeater reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/sleeping-with-you-and-other-night-time.html">SLEEPING WITH YOU AND OTHER NIGHT-TIME ADVENTURES</a></strong> <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">by Geoff Stevens</span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Neil Leadbeater reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/islands-in-blood-by-geoff-stevens.html">ISLANDS IN THE BLOOD</a></strong><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> </span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">by Geoff Stevens</span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Mirna Perrin-Louis reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-poem-from-feeling-is-actual-by-paolo.html">“Heart as Arena” from THE FEELING IS ACTUAL</a></strong> by Paolo Javier<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Eileen Tabios engages <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/cloudfang-cakedirt-by-daniela-olszewska.html">CLOUDFANG :: CAKEDIRT</a></strong> by Daniela Olszewska<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">John Bloomberg-Rissman engages <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/ban-by-bhanu-kapil.html">BAN</a></strong> by Bhanu Kapil<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Jon Curley reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/uselysses-by-noel-black.html">USELYSSES</a></strong> by Noel Black<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Nicholas T. Spatafora reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-shepherds-elegy-by-john-c-goodman.html">THE SHEPHERD’S ELEGY</a></strong> by John C. Goodman<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Patrick James Dunagan reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/on-planet-without-visa-selected-poems.html">ON THE PLANET WITHOUT VISA: SELECTED POEMS AND OTHER WRITINGS AD <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">1960-2012</span></a></strong> <strong><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">by Sotére Torregian</span></strong><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">rob mclennan reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/as-long-as-trees-last-by-hoa-nguyen.html">AS LONG AS TREES LAST</a></strong> </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-ansi-language: EN;">by Hoa Nguyen </span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Neil Leadbeater reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-partial-view-toward-nazareth-by.html">A PARTIAL VIEW TOWARD NAZARETH</a></strong> <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">by Kathryn Rantala</span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">rob mclennan reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/thunderbird-by-dorothea-lasky.html">THUNDERBIRD</a></strong> by Dorothea Lasky<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Neil Leadbeater reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-white-calf-kicks-by-deborah-slicer.html">THE WHITE CALF KICKS</a></strong><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> </span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">by Deborah Slicer</span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Jeffery Beam r<em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">eviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/approximating-diapason-by-jj-hastain.html">APPROXIMATING DIAPASON</a></strong> <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">by j/j hastain and tod thilleman</span></span></em><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Eileen Tabios engages <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/cutting-time-with-knife-by-michael-leong.html">CUTTING TIME WITH A KNIFE</a></strong> by Michael Leong<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">NEW REVIEWS VIZ “RANDOM DIPTYCH”<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;">Patrick James Dunagan reviews, viz “Random Diptych,” <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/publications-by-shirlette-ammons.html">MATCHING SKIN by Shirlette Ammons, A COINCIDENCE OF WANTS by Michelle Detorie, THRONE by Michael Cross and MAJAKOVSKIJ EN TRAGEDY by Johannes Göransson<o:p></o:p></a></strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;">Genevieve Kaplan reviews, viz “Random Diptych” <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/earthquake-came-to-harlem-by-jackie.html">EARTHQUAKE CAME TO HARLEM by Jackie Sheeler and GLASS IS REALLY A LIQUID by Bruce Covey<o:p></o:p></a></strong></span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Lucy Biederman engages, viz “Random Diptych,” <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/partyknife-by-dan-mager-and-autopsy.html">PARTYKNIFE by Dan Magers and AUTOPSY TURVY by Thomas Fink & Maya Diablo Mason<o:p></o:p></a></strong></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">ESSAYS<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/essay-remembering-paul-blackburn-by-jim.html">“Remembering Paul Blackburn”</a></strong> by jim mccrary<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/essay-on-visual-writing-by-tom-hibbard.html">“VISUAL WRITING: <o:p></o:p></a></strong></span><br />
<strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/essay-on-visual-writing-by-tom-hibbard.html"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">LANGUAGE AND EXISTENCE </span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></a></strong><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/essay-on-visual-writing-by-tom-hibbard.html">THE IMAGE OF MATTER”</a></strong></span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"> by Tom Hibbard<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"><strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/essay-engaging-my-trans-by-jj-hastain.html">“Engaging My Trans”</a></strong> by j/j hastain<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">FEATURED POET<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/featured-poet-micah-cavaleri.html">Micah Cavaleri</a></strong></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-critic-writes-poems.html">Genevieve Kaplan<o:p></o:p></a></strong></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;">Edric Mesmer and Matthew Hall review <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/11/publications-byedited-by-megan-kaminski.html">DESIRING MAP by Megan Kaminski, FLASH BANG by James Cummins, GLOSS TO CARRIERS by Ian Heames, HGFED.JANVr; SOME STARSs by Jo Cook, THE KATECHON: LINES 101-200 by Michael Cross, PEACHES AND BATS, Issue 9, Spring 2012<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>edited by Sam Lohmann, THE RELATIONAL ELATIONS of ORPHANED ALGEBRA by Eileen R. Tabios & j/j hastain, SORRY YOU’RE OCCUPIED: SPONTANEOUS ORDER, edited by James Louden, WHEREIN? HE ASKS OF MEMORY by Jeremy Balius, WORDS ON EDGE by Michael Leong</a></strong> </span><span style="color: #474b4e; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;">John Olson reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/11/where-shadows-will-selected-poems-1988.html">WHERE SHADOWS WILL: SELECTED POEMS 1988-2008</a></strong> by Norma Cole</span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">BACK COVER</span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #474b4e; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">A POETICS LESSON: <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-importance-of-that-close-up.html"><span id="goog_1645168278"></span>THE IMPORTANCE OF THAT CLOSE-UP!<span id="goog_1645168279"></span><o:p></o:p></a></strong></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-71071436075635759572012-12-17T18:01:00.000-08:002012-12-21T08:43:23.191-08:00EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-outline-level: 3;">
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">This issue is dedicated to <strong><a href="http://meritagepress.blogspot.com/2012/09/dawac-and-other-memoir-narratives-by.html">Beatriz Tilan Tabios</a></strong> (1930-2012) who was ever-supportive of my (often fanciful and/or idealistic) ideas, thus occasionally <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection7.blogspot.com/2007/08/bridgeable-shores-selected-poems-1969.html">reviewing for Galatea Resurrects</a></strong>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><em>R.I.P., Mom…<o:p></o:p></em></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Thanks as ever to <i>GR</i>'s numerous, generous volunteer staff of reviewers. In addition to some wonderful feature articles, we have <b>68 NEW POETRY REVIEWS </b>this issue! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Poetry has enhanced my love of lists so here are <i>GR</i>'s latest poetry-lovin' stats! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br />Issue 1: 27 new reviews <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 2: 39 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice by different reviewers)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 3: 49 new reviews (two projects were each reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 4: 61 new reviews (one project was reviewed thrice, and three projects were each reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 5: 56 new reviews (four projects were each reviewed twice) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 6: 56 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 7: 51 new reviews <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 8: 64 new reviews (3 projects were each reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 9: 65 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 10: 68 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 1 project was reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 11: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 12: 87 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 13: 55 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 14: 64 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 15: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 4 projects were reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 16: 73 new reviews (2 projects were reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 17: 108 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 18: 104 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 19: 68 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Some Thoughts For Future Issues:</span></u><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> While the core of <em>Galatea Resurrects</em> is likely to remain poetry book reviews, GR’s vision is not so much book reviews but offering new ways and opportunities to engage with poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So please consider this a reminder that you need not write a book review to be published in GR. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, you can do a close reading of a single poem from a poetry book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You might even discuss a poetry reading rather than a poetry publication.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Or review a visual art exhibition, videos, etc. that has some link(s) to poetry. You might even round up a pal or several pals to discuss a poem or book or other poetry project. </span>In this issue, we—rather, John Bloomberg-Rissman—even review a manuscript-in-progress, <em>BAN</em> by Bhanu Kapil, since the in-progress manuscript is publicly available (in this case, through the author’s blog). And Tom Hibbard engages with four paintings by a poet—Guy Beining—because GR is open to "reviewing" any output in any genre by a poet. So please feel free to think of different ways with which one might engage in poetry!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">*****</span><br />
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As of Issue No. 19, we are pleased to report that <i>GR </i>has provided 1,201 new reviews of publications and other poetry projects and 89 reprinted reviews (to bring online reviews previously available only viz print or first published in now-defunct online sites). With this issue, we increased our coverage of poetry publishers by 23 to 460 publishers in 17 countries. This is important as I feel that much of the ground-breaking poetry work is being published by independent and/or relatively small presses who (by the nature of their work) are not always as well-known as they deserve to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
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I continue to encourage authors/publishers to send in your projects for potential review—note that because we believe in Poetry's immortality, <i>GR</i> does not limit reviews to just "recent" poetry publications. And, obviously, people are following up with your submissions! Information for submissions and available review copies <a href="http://grarchives.blogspot.com/"><b><span style="color: windowtext;">HERE</span></b></a>. Future reviewers also should note that the next review submission deadline is April 12, 2013.<br />
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Of reviewed publications, the following were generated from review copies sent to <i>GR</i>:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 9: 42 out of 65 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 10: 46 out of 68 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 11: 46 out of 72 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 12: 35 out of 87 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 13: 38 out of 55 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 14: 40 out of 64 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 15: 43 out of 72 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 16: 49 out of 73 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 17: 73 out of 108 new reviews<br />Issue 18: 84 out of 104 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Issue 19: 41 out of 68 new reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br />*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">This issue contains a special feature I’m calling</span></em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> “Random Diptych.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For this section,<em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> three poet-critics accepted my invitation to review two books together, with such books chosen at random from</span></em> GR’s <em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">shelves of review copies.</span></em> “Random Diptych” <em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">presents a special challenge as, in addition to reviewing the individual book, the review also must read each book in the company of the other. Thanks to Patrick James Dunagan (who, as it turned out, wrote more than a diptych’s worth as the second publication incorporates three different poetry collections), Genevieve Kaplan and Lucy Biederman for taking on the challenge!</span></em><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">As I've said before, your Editor is <strong><a href="http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com/">blind</a></strong>, so if there are typos/errors in the issue, just email Moi at <a href="mailto:GalateaTEN@aol.com"><b><span style="color: windowtext;">GalateaTEN@aol.com</span></b></a> or put in the comments sections and I will swiftly correct said mistakes (since such is allowed by Blogger).<br /><br /><br />*****<br /><br />All of us at Galatea hope you enjoy the issue!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Happy Holidays!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">With much love, poetry, vino and fur, <br /><br />Eileen Tabios<br />St. Helena, CA<br />Dec. 17, 2012<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-352128545544612002012-12-13T23:56:00.000-08:002012-12-17T17:59:09.453-08:00FOUR BOOKS by CLARICE LISPECTOR<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">The following books by Clarice Lispector:</span></div>
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<strong><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Near to the Wild Heart (Perto de selvage),</span></i><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";"> translated by Alison Entrekin</span></strong></div>
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<strong><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixăo segundo G.H.),</span></i><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";"> translated by Idra Novey<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"></i></span></strong></div>
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<strong><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Aqua Viva (Áqua Viva),</span></i><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";"> translated by Stefan Tobler<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"></i></span></strong></div>
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<strong><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">A Breath of Life (Um sopro de vida; pulsações), </span></i><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">translated by Johnny Lorenz</span></strong></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">(All published by New Directions, New York, 2012)</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Daughter of a Jewish family who fled Europe following the First World War, Clarice Lispector was initially raised in northeastern Brazil. Her mother having died when she was nine, the family moved to Rio de Janeiro where she began attending law school while earning money as a journalist. Her first novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Perto de selvage</i> took Brazil by storm – the interior monologue revolutionary for Brazil. She spent time in Europe and the United States before returning to Brazil in 1959 where she wrote one of her masterpieces <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Paixăo segundo G.H. </i>Thanks to New Directions, these novels are again before the reading public.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">In his introduction to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Near to the Wild Heart</i>, Benjamin Moser quotes the response of several unnamed Brazilian critics to this seminal work, such as that Lispector had “shifted the center of gravity around which the Brazilian novel had been revolving for about twenty years.” Moser goes on to state:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">This was because the entire question of Brazil, that ‘certain instinct of nationality’ Machado de Assis considered to be the heart of Brazilian literature, is absent from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Near to the Wild Heart</i>. It was that its language did not sound Brazilian. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">He then goes on to describe the basis of this new language:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">It is instead connected to the sacred realms of sexuality and creation. A word does not describe a pre-existing thing but actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> that thing, or a word that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">creates</i> the thing it describes; the search for the mystic word, the ‘word that has its own light’, is the search of a lifetime. That search was an urgent preoccupation of centuries of Jewish mystics. Just as God, in Clarice’s writing is utterly devoid of any moral meaning, so does language signify nothing beyond what it expresses: ‘the symbol of the thing in the thing itself.’</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Near to the Wild Heart</span></i><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";"> opens with the protagonist, Joana, a young child living with her mother and father. Lispector captures this time of life splendidly in the following interior monologue::</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">She went off making a little braid in her long, straight hair. Never never never yes yes, she sang quietly. She had recently learned to braid. She went over to the little table where the books were, played with them by looking at them from a distance. Housewife husband children, green for the man, white for the woman, scarlet could be a son or a daughter. Was “never” a man or a woman? Why wasn’t “never” a son or a daughter? What about “yes”?(7)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First the mother, then the father dies young leaving Joana an orphan who goes to live with her aunt and uncle. Joana refuses to obey her aunt leading to this altercation between aunt and uncle:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">“It’s different! It’s different!” exploded the aunt victoriously. “Amanda, even if she were a thief, is human! But that girl...There isn’t anyone to feel sorry for in this case, Alberto. I’m the one who’s the victim...Even when Joana isn’t in the house, I feel on edge. It sounds crazy, but it’s as if she were watching me...reading my thoughts...She’s a viper. She’s a cold viper. Alberto, there’s no love or gratitude in her.(43)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Eventually, Joana marries Otávio, her childhood sweetheart, which leads to divorce when Joana discovers that Otávio has fathered a child with Lydia. All of this would be rather mundane if not for the fact that Lispector is the author. The story occupies a realm of thought that few writers have been able to approach. All writers have experienced the exaltation when their bodies disappear only to become conduits to their soul, when the words flow without impediment, almost unconsciously, onto the page. Generally, such moments are short lived.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lispector is able to sustain them and summon them at will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here is an example from early in the novel:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Things that exist, others that just are...She surprised herself with the new, unexpected thought, which would live from then on like flowers on the grave. Which would live, which would live, other thoughts would be born and live and she herself was more alive. Happiness pierced her heart, ferocious, lit her body. She squeezed the glass between her fingers, drank water with her eyes closed as if it was wine, bloody and glorious wine, the blood of God.(54)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">These lines flow with a kinetic energy lifting Joana above her circumstances until she herself becomes exalted taking the place of that god whose blood she drank as this passage reveals:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was detached from things, from her own things, created by herself and alive. She could be left in the desert, in the solitude of the glaciers, any place on Earth and she would still have the same white, fallen hands, the same almost serene disconnectedness.(169)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">This spiritual energy spills in a different and unique way into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Passion according to G.H.</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">G.H., the name by which we come to know the protagonist, defines herself as a three-legged person: “The idea I had of what a person is came from my third leg, the one that pinned me to the ground.”(4) This third leg is never defined although a good guess would be that it is fear: “In this new cowardice of mine – cowardice is the newest thing to happen to me, it’s my greatest adventure, this cowardice of mine is a field so wide that only the great courage leads me to accept it – in my new cowardice, which is like waking one morning in a foreigner’s house, I don’t know if I’ll have the courage just to go.”(4) The reader should note the development in the language Lispector uses between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Near the Wild Heart</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Passion according to G.H.</i> No longer is this simple internal monologue, no longer stream of consciousness. It has become directed.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">We encounter G.H. one morning jaded by her wealth into a melancholic lethargy. She decides to go into the maid’s room to organize. When she enters, she discovers outlines of figures on the wall. While cleaning and organizing, she opens an armoire. Inside is a cockroach. The cucaracha begins crawling toward the opening of the armoire and G.H. slams the door on it. However, it has gotten half way out so that the head protrudes from the door while the body is crushed. This is the essence of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Passion</i>. G.H. becomes trapped in the room and spends the next one hundred and fifty pages staring at the beast and contemplating her fate in a fit of ecstasy equivalent to Saint Augustine’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Confessions</i> or the contemplation of Meister Eckhart or, on a more secular plane, the Marquis de Sade. Lispector carefully controls this ecstasy as it gathers momentum the further into the novel one goes. Here is the scene where G.H. is getting ready to organize:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">A step before climax, a step before revolution, a step before what’s called love. A<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>step before my life – which, due to a kind of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>reverse magnetism, I hadn’t transformed into life; and also out of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>desire for order. There’s a bad taste to the disorder of living.(20)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Here an encounter with the cockroach:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Meeting the face I had put inside the opening, right near my eyes, in the half-darkness, the fat cockroach had moved. My cry was so muffled that only the contrasting silence let me know I hadn’t screamed. The scream had stayed beating in my chest.(39)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">She begins to transform the roach:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Looking at it, I was seeing the vastness of the desert of Libya, in the region of Elschele. The roach that had reached that spot millennia before me, and also reached it before the dinosaurs. Faced with the roach, I could already see in the distance Damascus, the oldest city on the earth. In the desert of Libya, roaches and crocodiles? All that time I hadn’t wanted to think what I had already thought: that the roach is edible as a lobster, the roach is a crustacean.(116)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">until finally the roach becomes God. This gives rise to one of the most spellbinding scenes in all of literature. G.H. falls in love with the roach – not with a love ruled by eros bur rather one of agape: “The profound tedium – like a great love – united us.” While all of this is going on, pus from the roach’s crushed body has been forming on its head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is this pus that becomes the site of transformation:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">I haven’t told how, sitting there and unmoving, I still had not stopped looking with great disgust, yes, still with disgust at the yellowed white paste atop the roach’s grayness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I knew that as long as I was disgusted, the world would elude me and I would elude me. I knew that the basic error in living was being disgusted by a roach. Being disgusted by kissing the leper was my erring the first life within me – since being disgusted contradicts me, contradicts my matter within me.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">But there is something even more disgusting to come.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">There is only one way to comprehend <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Passion according to G.H.</i> – as an allegory. To G.H., the ‘yellowed white paste’ becomes the wafer used in the transubstantiation of the host. But why the cockroach? Because we know essentially nothing about G.H. other than that she is ‘three-legged’, we cannot assume she is Christian. We do know that Lispector was Jewish, a Jew, in fact, attempting to exist in not only a Christian country but a Catholic country. There is always an attraction to the unknown, to the different, an attraction often accompanied by fear. So why not have Christianity transform into the ugliness of a roach, a roach with a pool of pus forming on its head in the shape of a wafer, a roach both attractive and abhorrent for the same reason – the roach’s sheer ugliness.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Thirty years after the writing of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Near to the Wild Heart</i>, Lispector wrote <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Áqua Viva</i>. Benjamin Moser, in his introduction, says that “Of all Clarice Lispector’s works, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Áqua Viva</i> gives the strongest impression of having been spontaneously committed to paper. Yet perhaps none was as painstakingly composed.” Moser goes on to say that “to a Brazilian the words [aqua viva] will first of all refer to a jellyfish’ - a floating thing without backbone. It is this that made Lispector hesitate in having it published. As she stated, “That book, I spent three years without daring to publish it, thinking it would be awful. Because it didn’t have a story, it didn’t have a plot.” But that is not that far from the two books already considered in this review. In Lispector’s work, plot is minimal. Moser refers to Olga Borelli, Lispector’s editor, when he says, “As Borelli understood, this ‘spineless’ writing is not random, or even abstract. Instead, its consistency more properly belongs to the realm of dreams, in which ideas and images connect with a logic that may not be immediately apparent but is nonetheless real.” Haven’t all of the Lispector works under consideration belonged to that dream realm?</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">But let’s concentrate on the language of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Áqua Viva</i> for, without plot, without story, what else is there? But the language is enough as this passage demonstrates:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">during love the impersonal jewel of the moment shines in the air, the strange glory of the body, matter made feeling in the trembling of the instants – and the feeling is both immaterial and so objective that it seems to happen outside your body, sparkling on high, joy, joy is time’s material and the essence of the instant. And in the instant is the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> of the instant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want to seize my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i>. And like a bird I sing hallelujah into the air. And my song belongs to no one. But no passion suffered in pain and love is not followed by a hallelujah.(4)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">If one can write like this, who needs a plot?</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Lispector remains conscious of that which she creates even though she denies it. She knows the difficulty of acceptance:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">I don’t know what I’m writing about: I am obscure to myself. I only had initially a lunar and lucid vision, and so I plucked for myself the instant before it died and perpetually dies. This is not a message of ideas that I am transmitting to you but an instinctive ecstasy of whatever is hidden in nature and that I foretell. And this is a feast of words. I write in signs that are more a gesture than a voice.(17)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Lispector does continue the theme she has explored in the earlier two books as this passage reveals:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">The transcendence inside me is the living and soft ‘it’ and has the thought that an oyster has. Could the oyster when torn from its roots feel anxiety? It is disturbed in its life without eyes. I used to drip lemon juice onto the living oyster and watched in horror and fascination as it contorted all over. And I was easting the living <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it</i>. The living <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it</i> is God.(24)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Toward the end, in a passage she labels ‘On the edge of beatitude’, she writes:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">When you see, the act of seeing has no form -- what you see sometimes has form and sometimes doesn’t. The act of seeing is ineffable. And sometimes what is seen is also ineffable. And that’s how it is with a certain kind of thinking-feeling that I’ll call ‘freedom,’ just to give it a name. Real freedom – as an act of perception – has no form. And as the true thought thinks to itself, this kind of thought reaches its objective in the very act of thinking.(81-2)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">Although there are moments where the energy lags – particularly in the long litany of flower names and lore – for the most part Lispector maintains a kinetic charge unsurpassed by others.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">The final book in this quartet of translations by New Directions, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Breath of Life</i>, presents difficulties for the reviewer. This is a posthumous publication which Benjamin Moser describes as “unfinished and hieratic”. What was “a mountain of fragments: which “remained to be ‘structured’ by a trusted friend”, as the back cover states – that friend being Olga Borelli who lived with and was Lispector’s secretary for the last eight years of her life and who assembled the fragments into the form we have here. The difficulty is determining who wrote what. Can a reviewer feel secure in praising a passage of prose without being confident whose prose she is praising? I have chosen to opt out of reading this book as, to me, the answer to that question is “No!” This doesn’t mean that the book isn’t worth reading. However, I felt that if I did begin to read it, I would have to comment on it with all of the incumbent insecurity of so doing.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">New Directions deserves, as always, a heart-felt thank you from the literary community for undertaking the monumental task of translating these four works.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif";">*****</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">John Herbert Cunningham is the host of <i>Speaking of Poets</i> heard every Sunday starting at 4:30 p.m. CST on CKUW 95.9 FM or by podcast on the CKUW website. He has written two plays, <i>Innocent</i> and <i>Waiting for ‘Waiting for Left’</i>. He is writing a novel, <i>The Professor</i>, and a poetry manuscript based on the diary of Samuel Hearne, an 18<sup>th</sup> C Canadian explorer. He reviews poetry, poetics, and fiction extensively.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-54271762575089618222012-12-13T23:55:00.000-08:002012-12-18T09:10:04.480-08:00WILLIAM BRONK: BURSTS OF LIGHT: THE COLLECTED LATER POEMS<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">ED ZAHNISER Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">William Bronk: Bursts of Light: The Collected Later Poems</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">, edited by David Clippinger<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(Talisman Publishers, Greenfield, MA, 2012)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">“Disdain for Cheap Solace”<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">Former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan writes that she likes to pick up William Bronk’s big book of poems <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life Supports</i> and read a poem at random: “For me they’re like the small brown bottle my grandmother carried in her purse and sniffed for the pick-me-up jolt. . . . However little you thought you’d been trafficking in surfaces and ornament,” she writes “and however cleansed of illusions you believed yourself to be . . . Bronk takes them off like paint stripper. . . . The experience is religious in its ferocity and disdain for cheap solace.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">Life Supports</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;"> was Bronk’s first collected poems, for which he won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1982. Bronk had by then published at least 15 books, the first by Cid Corman’s Origin Press in 1956. That and his second book were published to so little comment that he nearly ceased publishing. His second book brought him one letter, a complimentary one from poet Charles Olson. Most of Bronk’s early books were published in limited editions by Elizabeth Press, New Rochelle, New York, owned by his friend and fellow poet James L. Weill. Many of the rest of his books were published by literary or small presses: New Directions, Burning Deck, Sceptre Press, Graywolf Press, Grosseteste, William Ewert, Red Ozier, and Asphodel. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life Supports</i> and three other books were published by North Point Press. From 1996 until this 2012 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bursts of Light</i>, Bronk’s books have been published or republished by Talisman House, Publishers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">Bronk (1918 to 1999) was born in Fort Edward, New York, in 1918, later moving to Hudson Falls, New York. He was descended from the man for whom The Bronx is named. Bronk was graduated in 1938 from Dartmouth College and did a semester of graduate study at Harvard. He served in the Army in World War II, a draftee who then went to Officer Candidate School. After the war he taught at Union College in Schenectady, New York, from 1945 into 1946 but returned to Hudson Falls, taking over the family’s coal and lumber company there—after his father’s death. He ran the company for 38 years. Bronk later remarked that, although he had enjoyed teaching English at Union College, teaching would not have left him the time or the energy to write. His poems were created in his mind during the course of business, he said, then, when they were worked out, written down in longhand. He rarely revised or even modified a poem. He was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for poetry in 1991.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">Kay Ryan’s view that Bronk’s poems are spare and rarely given to illusion—or to an illusion not admitted as such—seems very accurate. She calls his approach “hard not to call brave.” Here is an entire poem:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">THE OUTSIDER<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">The mind isn’t the one to decide; it’s overruled<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">on all the important questions, has to keep<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">its counsel and be told afterwards how it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">was right as it knew all along and, of course,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">it’s too late then and that’s the important thing:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">the mind wasn’t in on the decision made. No,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">it knows that something else is going on<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">and it well might wonder what that something is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">The mind’s an outsider; the mind will never know.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">This is from the poem “EVEN DON’T”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 6;"> </span>I’m glad<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">of my ignorance, that I don’t need to know<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">and even what ignorance told me wasn’t enough.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">The sidelines is where I am, relieved<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">of those responsibilities we wish<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">we had. Use me, life, or even don’t.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">Some of his poems, as poet and Zen priest Philip Whalen wrote of his own, are like a graph of the mind’s movement. The poems are so straightforward that you’re tempted to amend Whalen to: “like a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">simple</i> graph of the mind’s movement:” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">UMPIRE<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">We don’t have to know that the game score<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">is unimportant; we can go on thinking as if<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">it weren’t or were. I don’t care how big<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">we make the game—mondial or more,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">say metaphysical—it’s still play.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">I can’t think what else there is to do;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">reality has left us out, neglects<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">to tell us even what goes on. Play ball!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">Bronk can sound, in content and in thought, like a postmodern deconstructionist, except that he writes a direct and largely unadorned version of plain speech. Here are two poems from the same page of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bursts of Light</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">FORT EDWARD<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">When the train comes, I remember to lift my arm<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">and wave to the engineer. He smiles at me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">and his hand waves back. His shiny tracks<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">recede to a distant point just as they should.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">His various cars are firmly articulated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">The conductor checks his watch. The schedule is sure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">SHORT TERMS<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">It’s one thing to learn the terms of the actual world<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">and make a kind of sense from that as though<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">the actual world exists—oh, we say it does,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">our sense depends on it. Nonsense to pare<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">that. I do nonsensical things: how<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">should I speak about a world whose existence as world<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">I don’t even claim and couldn’t? For which I don’t<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">have terms? I don’t know; but it’s where we are<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">if we need to say we are. I like it here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">I once stood at Fort Edward, New York, with my wife and two young sons, waiting for the northbound Adirondack Amtrak train toward Plattsburgh. It is a near-whistle stop now. What strikes me about Bronk’s “FORT EDWARD” poem is its meticulous but oddly distanced observations. “I remember to lift my arm” “his hand waves back” and that “just as they should.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">“SHORT TERMS” shares this direct, simple language, but it addresses an epistemology of ignorance. Elsewhere Bronk wrote that “we live in the permanence of ignorance.” This is not, I take it, a nihilistic assertion, but an admission and a refusal to entertain illusion. The French philosopher of the history of science Gaston Bachelard held that scientific knowledge, for example, is not progressive and always self-correcting, but rather is given to what we might call “restarts” or “cold boots.” A new discovery reorders all and occasions a start from scratch. In the field of natural resources stewardship, for example, the major problems of this generation—too much past suppression of wildlands fire, killing off too many predators—derive from what was <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“the best science” of the prior generation. We should have no illusion, following Bronk’s lead, that aspects of our generation’s best science won’t likewise complicate things for the next generation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">From Bronk’s "THE CONTRADICTIONS":</span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the sciences, it’s the mind’s rigor and skill<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">which, themselves, make the illusion as long as it lasts.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">We circle to another angle; try there.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">The imperative is knowledge or so it seems;<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">what we want instead is the ultimate ignorance.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">and this complete poem:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><strong><span style="font-size: small;">CENTERED<o:p></o:p></span></strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Science is grand, it deals with what we know.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Believers also know and charlatans<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">claim secret knowledge. All knowing leans away.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: small; line-height: 150%;">Still, at the center, is our ignorance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">In the following complete poem, from his last book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Metaphor of Trees</i>, he says much the same thing, but introduces the role of desire. As novelist Jeanette Winterson writes in her nonfiction book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Art Objects</i>—whose “Objects” can be read as noun and verb—every fact is also an act of desire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><strong><span style="font-size: small;">REALIZATION<o:p></o:p></span></strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Reality isn’t real. Why do we look?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">We look because the real is the shape of desire:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">that the world be real and we a person in it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">We believe our beliefs to pretend that that should be<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">or abide a world whose reality isn’t real.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">As to the final sentence in “SHORT TERMS,” above, “I like it here.”: Bronk’s poet friend from the early 1950s, Robert Creeley, wrote of Bronk: “‘Here’ is the only place he ever was.”<o:p></o:p></span>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">One quibble with Talisman House, Publishers: This book has many typos, making you stop and try to figure out how the line should read. The software’s spell-checking feature would have caught many of the errors.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 150%;">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Ed Zahniser’s poems have appeared in over 100 literary magazines in the U.S. and U.K.; seven anthologies; four books, and three chapbooks. With Shepherdstown (WV) Poet Laureate Georgia Lee McElhaney, Ed has co-edited an anthology of area poets for Shepherdstown’s 250<sup>th</sup> Anniversary Celebration, with major funding from a community grant from the Arts and Humanities Alliance—AHA!—of Jefferson County, WV. Four Seasons Books is publishing the anthology as well as Ed’s book of three long poems, also for the town’s 250<sup>th</sup>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">At Betty’s Restaurant Thomas Shepherd Loves Danke Dandrige and The Shepherdstown Sonnets</i>. </span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><a href="http://www.fourseasonsbooks.com/">www.fourseasonsbooks.com</a><span style="color: #141413;">. Both books are designed and produced by Heather Watson of the studio Pernot and Tatlin, pernotandtatlin.com.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-68122611621787661342012-12-13T23:50:00.000-08:002012-12-17T17:41:01.766-08:00THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LUCILLE CLIFTON 1965-2010<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">EILEEN TABIOS Engages<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010,</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"> Edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">(BOA Editions, Rochester, N.Y., 2012)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Publisher’s Weekly</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"> calls <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010</i> as “may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s certainly a hefty achievement, and I do believe the adjective “landmark” when the publisher’s release describes it:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">“This nearly 800-page landmark volume—which combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton’s published collections with sixty-nine previously unpublished poems—offers an unparalleled depth of insight into the human condition and provides a place for readers from all walks and stages of life to find challenging, blessing, and inspiration.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">For me, this only makes more poignant Toni Morrison’s observation (a de facto rant?) in her Foreword that Clifton’s readers and critics have tended to ignore Clifton’s “intellect, imagination, scholarship or her risk-taking manipulation of language” in favor of her “universal human heart.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">I have (at least) two theories on how Clifton’s poems have come to be read in the way Morrison describes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, I believe/wonder if this result—which I’m so glad is part of the contextualization of Clifton’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Collected Poems</i> viz Morrison’s introduction—may have been affected by how contemporary poetry in the last quarter of the 20<sup>th</sup> century developed such that Clifton’s unadorned, seemingly simple, and narrative-based language was not given its intellectual due.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Second, I believe/wonder if Lucille Clifton, as an African-American poet, was expected to write only about the African-American (as well as womanly) experience and that, according to certain critics, such recipes could not expand to encompass the (extremely) imaginative approach that often goes with experimentation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(This happens to other minority writers.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Yet, to mention just one example, Clifton’s use of vernacular speech is just as innovative and masterful as many poetic achievements which have generated tomes from critics and academics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> H</span>ow often have critics written on Lucille Clifton and allowed their focus on her “heart” to avoid addressing her poetic form?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Has anyone ever written, by the way, on Clifton’s use of lower-case letters when beginning words?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m not an expert on Clifton—this book is really the first time I’m paying attention to her poems and so I possess little background on her work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there are theories out there on why certain poets do not capitalize letters (e.g. the privileging POV that comes with such … which may seem relevant here). This <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">form</i>-al matter may be one example of an intellectual element ignored as regards Clifton’s poems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is this topic, by being one of “form” versus “content” judged as irrelevant to her body of work which, after all, is deservedly powerful for capturing the African American experience?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">In case you are unaware (as I’d been before this book) as regards much of Clifton’s poetry, let me insert here a sample poem:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">solomon<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">i bless the black<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">skin of the woman<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">and the black<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">night turning around her<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">like a star’s bed<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">and the black<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">sound of Delilah<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">across his prayers<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">for they have made me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">wise<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">It’s tempting, yes, to address only or mostly the narrative when talking about a poem like “Solomon.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet Clifton—as a true poet would be—is clearly interested in form as well as the “stories” she wants to share or how she manifests her self-described “mission” of coming “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morrison presents a number of examples in her Foreword, but as I write this paragraph I also immediately remember the absolutely superb poem she structured with the first word being “no” and the last word being “yes”—hence, the poem’s title of “poem beginning in no and ending in yes”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Here’s another example: her use of the caesura as a de facto period or stressing a pause.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a small but deft way to create emphasis at the beginning of this poem:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">bathsheba<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>how it was<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>it was<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">as if all of the blood in my body<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">gorged<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">into my loin<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">so that even my fingers grew stiff<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">but cold<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">and the heat of my rod<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">was my only burning<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">desire<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">desire my only fire<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">and whether i loved her<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">i could not say but<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">i wanted her whatever she was<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">whether a curse<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">or the wife of uriah<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">as well as a way to emphasize the pause at the start of the poem “birthday 1999”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">it is late.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>the train<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">that is coming is<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">closer.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a woman can hear it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">in her fingers, in her knees,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">in the space where her uterus<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">was.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the platform feels<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">filled with people<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Since, in the above excerpt, the sentence already ends in a period before the start of a caesura—and I’m actually more used to seeing poets avoid the period when they begin a caesura (as Clifton does, too, in “bathsheba”)—this makes the reader pause (longer) before continuing the read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What fills the space of that pause is subjective, but if you compare the effect of reading the three sentences with or without a caesura, I think it’s fair to say that one is encouraged to linger (to think about what’s being read) with the caesura.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Of course, the effective use of caesura includes not using it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you look at this line from “bathsheba”,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">i wanted her whatever she was<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">not creating a pause after “her”—whether from a caesura or even a line break—accelerates the reading and, by doing so, strengthens desire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">A flight of fancy, here, but, for me, Clifton’s effective use of the caesura makes me think she’d have been right at home in some 7<sup>th</sup> century Carolingian monastery—right there with the monks inventing the period, the comma, spaces between words, the paragraph return as a way to insert pauses and end-stops to make text more readable, hence, more meaningfully-accessible. But do we—can we—go <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">there</i> in addressing her formal innovativeness in addition to noting the obvious themes in poems entitled “africa”, “slaveships”, “the photograph:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a lynching”, etc?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Why not?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poems speak for themselves and are proof that Clifton, like all great poets, experiment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How about the start and ending of her poem “The Message from The Ones” which begins and ends respectively with the statements<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">beginning of message<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">and<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">end of message<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Obviously, most poems begin and end without referencing their beginnings and endings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, these two phrases even border the references to sections of the poem in the Table of Contents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The text of this poem would have been as effective without these particular ways of starting and ending. But the insertion of these two phrases emphasize that the poem’s words are a message from others as well as create a sense of homage to “The Ones” who sent the messages and taught Clifton what she then shares in the poem (“you/ are not chosen// any stone/ can sing// we come/ to languages/not lives// your tongue/ is useful/ not unique”); thus, it is an effective poetic device.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">I don’t know if Clifton chafed—as Morrison does in the Introduction—at the nature of the critical response to her work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If not—that’s an if—it may be because of how she puts it in one of her “stories” below, which I also consider an ars poetica poem:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">surely i am able to write poems<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">celebrating grass and how the blue<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">in the sky can flow green or red<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">and the waters lean against the Chesapeake shore like a familiar,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">poems about nature and landscape<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">surely<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>but whenever i begin<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">“the trees wave their knotted branches<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">and . . .” why<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">is there under that poem always<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">an other poem?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Indeed. That poem reminds me of a younger Me who, as a “minority writer”, used to complain about surely having the right to keep writing about the moon … before experience taught: there’s always <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">another</i> poem underlying poems.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdmtkEN2jn2G_MdVMwdFZcwPso7C-pgznAvDh7SdyuPfic45MMSIPGeXTTyraSvT_u1plPy3dNb2HS7CoqrAPmu_1n3nPYadOR16LZJb-nFXTDJ4ShCm7DEBNpg2q0ZyjRvTzlSz2DjNA/s1600/ox_herding_jul_08.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="172" mea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdmtkEN2jn2G_MdVMwdFZcwPso7C-pgznAvDh7SdyuPfic45MMSIPGeXTTyraSvT_u1plPy3dNb2HS7CoqrAPmu_1n3nPYadOR16LZJb-nFXTDJ4ShCm7DEBNpg2q0ZyjRvTzlSz2DjNA/s320/ox_herding_jul_08.gif" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The source, then, for Clifton’s poems is not just a huge heart but a formidable intellect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both factors combine to create powerful poems, such as her ekphrasis project “Ten Oxherding Pictures.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The referenced images, to quote from a note by Clifton, “is an allegorical series composed as a training guide for Chinese Buddhist monks. The pictures are attributed to kaku-an shie-en, twelfth-century Chinese Zen master.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am aware of this series, having been previously introduced to them by Buddhist artist Max Gimblett who created drawings for a collaboration with Lewis Hyde, <em><a href="http://terebess.hu/english/oxherd1.html">The Ten Oxherding Pictures</a></em>. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Max Gimblett also first introduced me to the beauty of the enso or circle (I’ve witnessed Gimblett accomplish purrrr-fect ensos with one stroke in his Buddhist Rinzai way).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is interesting—wonderful!—about Clifton’s poems is how she created them without having seen the actual Oxherding images.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She wrote the poems after only reading the titles of each image.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The effect, however, hews true to the original pictures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She gets the circles—circularity—of life, such that the series ends with<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">end of meditation<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">what is ox<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">ox is<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">what</span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">This effect bring us back full circle (ahem) to this review’s beginning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What Clifton accomplished in many poems including “Ten Oxherding Pictures” was possible due, indeed, to what Morrison calls “her universal human heart.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a poet, Clifton clearly sees not just with her eyes but by feeling through what she observes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And while she’s had her own <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">flights</i> (since the true poet must!) with her own visitations, she’s stayed grounded to the world and community as poetry and “The Others” have taught her:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">the angels have no wings<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">they come to you wearing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">their own clothes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">they have learned to love you<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">and will keep coming<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">unless you insist on wings<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That’s a particular kind of Muse: totally aware because the act of poetry-making expanded vision until insight matched heart.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">**<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Kudos to BOA Editions for not just a gorgeously but also <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">respectfully</i> designed and produced book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">**<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I look at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Collecteds</i> differently from <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>individual poetry collections that are only parts of a poet’s work. I look at a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Collected Poems</i> with a curiosity as to whether, based on the poems, the poet's life was worth it (so to speak)—whether it was worth it for that poet to have devoted one's self to poetry. Because of this, I wrote this review without accounting for Kevin Young’s afterword essay (though I would read it, post-review, and find it useful)—I wanted to experience the poems in as unmediated a way as possible (I read Toni Morrison's essay because it, as an Introduction, opened the book and I had not initially come to Clifton’s book with the idea of reviewing it). Was the poet’s life worth it for Clifton?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, here’s the ending to the book’s last poem, “God Bless America”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In the middle of the Eye,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">not knowing whether to call it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">devil or God<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I asked how to be brave<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">and the thunder answered, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Stand. Accept.” So I stood<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">and I stood and withstood<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">the fiery sight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Here’s one key: Clifton didn’t just accept.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She didn’t accept from a bowed, slumped or sitting position.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She <strong>stood</strong>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She stood despite what life threw at her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In standing, she accepted but also withstood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With her intellect and craft, her poems, then came to hold and offer one of poetry’s greatest possibilities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These poems, upon being read, have the possibilities of effecting change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What more can one expect a poet to achieve?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Consequently, in this last poem, Clifton earned the right to capitalize “I”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This book is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED with much respect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by <em>Galatea Resurrects</em> because she's its editor. But she is pleased to point you elsewhere to recent reviews of her books. </span><a href="http://marshhawkpress.org/tabios5.html"><strong><i><span style="text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><span style="color: purple; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA</span></span></i></strong></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, a collaboration with j/j hastain, is reviewed by Joey Madia at <em><strong><a href="http://www.literaryaficionado.com/2012/05/review-of-eileen-r-tabios-and-jj.html">New Mystics Review</a></strong></em>; Edric Mesmer at <em><strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/11/publications-byedited-by-megan-kaminski.html">Yellow Field 6</a></strong></em>; and Zvi A. Sesling at <em><strong><a href="http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-relational-elations-of-orphaned.html">Boston Area Small Press & Poetry Scene</a></strong></em>. She also just released a new poetry collection, <em><strong><a href="http://5shadesofgray.blogspot.com/">5 Shades of Gray</a></strong></em> (i.e. press, Florida, 2012).</span><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-29598903202558385742012-12-13T23:45:00.000-08:002012-12-17T18:44:38.419-08:00FAULT TREE by KATHRYN L. PRINGLE<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">SUNNYLYNN THIBODEAUX Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">fault tree </span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">by kathryn l. pringle<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(Omnidawn Publishing,Richmond, CA 2012) <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">fault tree</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">! Please plant another<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Every once in a while, oh and I do wish it were more often, you come across a book of poetry and read it through and through and you say, “That’s it? But I want more!” And then you realize that despite the number of pages you’ve burned through there is so much more. There’s an unfolding deep into the gut and head of impression and reflection that reveals itself slowly and then quickly and then slowly again. kathryn l. pringle’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fault tree</i> is one of these books.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">There’s a looking in on itself, a speaker describing and dissecting an image of an alter-self -- a reflective analysis that dizzies with role and purpose, a certainty of the uncertainty that one even exists<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“of course, one could make the argument that you were never there<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>which is problematic<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>for me being situated more or less<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>outside of you who<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>may or may not be<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>there or anywhere<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>if you exist in the future<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>then I am chasing you<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>or just behind” (19)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The almost maze like perspective in pringle’s poems harkens back to Jeanette Winterson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Passion</i> for me. A story that unfolds and weaves from different persons only to be taken back to a point of one person—the <span style="color: black;">young Frenchman sent to fight in the Napoleonic wars, the cross-dressing Venetian woman, 4 stories that begin as 2 different voices. pringle, in 3 sections, embraces a soldier, a patient, lovers re-feeling out their footing in the relationship: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“in sleeping we turn off towards<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>walls – single – after coupling<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>I place my hand on yr hip flexor<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>you sigh and back up into me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>this is what i like.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>when we are old<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>we will be crazy<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>and they will try and take us<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>there will be two crazies of us<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>but take us they will”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(64) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The questions surrounding the regard of self raise their head. There are no concrete answers as the guise shifts from one speaking who<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“yesterday . . . was alive” (24) to the one who later states, “i i i / don’t want to go to camp / there is no me there” (61)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The reflection of a self is tied up in the relation of time. Time shifts and jumps and the speaker, all the while holding a mirror for the sake of identity, changes faces and becomes political, scientific, a lover. The speaker’s afraid of the system, part of the system and the creator of the system at the same time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>pringle delicately and confoundedly weaves the emotive friction of various life circumstances, as if many tales were gathered from generations upon generations while at the same time it could be you, the reader. I surely felt there were moments that I even was speaking. And thought how does she know this about me?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>fault tree </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">is a beautiful, sometimes hauntingly mysterious, crisscrossing journey of what may or may not be waking moments. “the moment is like falling asleep. sometimes i think i am asleep. but for the sleep’s duration . . .” (11) It will take you in and hold you, even mistrustfully, but it won’t let go. “therefore you are not leaving this island.” (13)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Sunnylyn Thibodeaux</span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> is from New Orleans and lives in San Francisco. She is the author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Palm to Pine</i> (Bootstrap 2011) and many small books. With her husband, Micah Ballard, she co-edits Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions and has a daughter, Lorca Manale Ballard.</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-18628034291333373252012-12-13T23:40:00.000-08:002012-12-17T17:36:47.574-08:00FAULT TREE by KATHRYN L. PRINGLE<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Judith Goldman Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">fault tree</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> by kathryn l. pringle<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(Omnidawn, Richmond, CA, 2012)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Towards the end of kathryn l. pringle’s scary, genius, and compulsively readable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fault tree, </i>we encounter the following poem of redoubled “gore”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">i’ve been asked to guard the very monument<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">i resented building.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>then, enslaved as now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">i shall defend the symbols of my oppressors<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">in order to feed my family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>these are couplets<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">thus: a love poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>my strife is a tourist attraction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">the number one only income-generating industry<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">has been my oppression<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">a sensitive state to the needs of <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">its people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in my dream <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">the man’s face was distorted<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">he was bleeding gruesome gore<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">splayed across the snow – the gore<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">the kind you see with substance<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">dark red meaty blood<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">the man needed me to help him<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">but he was the enemy<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">so I let him bleed to death <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">in the snow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His eyes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">knowing he was to die painfully then<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">he want me to kill him<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">but I wanted him to suffer<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">so I bled him, in the snow.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">it was just over there, past that line of trees<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">the site is now part of my daily detail<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">my daily guarding of the plight of us<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">i see the same place I let someone die<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">remember I am a bitter – petty man<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">he would have done the same for me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">this is in couplets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a love<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">poem with blood and snow. 969)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Reading (bleeding) this “love/poem with blood and snow,” one is forced to notice that pringle’s serious play on couplets as coupling reproduces a libidinal intimacy with the “enemy”: an intimacy that involves a relational shaping of Being against and through various antagonists, as well as a sexualization of torture and cruelty. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One notices, too, that pringle portrays the State “monument” as a material object whose construction required “slave” labor and thus around which a certain psychical relation developed, while that monument is also a symbolic object whose existence requires a continuing labor of paid or mercenary guardianship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>pringle structures the entire scene around disclosing the service that enables and yet is effaced within the economy of the spectacle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here the production, reproduction, and maintenance of the insignia of empire, a “tourist attraction” of the State’s exhibition of itself to itself, have become the “only…industry.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One notices as well that the passive murder of the enemy bespoken by a multiply unstable lyric subject is said to take place in a dream far too lucid to belong to the domain of sleep, or sleep as we might conceive it in opposition to waking; that the psychical rebound of the guard’s victimization by the state is this lateral passive murder; that as demystified and irony-attuned as the guard’s relation to the monument seems to be, he (?) is, finally, using it just as the State intends, one of the people the “sensitive state” reciprocally serves well beyond the paying of his wage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">fault tree</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> is a remarkable book for much more than its insight into such complexes of paranoiac (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">viz.</i> real) projection and inversion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Fault tree analysis” is the term for the method engineers use to examine high-level system failures and to calculate the probabilities of certain problems arising as certain subsystems and components within them break down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You make a tree diagram and trace the causal sequences through which failure occurs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The cover of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fault tree</i> is overlaid with several copies of a plan of the book drawn as a fault tree diagram.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>pringle considerably torques her metaphorical-conceptual vehicle by introducing ideas of nested temporalities and the like, such that the total collection of glitches inscribed by the fault tree all seem to be happening at once or slightly staggered, oscillating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The book initially figures forth this kind of chronic dysachrony by having a persona speak of the loss of a particularly cathected future, and then having this persona describe itself as already killed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>pringle has a peculiarly visceral way of showing that we might technically be considered murdered versions of ourselves when futures of passionate attachment are decommissioned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">She complicates this anachronism of surviving the unsurvivable—this state of living past one’s own death, or alternatively, this question of what one can be, if made by a future that doesn’t come to pass—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">the binding of what is perceived is <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">bent, actually is bent, but you won’t see it <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">hanging there”(20)—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">by also wondering <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">when</i> one can be, if the future logically precedes the present, a conundrum effectively figured at the very end of the book when a persona wonders how the sonic boom of the space shuttle landing can be heard 24 hrs before its landing (76), that is, how the effect of the landing precedes the landing itself?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such a knotting of time gives way to other temporal entanglements—stipplings of “pre-moment,” “nonmoment” and “unhappening,” spatio-temporal relativity: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">there is no correct order to the incident <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">because time changes depending on<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">where you are standing and so does<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">place. (56)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">When first reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fault tree</i>, I thought the book had several interwoven narrative threads.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I then came to think that the book presented the “same” persona conceived as multiplicity without unifying or underlying substance, with that persona simultaneously embodying the out-of-sync lived durations of a whole grammar of social positions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fault tree, </i>we have the patient versus the soldier, and also the patient become soldier and soldier become patient, soldiers medicated to be soldiers and patients whose medical treatment resembles a war, with its collateral damage: “i had to take one pill to stay alive and several pills to handle the side effects caused by the one pill that was keeping me alive”(28).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such unnerving conflations of identities—different yet so inter-implicated they are prone to collapse, versions of one another in domains that sometimes uncannily fold—align with pringle’s Artaud-like depictions of words as fragmented, persecutory agencies literally wounding the body:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">the noises i begat made matter<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">atoms accumulated from within<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">a perforation appearing, i,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">wrenched in pain, spoke words<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">each one dropping from my new hole<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">with mass <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">and sound (47)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>when i said the word<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>i felt the word<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>coming out a little easier<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>words through the small <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>perforations of my body (54)<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1182873083481616607#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'MS 明朝'; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Refusing language as ideational or conceptual, with all the distinctions and separations, such would entail, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fault tree</i> admirably harnesses a straightforwardness of syntactic presentation to the creation of unsettling beyond-<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bios</i> complexes of multi-directional force. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It maps, with a gripping, authentic vision akin to descriptions in Deleuze and Guattari in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Thousand Plateaux</i>, planes of molecular immanence: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">remember we are organic<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">the reactant---> the product <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">a compound<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">resoundant space particulate (55)<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1182873083481616607#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'MS 明朝'; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">pringle further allows us to see, as Deleuze writes elsewhere, that, “Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images,” that there is “perpetual exchange between the virtual and the actual,” that the virtual preserves the past, including pasts that were never present<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1182873083481616607#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'MS 明朝'; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[3]</span></span></span></span></a>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">can you maybe shimmer<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">so I can hold a place <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">or am I now just mere<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">am I now of nothing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">or not much of anything<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">or am I now a speck <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">of something that was? (19)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Given its admirable portrayal of living, immanent, temporally differential networks, we might think <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fault tree</i> almost amused by the fable of abstract, capitalist time: “today it is never 9:30” (22).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But its sometime playfulness around the samenesses of metricated time and the calculable possible that metric builds around itself—“today always happens and so it feels like it never happens because I am so well-versed in today and how it goes” (24)—does not offset its concomitant acknowledgment and revulsion towards the plane of organization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fault tree</i> is filled with incisive, wry formulations that capture the captative, ideologically saturated, financialized, neoliberal, biometric, positivistic Real, in which human and all life have become cogs within a war-commodity machine of global capital:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">we waited on the politicians survival mechanism to engage <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">but so few are real animals<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">that it was not a big surprise when it didn’t (41)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">they say the food is already included<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">but i think it is probably really very<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">expensive and i can’t afford it – i i i <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">don’t want to go to a camp. (61)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">pringle figures humans as biologized machines:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">my transistor was hemorrhaging<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">exposed wires bleeding (24)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">the company transitioned <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">us into robots (53)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">and as near-machinic biopolitical organisms, controlled by the pharmaceutical industry at a molecular level well below that of subjectivity: “the doctors decided to put my milligrams directly into the plumbing” (72).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The brilliance of pringle’s elliptical portrayals lies in their sinisterly un-sci-fi <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">heimlichkeit</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">pringle (in correspondence) has said her book is about “agency and autonomy.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I asked her what she meant by that, she referred to her line, “you wake up or you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wake up</i>/most people wake up” (24).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">I’m not sure I agree with this summary, acute as I invariably find pringle’s insights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With its interpenetrating intergenerational memories of never-ending war, its archives of a father’s dementia speech and medical meta-literatures for pills and their risks, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fault tree</i> brings into relief particularly dire contemporary modes of precarity—first-world rebounds of militarily enforced globalization—as it also chronicles deeper transhistorical human vulnerability and dependency, our ways of making and unmaking one another in ways we do not control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is waking up something we can choose?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If waking up is an act of autonomy, isn’t simultaneously, an acknowledgment of dependency, whether through illness or desire?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fault tree</i> so admirably works this contradiction. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1182873083481616607#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'MS 明朝'; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> See Gilles Deleuze, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Logic of Sense</i>, trans. Mark Lester (Columbia University Press, 1990), 87-8.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1182873083481616607#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'MS 明朝'; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> As Deleuze and Guattari write of immance: “Here there are no longer any forms or developments of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation of subjects…There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness, floating affects, between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia</i>, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press 1987), 266).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1182873083481616607#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'MS 明朝'; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[3]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> Gilles Deleuze, “The Actual and the Virtual,” trans. Eliot Ross Albert, in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dialogues II</i> (Columbia University Press 2007), 148; 150.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #ffffcc; color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: #ffffcc; color: #222222;"><span class="il" style="background-color: #ffffcc; color: #222222;">Judith</span></span></span> <span style="background-color: #ffffcc; color: #222222;"><span class="il" style="background-color: #ffffcc; color: #222222;">Goldman</span></span> is the author of <em>Vocoder</em> (Roof 2001), <em>DeathStar/rico-chet</em> (O Books 2006), and <em>l.b.; or, catenaries</em> (Krupskaya 2011). She joined the faculty of the Poetics Program of SUNY </span><span style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Buffalo in Fall 2012.</span></span></span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-56191564508436703142012-12-13T23:35:00.000-08:002012-12-17T17:34:42.423-08:00STILL: OF THE EARTH AS THE ARK WHICH DOES NOT MOVE by MATTHEW COOPERMAN<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">MICAH CAVALERI Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">STILL: Of The Earth As The Ark Which Does Not Move</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> by Matthew Cooperman<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(<i>Counterpath Press</i>, Denver 2011)<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">If I had to list every element of Matthew Cooperman's <i>Still: Of The Earth As The Ark Which Does Not Move</i>, which I will, but not in toto, so not every, it would look like this:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">2000-2012 sucked<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">We killed ourselves we killed others<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Nazi predecessors are also prophets<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">dreams and borders take place at the intersection of “winter and snow”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">color as time and purpose = (“avocado 70s, prophecy hues”)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">a theory of writing that is pataphysical, that is it reaches up above everything because nothing down <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>here says it right<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">a theory of writing that says everything that is here, because there is only enough that can be said<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">space is the place<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">life begins in the scat of the muladhara and explodes with a hum through the skull<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">That is, that's what I'd say if I had to list everything and then wrote it down only part way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, I could just hand you a copy of Cooperman's <i>Still </i>with my notes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe then you, my reader, will understand that what Cooperman is doing is simply a series of shadow boxes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ah.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Did I forget that the author hides, his daughter is autistic, he aches with guilt for his wife and never can say it so he talks about Aeneas instead?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thousands of words and not an author in sight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Matthew Cooperman's <i>Still </i>opens with a line that sets us immediately in the historical context of the last decade or so:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>and the lanterns coming on: the oil price rising ($135 crude), the old furnace<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>functioning (2/3<sup>rds</sup> capacity), the body count rising (38%, 1/20/01–3/20/11)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">So, of course, the question arises as to whether the poem survives the now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But to appreciate Cooperman's aesthetic work, I step back from the political, look directly at the form.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What I see are shadow boxes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For one thing, the lanterns are an antique set against the bodies of our boys and barrels of oil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not a statement of simple, contemporary facts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a shadow box that displays juxtaposed facts... let the reader assign the value.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Does the reader get to assign the value though? A war poem, as this one must be given its historical period and insistent reminders of the wounded, is boring if all it does is condemn a war:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Premise: the loss is smaller than the gain<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Subject: Pfc. Johnson (ruptured spleen), Pfc Snigowski (shattered rib, perforated<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>colon), Pfc Desnos (displaced patella, chancey thigh)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">or<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Campaign: Actium, Massilla, Thermopylae; Antietam, Appotomax, Vicksburg,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Shiloh; Ypres, Gallipoli, Somme, Passchendaele; Khe Sanh, Ap Bac, Tet, My Lai;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Alamo, Medano, San Jacinto, Wounded Knee; Kirkuk, Mosul, Karbala, Samawah<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Antecedent: Devolution, War of, Secession, Algerian War, Aroostook War, Balkan<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Wars, Bishops' Wars, Boer War, Crimean War, Gallic War, Great War, Gulf War,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Hussite Wars, Indochina War, Punic War, Teutoberg Wald...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">There is the invocation of the central premise of just war theory followed by a litany of wars and battles and injuries that the reader is compelled to look at in disgust.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But no.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not a simple long-form anti-war placard.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">If I read Cooperman's lists as mere mantras of condemnation, I would have stopped listening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was a soldier after all and war is truly sweet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part of me wants to do it all over again even if it does rip apart minds and hearts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But <i>Still </i>is not demagogic protest in the guise of contemporary poetic experimentation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is contemporary poetic experimentation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are shadow boxes where I find the fact of a scrap of Adam Smith beside the US body count facts of the last two decades:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Adam Smith: “Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the <span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>society as great as he can.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public <span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Numbers: Desert Storm (100,000 Iraqi soldiers killed, 300,000 wounded, 35,000 <span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>civilians killed, 116,000 sorties flown; Coalition losses, 358 killed, estimated cost, $61-<span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>71 billion); Iraq war (75,000 Iraqi soldiers killed, 120,000 wounded, 18,200 civilians <span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>killed, 33,000 injured, Coalition losses, 3,500 killed, 12,000 injured; cost?)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Put that in your scales! screams Cooperman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Facts are valueless, but they have weight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Adam Smith is speaking of a sort of natural law of social behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not one life full of interests and loves knows its contribution or value to the whole.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Cooperman is aware of this even as he groans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He hears the voice of prophecy tell him that it is all nothing and we will all burn in the end:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>HubbleVoxII: I am Super Nova X and Nebula Y, and the prophecy of heat death.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">That is the value of the whole.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">But if it is as bleak as all that, why write a protest poem... even if it experiments in the expressiveness of lists and how values emerge from just looking? Who cares about the juxtapositions of shadow boxes?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The form of life changed after 9/11... for all of us... that is an inescapable fact of the book:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>we cannot sing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>dragging our saddles<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>afters and befores<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>the daily grind<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>the dollar mine<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>a plane accelerates<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>so much glass<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>terror our empire<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>begin our beguine<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>the light is<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>on the sash<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The horror of knowing who we all are now, what we can do to each other... that can never be undone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can drag our saddles off to war or work, but the dance... the beguine... has begun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And a beguine is also an ascetic of a sort, so maybe we have come to the point where we are going to strip ourselves of everything, live in poverty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Give up on the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The light is/ on the sash,” which says there is light, something open... but Cooperman doesn't fall into that sentimental trap:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>an epoch of<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>our daze this<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>epic of our<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>ways and means<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>we're changing as<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>a species see<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>the list is<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>long and dark'ning<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>not to do<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>things with actions<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">It was, on one reading... a reading that seems right..., the confusion of a theology and economics with power politics, guns and planes that destroyed the world on 9/11.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I deliberately refrain from assigning blame vis-a-vis the confusion.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That poison has seeped into us as a species and we are changing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is interesting to think that in a world where we give so much value to the mind, it is the mind seeping into the world that poisons it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our theologians and political theorists have it all backwards: “Contingency: 'Mind is just an idea of the body' (Spinoza)”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Cooperman's solution is “not to do/ but radically undo/ a confusion of/ things with actions/ why it means/ to use language/ late in this/ our visible domain”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so, his book starts in the muladhara, that most scatological of chakras where the libidinous energies coil like a snake in our bowels: “Chahkra: root, scatological, ground zero, La Brea, to stay warm, inculcate burning”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The book's beginning is in the dirt of the human body, the place where our burning, which we have seen as a destructive force, is in fact a warming of the rising energies of the human soul.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don't believe me? Listen to the voice of prophecy:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>HubbleVox: “I'm the august monolith of Loth burning in the empyrean of space”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The threat of immolation is now the warmth of the serpent who rises from muladhara carrying us out in to the vast empty peace of space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The undoing of the confusion... is to undo everything.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But we have gotten lost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where did I start? Oh yes, where is the author?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>I: as Thou<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>in flits and tatters<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>a semblancer bereft<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>no part of sense grown<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>un-contained<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>no season foaled untoward<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">and then:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Author: that it be my time, my time being, being spark, ever a fiery eidolon<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Every word of the book is the author as he engages the Thou... that's you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cooperman is not a thing; that is to make the mistake of confusing things with actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Spark is ignition, activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cooperman is a process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He says as much: “Inspiration:[...]Tesla[...]; Whitehead's prehension”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Relation and action are the foundation of Cooperman's metaphysics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He tries to deny it, he tries to be cold: “Author Stall: occasional, wind-socked, exceeded; the bad turnout, the slow sell, the signs of my demise in the papering arcades”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the author is alive in his ten year odyssey to compose this book – (this book is ultimately a biography, although noone will know it if they don't give their attention to the form and philosophy of the work rather than the rage and politics it reports) – and alive in his deep engagement with every word he has read, painting he's studied, girl he's watched, friend he's lost:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Quandary: what is a subject and what is a form, like any foray into time, there's freedom <span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>in it, and the almond smell of death</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">And, so digging through the detritus of history, especially dusty rubble of the last twelve years, with the “Purpose: to distill”, the author finds a lyre and hits his first note –<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“<b>STRUM</b>” – in the third poem of the book “STILL: INITIAL”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that note is the author's awakening and he vibrates through the whole book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He an energy, he is that relation of time and space we call a wave, he is the fiery eidolons we are continually stunned by in reading <i>Still.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>*<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">A chemical process of slow addition to reach that perfect level of saturation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think that is what Cooperman has been after.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is why he has collected every bit of news and art and philosophy of the last decade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each bit added gives light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am saying all this, and you probably wonder: what about the author's identity? I know, I haven't proven my thesis yet, if I have one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cooperman is this book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Look at how the book weaves in and out of the works of his poet-wife, Aby Kaupang Cooperman, with its “gods” and “blooms” and you will see that I speak truth here:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>little 'g' gods<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>a wandering form<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>my adventurous song<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The little 'g' gods are central characters in the work of Aby Cooperman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their works are in conversation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cooperman's writing is the expression of his own relation to Aby.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is so much more to say, but that would be an intrusion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Ah, but we have to intrude.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consider this most beautiful poem:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>the odd angels<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>for which flight<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>took sinew oh<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>the father and<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>the morning dove<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>in sun plummet<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>so the doll<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>her doll life<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>o! my daughter<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 8;"> </span>the air is<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 8;"> </span>our apparent fuss<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 8;"> </span>humidity and war<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 8;"> </span>I swear baby<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 8;"> </span>thinks our fall<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 8;"> </span>or fallen she<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 8;"> </span>is the avatar<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 8;"> </span>the wife does<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 8;"> </span>too how lonesome<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 8;"> </span>say that's all<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 5;"> </span>[….]trying each to<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 5;"> </span>throw of city<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 5;"> </span>makes it so<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 5;"> </span>still nows thens<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 5;"> </span>never relent he<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 5;"> </span>loves her till<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 5;"> </span>the ever ends<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">First, can someone say God DAMN and Duino Elegies? Thanks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Second the philosophical coldness and political rage of the poem shatters here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cooperman has made no secret of his daughter's real life condition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And he is no fan of the war on terror.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So everything he has written has been autobiographical, but here autobiography trips from notes on my world with me bracketed out to some sort of vibrating aum that accepts all existence as it is.... because of love.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pure and simple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pura vida.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the beauty, the profundity, the eloquence... it's enough.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span></span></i><b><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">STRUM:<br /><br /><br /><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>STRUM:</span></b><i><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>STRUM:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>STRUM:</span></b><i><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">*****<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Micah Cavaleri’<span style="color: black;">s most recent book is 'the romances and other poems.' His first book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">'the syllable that opened an eye,'</i> was published by Dead Man Publishing in 2010. He has served in Iraq, jumped out of helicopters and flown Humvees off of dunes as well as earning a few degrees along the way. Micah studied for his BA in Theology and Philosophy at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, MN, and received his MA in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN. There was poetry along the way. After that, he trained in satellite communications and as a cavalry scout for the Army National Guard, and completed graduate studies in Advanced International Affairs at Texas A&M in College Station, TX. Micah now lives in Michigan's UP and makes dinner, cleans the bathrooms, practices viola and runs while his wife and her students uncover the mysteries of the natural world. Oh, and he runs Dead Man Publishing too. You can find his poetry and literary criticism in <i>elimae, Moria, Galatea Resurrects, Jacket2</i> and more scattered around the web.</span></span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-45304395690063998552012-12-13T23:30:00.000-08:002012-12-17T17:32:50.999-08:00UNCERTAIN TIME by RICHARD CADDEL<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">GUILLERMO PARRA Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Uncertain Time </span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">by<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Richard Caddel, with an introduction by Aaron Tieger <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(Pressed Wafer, Boston, 2011)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">“An adventure of the air”: Richard Caddel’s Night Songs<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">William Corbett’s Pressed Wafer has been in existence for over a decade now. Pressed Wafer’s editions have included broadsides, chapbooks, anthologies, magazines and full-length books by poets directly and indirectly tied to Boston and New England. Thanks to Corbett’s efforts, several late works by John Wieners were published, including the posthumous <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kidnap Notes Next</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two poets of my affection, Fred Moten and Cedar Sigo, had their first works published with this small but influential press. Now Pressed Wafer has released the first American edition of the English poet Richard Caddel (1949-2003), entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncertain Time</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Originally released in England by Galloping Dog Press in 1990, Caddel’s book is accompanied by a helpful introductory essay by the poet Aaron Tieger, along with a biographical note by Corbett, who was a friend of Caddel’s. Tieger edited a selection of Caddel’s work in his magazine <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">CARVE</i>, back in 2005. As with most Pressed Wafer publications, this edition is beautifully designed. It has an elegant yellow cover and wide, creamy pages that allow for Caddel’s poems to breathe naturally with plenty of space. On the back cover, a more personal blurb from Corbett evokes his friendship with Caddel. This personal touch gains significance once you proceed into the book. Caddel’s poetry establishes an intimacy with the reader over time, as the precise imagery and sound of his poems begins to resonate like a personal music. The poet asks that we collaborate in bringing to life the sound of the poems while we read them. Caddel’s conception of poetry is deeply influenced by his friendship —one might also call it an apprenticeship— with Basil Bunting, who emphasized the importance of listening: “Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">In his introduction to Basil Bunting’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Complete Poems</i> (New Directions, 2000), Caddel, a student of Bunting who eventually became a founding director of the Basil Bunting Poetry Center at Durham University Library, discusses the difficulty contemporary readers might face when encountering poetry. Caddel’s observations about the importance of sound in Bunting’s work, encourage reading aloud as an entry into poetry that might seem forbidding at first glance:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">We are not all trained readers of poetry today. For the new reader, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">the first experience of sounding these poems in the air, however<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">inexpertly, will be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">physical</i> —nervous perhaps— but above all<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">enriching. Word patterns which may at first appear dense and<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">complicated on the page become articulated and clarified, resonating<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">across the poem’s structure. The subtleties and echoes of language<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">which hold a poem together are revealed by the process of sounding it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">One of the joys of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncertain Time</i> is the structure of the book, which is designed to create resonances that flow back and forth along the pages as we read. The book is structured so that it might be reread, until the sounds themselves become familiar to us, while opening new glimpses of Caddel’s distinct voice. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncertain Time</i> is organized into two sections: the first is the long poem “Fantasia in the English Choral Tradition,” where Caddel displays a concern for the text as an architectural construction across the page. As Tieger writes in the introduction: “Ric described “Fantasia in the English Choral Tradition” […] as his “final working of the ‘objectivist poem’ —that wrought thing, that almost determined coming-to-a-focus.”” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">This first poem begins and closes with fragments, so that we are instantly allowed the freedom to read it as we’d like, in fragments, as a whole, or as a prelude to the rest of the book. Caddel is both singing and theorizing his song, employing a style that bends to the pleasures of subtle surprise in poetry. The final lines of this poem are not only fragmented, they are also a declaration of an aesthetic of the “everyday.” We find this appreciation for the beauty and music of the daily throughout this book. Caddel presents himself as an arranger of a perfect sound forever indebted to the improvisation of the moment:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">I am back in thought<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in the hills<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">with scope<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to sing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">the things I love<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as they occur<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">this instant<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">everyday<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The second, and longest, section of the book is a sequence of 53 numbered “songs” that explore the same concern for the poem as a visual field, but in much tighter structures. It seems apt that the penultimate text of the book is a page-long prose poem that takes up the entire visual field, speaking directly to the reader—and to the poet himself— with deceptively plain words. There is a sense in this book that Caddel is thinking about himself within a life-long span of work, not just his immediate time and place of composition. The “fantasia” of the first part of the book carries us into very specific realities of self, landscape, polis and time (as manifested through sound) in the quick “songs” that, like any good composition, you want to play over & over again. Take, for instance, the following poem, quoted in its entirety:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">XVII<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">SPRAY<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">kick the brush-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>wood,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">pollen, compass, magic<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">it’s June<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">pinks and yellows<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">splash everywhere<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">In his introduction, Tieger describes Caddel’s use of a precise sound that is “knowing, cadenced, intimate.” This intimacy is evident throughout <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Uncertain Time</i>. Among the striking aspects of this book are the unexpected images and sounds the poet creates, often based in everyday occurrences: “Rain (harpsichord) / in Weardale / the drops / fall from leaves / with a little / tug…” The precision in these lines mirrors that of the miniature landscape being described.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Caddel, along with Peter Quartermain, edited an important anthology of experimental English poetry entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Other: British and Irish Poetry Since 1970</i> (Wesleyan, 1999) that served as a manifesto of sorts. Their anthology seeks to amplify the field of English poetry beyond the notion of a single tradition. In their “Introduction—A Fair Field Full of Folk,” they propose a rereading of the English poetic canon as something that defies standard notions of a single, cohesive lineage:<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Identity, and the “culture” that goes with it, is conjectural, invented<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">and inventive, not intrinsic —this is the age of mestizo culture, of <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(in [James] Clifford’s phrasing) an “unprecedented overlay of <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">traditions.” In any community multiple-identity structures are at play. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Communities overlap and intertwine, are local and spread out, tight-knit <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">and fragmented…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Caddel’s own poems are built on elements that “overlap and intertwine,” at once deeply rooted to a specific place (the rural landscape of northern England) and open to how that region might resonate within the greater world. This multiplicity is expressed in the manner by which his language bends and refashions itself with each poem. One gets the sense in Caddel’s poems that he is invoking ancient traditions, handed down informally from nature to poet and from voice to voice. But those traditions are remade to fit the living present in all its humility, delighting in the often-overlooked sheen of the ordinary to be found all around us. This exchange between the ancient and the now is registered in the following fragment from the first section of the book, where Caddel’s “folk” voice thrives:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">something reaching out to you<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>direct<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">from birdsong<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>from the warmth<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">of two people together<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for an instant<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">different from one another —<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">to wait perhaps a life<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for as much—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">lighthouse puts out its signals<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">to no ships<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but sings<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">a voice of life<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>how small it may seem<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">in the dark<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">That same “dark” is breached in the penultimate poem I mention above, called “Mist,” where a lighthouse is again used by Caddel. In four long paragraphs that take up an entire page, Caddell reminds us that what we’ve been reading is illusory. The opening sentences set a spectral and peaceful setting: “Towards evening the mist comes in off the sea without a sound, as if prearranged. The temperature drops and you squat on your heels to watch the eddies of brown tidal drift as droplets collect on your hair, your clothes, your skin.” Those “droplets” evoke the short, intense “songs” we have been reading in the previous pages. It’s as though the poet were reiterating one last time his position as an invisible observer. And in that invisibility, Caddel’s poetry is all the more alluring, staking out a field of its own, confident and subdued, taking pleasure in the sinews and unexpected paths of his words.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Uncertain Time</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> gathers inspiration from a broad range of sources, from nature to fellow poets to the pull of memory as rendered by the music of the silent page. One can read these pages multiple times and always find a surprising melody in its carefully calibrated forms. In a poem honoring the surrealist painter Paul Nash, we find a stanza that encapsulates the nighttime magic of this book. In the following stanza we can hear Caddel’s exquisite lines, so attuned to their own construction yet open to an errant, nocturnal pulse: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">An adventure of the air<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">at night. Trees<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">fused in mist as solid<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">as the ground. We were there,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">grounded, too: our<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">lost papers in a room<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">yet to be built.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">William Corbett has recently departed for New York, a move that deprives Boston of its most important source for experimental poetry. One hopes that Pressed Wafer will continue to publish such vital poetry as this book by Caddel, whose work deserves more readers here in the United States. That “room / yet to be built” is the invitation Richard Caddel’s poetry offers those readers lucky enough to encounter this marvelous book.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Guillermo Parra was born in Cambridge, MA in 1970 and lives in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Phantasmal Repeats</i> (Petrichord Books, 2009<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Caracas Notebook</i> (Cy Gist Press, 2006). As a translator, he has published <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">José Antonio Ramos Sucre: Selected Works</i> (University of New Orleans Press, 2012) and José Antonio Ramos Sucre, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">From the Livid Country</i> (Auguste Press, 2012).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-8550405125254850172012-12-13T23:25:00.000-08:002012-12-17T17:29:51.853-08:00LETTERS TO MADELEINE: TENDER AS MEMORY by GUILLAUME APOLLINAIREJEFF HARRISON Engages<br />
<br />
<strong><em>Letters To Madeleine: Tender As Memory</em> by Guillaume Apollinaire, Edited by Lawrence Campa, Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith</strong><br />
<em>(Seagull Books, London, 2010)</em><br />
<br />
[each line below is an excerpt from Apollinaire's <em>Letters To Madeleine]</em><br />
<em></em><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There is an inkwell<br />
tender as<br />
a panther's laugh<br />
<br />
the first inkwell<br />
to be<br />
a secret Bacchante<br />
<br />
What nerve!<br />
It is Venus herself fastened upon her prey<br />
<br />
a silver wound in the sun<br />
the towns one by one become keys<br />
<br />
Hold fast,<br />
delightfully dark<br />
Bavarian belt buckle<br />
<br />
melancholy is<br />
the fool's parsley<br />
sardonic<br />
sardonic<br />
<br />
years and years<br />
pale epigones of<br />
rabbits' noses<br />
epigones<br />
pale as<br />
a double bridge of snow<br />
<br />
years and years<br />
brandished like sabres<br />
like snails' eyes<br />
made from the rays of the sun<br />
<br />
And what a sun the errant mouth<br />
<br />
under the veil of Allegory<br />
the life of Coleridge<br />
shakes me as Samson shook<br />
I who live in the forest<br />
<em>in the shadows of the forest</em><br />
<em></em><br />
witches<br />
clack clack<br />
so-and-so<br />
tack-tack-tacking<br />
<br />
mice, I mean -- not witches<br />
<br />
There is an inkwell<br />
upright as<br />
the spells of the Etruscans<br />
<br />
The second inkwell<br />
to be<br />
a secret Bacchante<br />
<br />
What nerve!<br />
Silent? I forbid it!<br />
<br />
hurrah for Madeleine<br />
hurrah<br />
hurrah<br />
<br />
And here she is on the balcony<br />
toppling dwarf suns<br />
hurrah<br />
<br />
<em>pip-pop-boom</em><br />
oh my Poppaea<br />
snuggled between<br />
a mason and a woodcutter<br />
<br />
a pair of doves<br />
in disguise<br />
names but I don't know them<br />
<br />
honey and light<br />
perhaps<br />
<br />
Madeleine?<br />
Is she smiling? Dreaming?<br />
The bird Madeleine<br />
falling back down to<br />
rotten pears<br />
<br />
pale epigones of<br />
sabre and revolver<br />
cherry and lilac<br />
<br />
for two pins<br />
a cloud of flies<br />
would block out the sun<br />
<br />
for<br />
Rimbaud's louis d'or<br />
I'll try to <br />
poetic more<br />
<br />
for Madeleine<br />
I mean --<br />
for Madeleine</blockquote>
****<br />
<br />
Jeff Harrison reviewed books for the past eleven issues of <em>Galatea Resurrects</em>. He has publications from <em>Writers Forum, MAG Press, Persistencia Press</em>, <em>White Sky Books,</em> and <em>Furniture Press</em>. He has e-books from <em>Blazevox, xPress(ed), </em>and<em> Argotist Ebooks.</em> His poetry has appeared in <em>An Introduction to the Prose Poem </em>(Firewheel Editions), <em>The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II </em>(Meritage Press and xPress(ed)), <em>The Chained Hay(na)ku Project </em>(Meritage Press and xPress(ed)), <em>Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Xerography, Moria, NOON: journal of the short poem, Dusie, MiPOesias, EOAGH, EXPLORINGfictions</em>, and elsewhere. You can read his poetry <a href="http://the-otolith.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/jeff-harrison-our-actaeon-again.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=111">here</a>. You are welcome to visit <em><a href="http://anticview.blogspot.com/">Antic View</a></em>.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-55018865001902146432012-12-13T23:15:00.000-08:002012-12-17T13:07:37.275-08:00MAYBE A PAINTER by CHRISTINA FISHER<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">BILL SCALIA Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Maybe a Painter</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"> by Christina Fisher<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">(Auguste Press, San Francisco, CA, 2009)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">As an introduction to Christina Fisher’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maybe a Painter</i>, consider the short poem “Against the Sky”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">standing near shadow, a steeple<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">or a teepee, your silhouetted<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">figure: ears & arms & legs<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">all tired of me.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">That final line is heartbreaking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poem starts by taking the reader into the sacramental / aboriginal (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">steeple</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">teepee</i>), and then to romance (the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">silhouetted figure</i>) and seems to beg reading as a love poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we are misdirected, unprepared, for the last line:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>what must the speaker feel to hold that romance, and have it so far removed?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">After reading Christina Fisher’s work, my overall impression is that when she is brief, compact, and the images specific and clear, she’s terrific.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consider, for example, her poem “Take Me to the River”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Black earth, it was 1988 when I moved out of there<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">my little transistor radio, hits on Z104<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">YWC Summer Camp 1983, I remember walking around the woods with my stereo<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">1985, I remember 1986 with my Schwinn<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Freestyle Predator bike -- oval section of the top tube<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">baby blue -- I remember this song:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and the woods<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">at Sunset<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>tall oaks<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">lichen on limestone<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The images are sharp, so much so that I needn’t have had the same experience to know its authenticity; the details (the blue bike, the radio, the call letters) connect so closely to a shared experience (of a certain age, perhaps; the poet nicely skips through the range of specific years 1983 to 1986, and though I don’t relate to that specific era, I know the span of those years in the poem conform to adolescence) and a larger sense of longing -- to escape, to move out of the house and into the woods, into the world -- that the poem becomes universal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The specific, writ large, elicits the universal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">But notice again -- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i> song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The demonstrative doesn’t point to anything beyond the title.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can do some research and find out that “Take Me to the River” is a Talking Heads cover of an Al Green song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I might even listen to the song and be able to determine, from both the lyrics and from David Byrne’s odd, disaffected vocal style why this particular version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">song</i> remains in the poet’s mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it would require work outside the page.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As nice as this small poem is, it lets me down at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">I’m afraid this is characteristic of Fisher’s diction; many of the poems in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maybe a Painter</i> have the vertiginous effect created by the unconnected relative pronoun, unidentified <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i>, unmotivated use of the indefinite pronoun. At times, the diction seems so forced that I am at a loss to make sense of the resulting language, as in the poem “Moment Sun”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">what was so bright, a texture<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">against fingers, this night<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">burning comets out, this<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">plight of lost stars never<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">yet somehow always to be<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">renamed again & over my high<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Sabbath strung wrong time<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">right place, please accept<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">my apology as it comes from<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">form, as an extension of my hand<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">wrought true, tenured romance<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">remain here<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Or this, from the poem “Dear Senator”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">She did it, gone today<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>forever in some way<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>this morning<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">very early although she sd<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>last week: I died 5,000 years ago.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>keep at it, keep at it, keep at it, <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">start over fog on Sutra tower, to teach me things<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">like a blue-silver line running down the back of the leg<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">tell me where the pain is, hand-sewn stockings.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Certain images adhere -- the comet, the blue-silver line (though I’m not sure whether it’s the “line” itself being addressed by the question “tell me where the pain is”) -- but I am lost in the swirl of verbiage and tenuous line breaks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But perhaps this is Fisher’s point: if one of the jobs of the poet is to render into language unqualifiable human experience, then her form and wordplay beg the question: is the subject of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maybe a Painter</i> the impossibility of describing human experience?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What does poetry owe to the reader?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps this is the basis of Fisher’s project.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consider an interesting moment in the poem “Big Time”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">To you who are not here<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>when I am<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">heretofore<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>unseen<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">needing none other<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">so these diaphanous<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>screen you to me, rough<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">new prizes, hooded & cloaked<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">stoked it is<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">to be so like a tree<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">invisibly growing, redwood<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>holding cones<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">no-berries, yes-birds<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>somewhere there are other<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">animals lowing<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">beside mills, flowers opening:<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Behold<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>a year, a season<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">both now coming.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">I like the word “diaphanous,” but I can’t make sense of it as a noun (?) before the verb “screen” (unless the poets in tends “screen” as a plural noun, as in “these diaphanous screen<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">s,</i>” but this is not what’s on the page).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I might imagine the poet is using “screen” as both noun <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> verb to connect the idea of invisibility (or non-availability) of the opening lines to the “rough, new prizes” that follow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After lines six and seven, the images cohere; but the irruption of the syntax in this case frustrates my ability to read the poem as a whole.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doubling a part of speech is a clever device to question the volatibility of meaning, and as well to utilize a double-edged word: the subject of a sentence is expressed through the action or expressed condition of the verb, and the verb defines the action or condition of the subject; the relationship is necessarily dialectical. So, what happens when one word contains both?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Semantically, this is an impossibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To combine a stated <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thing</i> and the expressed action or condition of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thing</i> into one word defies logic (and thus is uniquely open to poetic practice).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">I’m focusing attention on this one feature in this poem because this is the most compelling moment of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maybe a Painter</i>, and unfortunately it falls just short of fulfillment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the final analysis, I find myself longing for the clarity and simplicity of the first six lines of “Take Me to the River” and the raw emotion of “Against the Sky.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Bill Scalia has published essays on literature and film in the journals <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Religion and Literature</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Literature/Film Quarterly</i>, and in the anthology <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also edited the anthology <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Classic Critical Views: Ralph Waldo Emerson</i>, and is currently at work on a book concerning Emersonian aesthetics, poetry, and film.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dr. Scalia teaches literature and writing at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-39552775008622815142012-12-13T23:10:00.000-08:002012-12-17T13:04:22.099-08:00RING OF BONE: LEW WELCH COLLECTED POEMS<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">JEAN VENGUA Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<em><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">RING OF BONE: LEW WELCH COLLECTED POEMS</span></b></em><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">, Editor Donald Allen<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(City Lights / Grey Fox, San Francisco, 2012)</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Circling and Singing Through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ring of Bone<o:p></o:p></i></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The photograph of Lew Welch wearing an animal pelt on the cover of the recent edition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ring of Bone</i> portrays what might be an outdoorsman and adventurer, but there’s something else going on there. He looks with disarmingly open and youthful eyes off toward some distraction beyond the photographer’s lens. According to Gary Snyder’s 2012 introduction to this collection, Welch had “a way with guns” (and alcohol); but you wouldn’t know it to look at this picture. He’s almost smiling, looking out at the world with guarded curiosity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">This is my first read-through of his work. I read about half-way through the book, then jumped around, skipped to his “Language is Speech” lecture at the back of the volume, then skipped forward, read from the middle of the book to end, and returned to different sections or “books.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ring of Bone</i> is autobiographical: each section is in itself a “book” of poems covering a range of years. For example, Book II (Hermit Poems) and Book III (The Way Back) are separate, but both cover the years 1960--1964.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Welch viewed the shape of the book as “circular, or back and forth,” a “form [that] never ends.” There’s even a poem entitled “Circle Poems”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Circle Poems<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Whenever I have a day off, I write a new poem.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Does this mean you shouldn’t work, or that you<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Write best on your day off?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">For example, this is the poem I wrote today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">It begins with a statement; he writes a new poem. Then the mind rambles forward, interrogating, on its quest for answers, as it always does, and he lets it roll out as it will; then it rolls right back to the beginning: this <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">itself</i> is the poem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">He wanted his words to be simple, accurate, and I guess “(I Saw Myself)” is as good an example as any in the book:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">(I Saw Myself)<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">I saw myself<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">a ring of bone<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">in the clear stream<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">of all of it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">and vowed,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">always to be open to it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">that all of it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">might flow through<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">and then heard<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">“ring of bone” where<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">ring is what a<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">bell does. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Maybe this is how he rests, now, after walking off into the forest with his gun, never to be seen again, body never recovered—a ring, or curve of bone in a stream. Absolute thing, clear sound of water.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">In the Red Monk’s[1] commentary on the poem, “The Rider Riddle,” Welch conjures up <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Manjusri</i>, riding on a lion and wielding a sword, the Buddha who cuts through crap. That’s the idea: accuracy. Not a goal, something to achieve, but what naturally happens when you listen, open to the stream.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Sometimes, that means to be open to the “din” of language: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Tizuvthee, Old Soapy, land where Thoreau sat and Whitman<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">walked, despised of all nations, Strontium, alone<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Tizuvthee<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Fucked L.A. starlet of tiny dream untrue even to your<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Tiny dream intolerable up-tight dirty noise New<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">York, rusty muscle Chicago, hopeless Cleveland<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Akron Visalia alcoholic San Francisco suicide<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Tizuvthee, I sing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">-excerpt from “Din Poem.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">He writes, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">“I’ve tried to keep the din while still being accurate to the poise of mind that lets us know what’s what. Sometimes I’ve called this din ‘Letting America speak for itself.’ Often it’s a depressing job.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">But I still have faith that if I do this right, accurately, the sound will emerge a ‘meaningless din of joy.’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Welch had met and admired William Carlos Williams for his concise use of everyday language, and in “Din Poem,” the language of madmen, the national anthem, and the rambling, cursing tone of wandering, rootless men rings out. Speaking of “madmen”: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">“Raid Kills Bugs Dead”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Welch penned that, while working for an ad agency.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">On the same page, the image of an eighth note marks another poem, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“SUPERMARKET SONG,” </i>because Welch liked to sing, and had a fine voice. He wrote, “This book is a book of scores, for the voice. The scores will become poems only while they are sounded, performed, sung…Far too many of our pleasures are spectator sports already.” He wanted his readers to “actively perform” the poems, themselves. Go ahead, try it yourself:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Super Anahist cough syrup tastes as good as the syrup they put<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">on ice cream<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Super Anahist cough syrup tastes as good as the syrup they put<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">on ice cream.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Super Anahist cough syrup tastes as good as the syrup they put <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">on ice cream.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Let’s take out the car and park it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">at the big new super market<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">and go on inside and see<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">what they got for you and me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Look at all the brand names!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Aren’t they really grand names!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Continental Can Corporation of America<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Has arranged that to be!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">I have a difficult time with the first three stanzas. Is it because I don’t have the music of Wall Street in me? It sounds like something written on the side of a box, and something in me resists. But then, that’s the poem/song. I do remember “Super Anahist”; I was probably dosed with it as a kid, and the sound of it makes me want to sneeze. The two stanzas following it go better, because it’s like a little ditty that might go on in my head as I walk through the grocery, only now accompanied by a few lines from “Gangnam Style.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The poems indicate that Welch moved back and forth between city and country, a “hermit” at times, seeking some kind of pure state, perhaps, often on Mt. Tamalpais:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Praises, Tamalpais,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perfect in Wisdom and Beauty,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">She of the Wheeling Birds<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">By “pure,” I don’t mean clean, or snow white. But again, that bone-ringing:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">They smell sweet<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">meat is dry on their talons<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The very opposite of<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>death<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Bird of re-birth<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>buzzard<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Meat is rotten meat made<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>sweet again and<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Lean, unkillable, wing-locked<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>soarer till he’s but a<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Speck in the highest sky<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>infallible<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Eye finds Feast! On<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>baked concrete<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>free!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Squashed rabbit ripened:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>our good cheese<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(to keep the highways clean, and bother no Being)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>-excerpt from “Song of the Turkey Buzzard”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Later, he writes what might be his own anthem of freedom):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">NOT THE BRONZE CASKET BUT THE BRAZEN WING<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">SOARING FOREVER ABOVE THEE O PERFECT<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">WHEELING<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Much has been said about Welch’s beat- and hippie-era friends—Kerouac, Duncan, Snyder, Kandel, Kyger—his reverence for Gertrude Stein, his alcoholism and squirrel shooting, his death. So what? I say.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">I’m not finished with Lew Welch, yet. More to read. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">It’s not all pretty Buddhist haiku-land, but often there is joy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: x-small;">[1] The Red Monk was Welch’s alter-persona.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="vengua"><strong><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Jean Vengua</span></strong></a><span style="mso-bookmark: vengua;"></span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"> has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Gavilan College, and California State University, Monterey Bay. She is the author of a collection of poetry, <em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Prau</span></em>, and a chapbook, <em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The Aching Vicinities</span></em>. With Mark Young, she co-edited the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">First Hay(na)ku Anthology</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II</i>. In the mid 1990s, Elizabeth H. Pisares and Jean Vengua formed Tulitos Press and published and edited the <em>Debut: the Making of a Filipino American Film</em> by Gene Cajayon and John Manal Castro, and <em>The Flipside</em>, by Rod Pulido. Her poetry and essays have been published in many journals and anthologies. She currently lives and works in Elkhorn, CA, near Salinas. Jean’s website on early 20th century U.S. Filipino periodicals is <a href="http://www.commonwealthcafe.info/">www.commonwealthcafe.info</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-16715621106906216452012-12-13T23:05:00.000-08:002012-12-18T09:13:30.130-08:00DIVINE MADNESS by PAUL PINES<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">BURT KIMMELMAN Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Divine Madness</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> by Paul Pines<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2012)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">The philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s idea of “absolute metaphor,” the psychologist Carl Jung’s idea of archetypal symbols in a “collective unconscious,” and the literary anthropologist Joseph Campbell’s idea of the “monomyth,” may or may not have much particularly to do with the poet Paul Pines’s journey into the self in <i>Divine Madness</i>, his newest collection of poems (from Marsh Hawk Press, beautifully designed by Claudia Carlson). That is, in the poems in this book, Pines—who, among his roles in life, is a psychoanalyst—takes us toward a reality that only art finally can bring us to touch. <i>Divine Madness</i> stands as a testament to the welcoming of the dream experience into the holism of human experience—rather than the dreamscape’s sequestration in so much of intellectual endeavor, some of it in poetry. Whether or not this latest volume of his is a culmination of his art or thinking (consider <i>My Brother’s Madness</i>, for example, his marvelously compelling prose memoir of some years ago, to say nothing of some of his earlier volumes of verse, or any intellectual contribution of his own to the discourse on the human psyche and ultimately the human condition), <i>Divine Madness</i> partakes of an ongoing, extended meditation on the unconscious and the hope for its integration into one’s daily awareness of self and world. And, as this book makes quite clear, the hope for escaping alienation resides in the access to experience unencumbered by common sense or logic or other means of control—to be sure (I would add, prompted by my reading of this wonderful volume), the escape from alienation aided and abetted by artistic creation.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">My own theory of the genesis of art, which is corroborated and deepened by Pines in these poems, is that it springs <i>not</i> from a realization of mortality but rather from the depth and vividness and the unrelenting insistence of the dream, which perhaps by definition must be incongruous with the world we conform to in our waking lives. Indeed, regardless of whether or not Pines—in this book or in other of his writings, or in his professional practice as an analyst, or in his life as that person we call Paul Pines—would agree with my theory, and however much we perceive the limitations of the waking world, arguably its unreality, one in which our dreams are terribly and fascinatingly out of place, this extraordinary volume of poetry demands that we attend to reality or a deeper reality whence emerges happiness, a reality finally only accessible through art (especially, perhaps, despite the burden of language, through poetry).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">I would offer two exemplary samples from Pines’s book, selected almost at random:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">The moving finger writes<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">in steaming eons<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">as lines<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">on a child’s forehead<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">form in the recesses<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">of sleep<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"> the unseen<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"> enters and departs<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">on a river<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">that flows both ways [.] <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">(<i>The Serpent in the Bird</i> Part 5, p. 9)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">We never know what to do<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">with one who appears from nowhere<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">to change our hearts<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">but send him into exile<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">on a raft of snakes<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">or into the night sky<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"> in which we meet<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"> ourselves<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;"> in search of ourselves[.]<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">(<i>Who Knows the Knower</i> Part 44, p. 60)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">That this poetry disturbs, even as it purports to explain (<i>because</i> it purports to explain?), must go without saying. That this poetry delights is also a fact of life. Yet to my mind <i>Divine Madness</i> is no <i>Tibetan Book of the Dead</i>. Rather, this is the testament of a poet, and so its words soar well beyond any intellectual construct the “unbeautiful banker,” as George Oppen put it, might insist upon. The poems in this book are vital.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">I wonder if any of Pines’s many books before now has granted such sure access to the fount of lyrical truth that resides within this new book. Its beauty and—that which is integral in this beauty, its insight—is something that stays with you after putting the book down, and I wonder if it ever does let go. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Burt Kimmelman</span></span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">has published seven collections of poems, the most recent being</span></span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic;">The Way We Live</span></span></i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">(Dos Madres Press, 2011), as well as four books of literary criticism (with a fifth forthcoming) and more than eighty articles on medieval, modern, and contemporary poetry. Recent interviews of Kimmelman are available on the internet: with Tom Fink in</span></span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic;"><a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/40/iv-kimmelman-ivb-fink.shtml" title="http://jacketmagazine.com/40/iv-kimmelman-ivb-fink.shtml"><span style="text-decoration: none;">Jacket2</span></a></span></span></i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">(text), and with George Spencer at</span></span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=burt+kimmelman+1+-+poetry+thin+air&oq=burt+kimmelman+1+-+poetry+thin+air&gs_l=youtube.12...14706.18324.0.21921.3.3.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1ac.1." title="http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=burt+kimmelman+1+-+poetry+thin+air&oq=burt+kimmelman+1+-+poetry+thin+air&gs_l=youtube.12...14706.18324.0.21921.3.3.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1ac.1."><span style="text-decoration: none;">Poetry Thin Air</span></a></span></span></i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">(video). More on Kimmelman can be found, recently, at “<a href="http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/Kimmelman.htm" title="http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/Kimmelman.htm"><span style="text-decoration: none;">Burt Kimmelman: A Survey</span></a>” (critical commentary and poetry samples selected by Karl Young, a part of his</span></span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lighthom.htm" title="http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lighthom.htm"><span style="text-decoration: none;">Light & Dust Poetry Anthology</span></a>), and at Kimmelman’s website</span></span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://burtkimmelman.com/" title="http://burtkimmelman.com/"><span style="text-decoration: none;">BurtKimmelman.com</span></a>. He teaches at New Jersey Institute of Technology.</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-20867115451233049642012-12-13T23:00:00.000-08:002012-12-17T13:00:39.701-08:00RE- by KRISTI MAXWELL<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Re-</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> by Kristi Maxwell<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2011)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The first word in Kristi Maxwell’s fantastic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Re-</i> (Ahsahta Press, 2011) is “Filleted,” a word that<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a> doubles back on itself, undoes itself, meaning as it does both <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bound</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">divided</i>. In this there is an echo of the book’s title, with its dual and opposing implications of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doing again</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">undoing</i>. Re- also sounds like he and she, the two characters in the book. Those characters’ binding/division—or, to say it another way, their re(-)lationship—is the book’s primary subject. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">I have only gotten as far as the first word here, but one gets the sense that nearly every word, line, piece of punctuation in this carefully constructed book, which manages to be precise and oblique at once, could be put under a magnifying glass, and a deeper, clearer, stranger meaning—with implications for the rest of the book—would emerge. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Especially in the book’s first and last cycle, Maxwell seems to be led by sound in almost the way another writer might be lead by image. Instead of describing a room that the mind’s eye can move across, from a rug to a table to a chair, Maxwell travels among similar sounds: “Gnats deconstruct / their breakfast fastidiously, feast-tediously” (7). Due to their like sounds, breakfast becomes—or is exposed as— a tedious feast.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The book is filleted into four “cycles,” the first of which, “(Action/Figure),” seems based around the question, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What is the place of one’s body when one’s life is about language?</i> The uneasy balance between the lives these this couple leads in language and their physical lives is one of the concerns here. As Maxwell puts it, “they’ve been known to tighten mauve corsets / too tightly against the bosom of their speech” (10). Language presses against their bodies, and their bodies seem to fade from their own corporeality and into language even as they are described. At the beginning of the cycle, Maxwell writes, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">in this map of her face as part of the upper states <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">he wades through with his gazing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Is not her due morpheme-gashed, meaning <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">meaning leans toward her <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">but barely. (2)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Here, her face quickly dissolves into lake, his gazing, and ultimately into bits of language to be parsed for meaning. It feels like for this couple (or maybe for every couple), language is the destination that a physical place like the Great Lakes could only pretend to be. But once the couple arrive, meaning is only “barely” present. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">These themes are backgrounded in the second cycle, “(Enter/Veer/Confirm),” in which the couple take a journey on a “boat built entirely / of home” (17). In this cycle, centered on notions of ceremony—words like occasion, performance, commitment, and formal (even sometimes out of context) imply a wedding—our he and she feel most bound, least divided. Sometimes here, even the natural world seems to be under their spell: “The progress of their leisure was such / that they cancelled noon concealed it within a cloudy beaker” (19). Later, “They bettered the yard with trees weeping rope” (22). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">I read trouble in the relationship in the third cycle, “(Configure/Filter).” Phrases like this suggest that something indefinable is wrong between them: “They swooned / at the times that wooed them toward wrenching / yet retched each time tips reached their heads” (31). There are leave-taking words on nearly every page of this cycle: words like breach, distance, strays, exits, and apart. One of the pages begins, “Could not / he have made for the dinner plates / placemats out of prayer” (36). To my ear this sounds like an accusation aimed at him, voiced by her—phrased as it is, negatively—could <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i>—driving home her disappointment and frustration. On the following page, we get what is perhaps his perspective on her: “his frontal lobe suppers on posies off an oddly- / poised crow’s left wing. She’s nearby and not. Near bye, she has torn seeing out of her / iris.” The couple feels divided rather than bound; he versus she. With his posies and crow’s wing supper, ignoring his dinner-plate and placemat duties, he seems to have shirked his responsibilities, and she, while physically present, has given up “seeing [him?].” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">In the final cycle, “(Coat/Verb/Touch),” the couple takes a trip. This section includes several pages that to my mind could stand alone as individual poems. For example, the brilliant consideration of bees, which, Maxwell writes, “know their product / so concretely they need neither names / for themselves nor it, thus fitting / bees are phoneme-twinned to the verb / ‘I,’ who is instantaneously he and she” (51). This meditation recalls the first cycle’s focus on language—and it deepens and complicates my experience of that cycle, suggesting that perhaps part what is difficult about being in a heterosexual couple is that awareness/self-consciousness that one of you is a he and one a she. This section also contains some of the most beautiful lyric passages in the book. For example, “Rouge sups the cheekbone as lounging sups the spine. O,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>/ howl their hands, laced with that chance of having” (52). Or, “Where need hides single file / foreshadows with her fate imbedded there” (46). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">None of the poems in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Re-</i> have titles, besides the cycle titles, which, because they are parenthesized, feel whispered, dimmer than typical section titles. Contributing to that sense is how elliptical they are. It is possible to read the prefix re- into each word in the cycle titles; rather than providing clarity (of narrative, say, or context), that additional set of meanings casts a whole new set of shadows across each cycle. This wonderful book is filled with many such elegant challenges to and opportunities for making and unmaking meaning. What I like most about it is its fresh, stripped down, virtually toneless honesty about romantic relationships—how to the people inside it, a relationship can, minute-to-minute, teeter between meaning nothing and meaning everything. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Lucy Biederman (<a href="http://lucybiederman.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: blue;">http://lucybiederman.blogspot.com/</span></a>) is a doctoral student in English Literature at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. She is the author of a chapbook, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Other World</i> (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Literary Review, Parcel, RHINO, Ping Pong, ILK, Shampoo</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gargoyle</i>. </span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-83082443879984607362012-12-13T22:50:00.000-08:002012-12-17T13:00:00.660-08:00MAY APPLE DEEP by MICHAEL SIKKEMA<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">EILEEN TABIOS Engages</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><em>MAY APPLE DEEP</em> by Michael Sikkema<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><em>(Horse Less Press, Providence, RI, 2012)</em></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Well, wow. I almost ignored this chap by Michael Sikkema. It was sort of a stray order from that "bare-bones" but MIGHTY publisher, Horse Less Press. But I vaguely recall some poems I'd read before by Sikkema and their effect made me sufficiently curious to order <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MAY APPLE DEEP</i>. No regrets. In fact, I really really like this chap ....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">... which is a chap-length poem that begins invitingly by catching your attention with its attention:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Begin with tresspass<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> to get anywhere<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> ripe in the first place<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I guess this poem might be classified as postmodern pastoral—a lot of folks seem to be writing such nowadays.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sikkema’s does it with verve, wit and a fabulous ear.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The music, especially, is worth nota bene-ing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is accomplished by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">purity</i>—a word with baggage, I know, but which I can’t help but choose to describe how there is no single unnecessary word in the entire poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Combined with its line-breaks, the read becomes a rhythm. Here’s an excerpt:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Sometimes I’m the wrong animal is all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In the petroglyphs<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>on the rocks<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>there’s an archer always<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>and some half-human<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>begging back<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>story, silence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Here there is me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>just pointing <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">out continuities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I started<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">happening all<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">the floors were<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>mustard, a handful<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>of powerful outlaws<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>had a lasting effect<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">on men’s hairstyles.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Sikkema’s juxtapositions of nature and man’s effects are fresh, as fresh as the collaged images (not sure if they’re collages but they look like collages) on the front and back covers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the front cover, a gun, an alligator, a strawberry and either a teapot or soup tureen combine to create its own creature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the back, a grenade is affixed to a palm tree, looking as natural there as the coconuts that used to hang there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both results offer believable new creatures, in the same way that Sikkema’s poem hangs together despite a wide disparity of references ranging over “a skillet full of gravel” to “albino senators.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It works so deftly, and this excerpt perhaps captures something about the poem’s underlying infrastructure:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">With a fine address for a hermit<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">and a live feed, this<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>mud bog pastoral<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>has a gangsta<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">soundtrack,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">and later, pretty<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>loud snow<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>with no working head<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>lights to deal it out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">So there’s music (soundtrack), a fine musculature throughout (gangsta) but what’s the light?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ahhh.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, the poet is a philosopher, too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This ain’t just a walk through a swamp in Michigan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How about this line:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: small; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">…any finished work that points at the unfinished</span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Or the excerpt above that begins the poem?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Philosophy—like poetry—can effect change, certainly change a reader’s mindset.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poem, on its first page, asks,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Can you tell that story so<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Usually, in reading I’m focused on how the words change me, the reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here, the poem’s persona is so strong you feel the persona/poet changing as the poem unfolds. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like the observed affecting the observer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a testament to how deeply the poet went to create this poem, even more impressive given the author’s note at the back that he “believes in a trickster poetics of trance and chance and/or telling it how it is.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The experience of MAY APPLE DEEP was unexpected but totally welcome for its deeply satisfying read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by <em>Galatea Resurrects</em> because she's its editor. But she is pleased to point you elsewhere to recent reviews of her books. </span><a href="http://marshhawkpress.org/tabios5.html"><strong><i><span style="text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><span style="color: purple; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA</span></span></i></strong></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, a collaboration with j/j hastain, is reviewed by Joey Madia at <em><strong><a href="http://www.literaryaficionado.com/2012/05/review-of-eileen-r-tabios-and-jj.html">New Mystics Review</a></strong></em>; Edric Mesmer at <em><strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/11/publications-byedited-by-megan-kaminski.html">Yellow Field 6</a></strong></em>; and Zvi A. Sesling at <em><strong><a href="http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-relational-elations-of-orphaned.html">Boston Area Small Press & Poetry Scene</a></strong></em>. She also just released a new poetry collection, <em><strong><a href="http://5shadesofgray.blogspot.com/">5 Shades of Gray</a></strong></em> (i.e. press, Florida, 2012).</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-83153507019985097652012-12-13T22:45:00.000-08:002012-12-17T12:58:56.421-08:00CAPTAIN POETRY'S SUCKER PUNCH... by KENNETH WARREN<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">JIM MCCRARY Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980-2012</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"> by Kenneth Warren<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">(BlazeVOX[books], Buffalo, NY.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>2012)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Did you read that ...<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>467 freakin pages!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s a lot of text, friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is, indeed,what some would call ‘a doorstop’ of a book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, indeed it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why not, if you need it, use it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is also a milestone (pardon that pun, jeez), an amazing collection of Warren’s writings, amazing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who knew. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well now there is no excuse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This book should be on lots of lists….of course it won’t for all the obvious reasons readers of <em>Galatea </em>know all too well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So maybe it shouldn’t be on any list…would just bring us all down for sure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now to me, a rather simple guy out here, the writing for, the editing, printing, publishing, mailing and whatnot involved with Warren’s delightful publication <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">House Organ</i> would seem to take up all his time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>467 pages is a lot of text.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And here it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Escaping the Punkhole of the Homeric Captain’s Rabbit Den….so to speak.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Well what do you want to know about the past 20 years of “small press/little mag/small time” poetics in the USA?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is certainly more than just a collection of Kenneth’s publications in the above mentioned HO magazine….you can see from pubs acknowledged i.e. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rolling Stock, Exquisite Corpse, Sulfur</i> et al….where Warren is known or seen (in print).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Warren has certainly been a big part of what, for better words, I will call the ‘invisible poetry nation’ which exists within and alongside and under and next too and beneath and between what might be called the ‘big deal’ or ‘academic’ or ‘MFA driven’ or ‘hipster east coast’ poetry scene(s) in the USA today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The point being made here is that, to me, a whole lot of those involved in public poetics these days seem to skip from the days of Ted Kerrigan to the day of C a Conrad without noticing what went in between.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(This is based on such data as is available on the Poetry Foundation Harriet Blog.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here we go.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The book is for the most part broken into two areas ….first -- everthing Charles Olson centric and second -- remarks and reviews of dozens of poet you might not recognize unliess you followed small press writings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No question that Kenneth Warren is writing the most articulate and educated texts concerning Charles Olson of anyone on the planet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I must confess upfront that most of what he does write about Olson is way over my head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However it is must read if you want to read someone able to dive deep into the meta of Olson…the physic, the mystic, the clinical physical, the mental and the magical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Warren is on to it all and can write to keep one interested even if (and here my hand is up waving) one does not or cannot follow all the reference Warren gathers in his explications of Olson’s poetics or magic or whatnot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would not hesitate to say that Warren on Olson is gonna match the likes of Duncan on HD and Lisa Jarnot on Duncan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is, then, one of the great critical collection on one of the leading 20<sup>th</sup> century writers…Charles Olson.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which would make Captain Poetry’s book worth investing in for sure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The other best reason to spend that cash is to read Warren’s take on a long list of writers who stand out in the last half of 20<sup>th</sup> and beginning of 21<sup>st</sup> century here in the USA.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if you will notice that the majority of those included in Warren’s musing are not exactly household names in Williamsburg, NY or Chicago, Ill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let me list a few names:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stephen Ellis, Tod Thillemam, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Clarke, Ray Bremser, Rochelle Ratner,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sharon Doubiago, Lyn Lifshin,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Diane Ward, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gil Sorrentino are a few of the “outsiders” covered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Others like Eigner, Waldman, Wieners, Eshleman, Dorn, Codrescu, Warsh, Myles, Howe, Wakoski.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Antin….are some rather well known poets of mid-century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">I guess what I am saying is that not many collections of writings in either published anthology’s or other media are going to include such a diverse and un-discussed group of writers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perloff aint doin it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Harriet” aint doin it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bernstein aint doin it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Warren is…did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Like me, you might not always agree with what Warren has to say or how he says it or who he says it about…but, but I would suggest that you sure as hell will be entertain, amused, educated and enhanced as you read through this book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And just one more thing…it is 467 pages sure and you would think I could find something to quote in this engagement….well I didn’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Didn’t look for anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is just the way it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here is what I say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Find the book, read the book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here we go.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">McCrary's latest chapbook <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">NOT NOT</i> now available from Hanks Original Loose Gravel Chapbooks. You can find video of him reading from Kathy Ackers Pussy King of the Pirates if you look for the Taproom Poetry Series blog. You can find him at the book table in basement of the 8th St Taproom during regular poetry reading series. Other recent publications include <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Es Verdad, Po Doom</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ReVeiled</i>. He lives on fixed income so dont fuk with his social security!!!!!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><em><span style="font-size: small;">Editor's Note: Also, here he somewhat is with his kitty kat Abby!<o:p></o:p></span></em></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-20016630212084007562012-12-13T22:40:00.000-08:002012-12-17T12:57:54.968-08:00NEGRO LEAGUE BASEBALL by HARMONY HOLIDAY<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">LUCY BIEDERMAN Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Negro League Baseball</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> by Harmony Holiday <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(Fence Books, New York, 2011)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">I am interested by Harmony Holiday’s inclusion of an afterword to her excellent debut <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Negro League Baseball</i>, winner of the 2011 Motherwell Prize, because one of the things I love most a<a href="http://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>bout this book is how little Holiday seems to care whether her reader understands her direct meaning. As her speaker combs through the sounds, sense, and senselessness of memory and family, she leaves the reader behind in a way that is interesting and beautiful. What the reader can “get” out of this book will not be increased by knowing details of Holiday’s upbringing or receiving a broader theoretical context; rather, Holiday, in delving into her own depths, invites or encourages a kind of parallel process in the reader—or invites us to know her mind as opposed to her experience. So it seems somewhat strange that of all poetry books, this one would include a mission-statement-like final page. Because some of the poems in the book could be read as mission statements (like the wonderful “Negro League”), the afterword—or the very fact that there is an afterword—could feel almost like an apology or an explanation for the book’s idiosyncrasies, even as it echoes and recounts them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Much of the emotional and poetical force in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Negro League Baseball</i> comes from the brilliant way Holiday introduces or contrasts those idiosyncrasies to various formal devices, creating poems that feel mysteriously and defiantly composed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In how she seeks to exert maximum control over how her reader <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hears</i> her, Holiday recalls for me both Frank Bidart and Gwendolyn Brooks. All three of these poets are concerned with the sounds of American speech and all three are ingenious employers of punctuation to convey speech. And yet, Holiday’s prosody is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">loose</i>, prose-like in a way that feels contradictorily laissez-faire and unlike Bidart or early Brooks. She excels at conveying the sound of a mind racing. For example, in “Assembly”: “my mother, with her casual sense of a language of the household scaffolded by words for average moments by words for disaster, for happier, bywords, I can’t think of any now”. It feels so beautiful and true-to-thought how Holiday just keeps going after this—the sense of propulsion through each poem, and throughout the whole book, is immense and powerful. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Holiday uses not only punctuation but synesthesia, soundplay, and plenty of other techniques to evoke feelings threaded back through memories, discarding sentence structure and our expectations about what a sentence should or will do to evoke more purely the experience of memory. In “A Rumor About More Earth,” the book’s first poem, she writes, “you look stepping, you look the pleasure feet burgundy.” In “Death by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Then,</i>” “I’m listening green, not like splendor, like latitude”. Even though I do not know exactly what she means in either of these passages, the sense of the speaker moving toward something specific in memory, throwing up words like going through old clothes, deciding what to give away, drives these moments. One of the most moving passages for me in the whole book appears in “Death by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Then</i>”: “Iowa wasn’t green, shag carpet green, still thinking the grass which gross out of tar shoulder, the carved shrug toward our such slick road.” I love this passage for the strong sense it gives me of a scene or image just beyond understanding, but many times return to in memory. The phrase “such slick road” feels like something once overheard that has become part of a child’s private language of description. This passage feels so true to me, so movingly close to the way I experience language and memory. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">There is a sense that the core of these poems cannot be uncovered or recovered—a feeling of swirling around rather than getting closer to a truth or a direct experience. Rhyme is used like events from the day returned to in dream, or like a deliberate misunderstanding, or like a child learning words by repeating them over and over, getting them a little bit wrong. In addition to sonic rhyme, there is image rhyme, such as in “A Rumor About More Earth”—the first stanza’s “Dumbed fire of a carved pumpkin, starting the threshold of a Virginia porch” becomes “Hunched father in a harvest lantern starting the threshold of an antique porch.” Or the repetition of the sentence structure and many of the words at the end of “Certain Ballads”: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">How we were staggering together through the streets where they keep flags and yachts until the morning watched us lean indoors, a terrible ordinary day<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How we were staggering through the streets together between flags and yachts, forming calluses we wouldn’t even notice on the bottoms of our empty footage<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>how bearable you’ve made it, beyond my wildest motives<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The way Holiday goes over and over this scene, even using many of the same words (“How we were …” “How we were…”), feels to me like strokes, caresses—an enactment of (or trying to convince herself or someone else?) just “how bearable” it really is. The rhyme/repetition is a kind of palliative. Here even “beyond my wildest motives” becomes a kind of rhyme, with the expected <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">beyond my wildest dreams</i>. This poem begins with the line “It’s said that he resisted and they beat him with sticks”; as in many of the poems here, a shadow of racial violence, tension, or fear is cast across the rest of the poem. In “Like I’m Simple,” Holiday again uses sound to create a new level of meaning, writing, “laughter is permanently in a middle, and why can’t his haunt me, in / fact, I forget how it sounds” This moment is staggeringly gorgeous for me because of Holiday’s incredible metrical control—that strong stress on “sounds” creates the feeling that there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">should</i> be a full rhyme here, but there just isn’t. That sense of absence evokes wrenchingly the absence of her father’s laughter. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Coursing throughout the book is a strong sense of resistance. Sentences refuse punctuation. Poems refuse line breaks. In “Assembly” Holiday writes, “Nor is my house a house nor is myself a self in the way they mean one occupant of one place called a body” Here and elsewhere, in bits and pieces, Holiday’s impulse toward refusal recalled for me Shakespeare’s sonnets, their frequent use of “nor that, nor that” construction (Holiday even uses that old-fashioned sentence structure) and enduring theme of what contradictions and multiplicities a single consciousness can contain. In “Home Negations,” a crushing statement of refusal that deals obliquely and simultaneously with poetics, race, place and personal identity, Holiday writes, “Not to want what they know, but to have the nerve to want it or not / the nerve but the bravery<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of shape<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to take place<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>which is to contradict<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>affection<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>similies” The ability to “contradict”—to be both formal and wild throughout and at once—is a freedom Holiday performs brilliantly throughout this book. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">It can be difficult to know how to read certain effects, especially variations in typographical inventions—for example, in “My Thoughts on Fire,” Holiday plays with the spacing around colons in a way that I am unsure how to interpret, giving us combinations like “texture:shine and a swimmer: saint and a wielding air<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and a dancer:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>remembered breeze and an end: in and an end (in), andanending: never.” The language throughout the rest of this book is so rich and inventive (instead of “from morning until night,” Holiday writes, “from can’t see in the morning ‘till can’t see at night”) that Holiday’s repeated “and a” sentence structure here feels flat; even the word “remembered” feels unnecessary given the context of the poem and the book—we are living in a remembered world here. Similarly, “Which Crosses You, Which Covers You,” begins with the phrase “Starting to go-to-law”; then, at the end of the poem, the phrase reappears as “starting to-go-to-law.” I don’t know how or whether to parse the slight variation between these two appearances. In “Two Tiered<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alliance,” Holiday uses typographical invention more successfully to my mind, with erratic spacing perhaps suggesting pauses in breath of different lengths. The poem is about the speaker’s mother’s wedding, the start of an unrecognizable new life for the speaker, and Holiday’s spacing also feels like a memory, or a relationship, nearly slipping away. In some of the poem’s gorgeous final stanzas, Holiday writes, “from the beginning flung into looking<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>on the freeway, in a wedding dress made of favors<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and birth / Hey Runner,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>run like you’re never // gonna be her<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>wearing that black gaze on your step<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>wait stop”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Of the book’s five sections, the second and third are the least speaker-driven, though in every section, the focal point of these poems is the language they are composed of and the movement of the mind they are composed by, rather than the self making the poem. It’s thrilling how this poet employs the music of language. Typical of these middle sections is “Absolutely,” a poem I didn’t know how to parse, but its rich soundplay allowed me to access it on a different level: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">…This one was just glancing at the vinepiece, mise-en-scene, beat machine, the same person jumping land into building—an electronic volume, tight jeans wearing-thinking maybe we’re <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">I marked the return to a more speaker-driven poem with the beginning of the book’s fourth section, with the wonderful poem “High Concept,” which also has more narrative coherence than most of the other poems here, as it traces and retraces with various lenses and apertures the affect of her father’s death on her family. Elsewhere in the fourth section, in “To My Paloma, My Tough Dove” Holiday repeats and reworks a series of words and sounds—locusts, “the things we know,” Gigolos, corners, whistle—to create an atmosphere of inevitability, stuck-ness, and sex. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">More moving than the strong net of sound Holiday creates are the silences, or more quiet moments, that contrast against them. For example, in “Ambassador,” which opens the final section: “Wear house shoes to the market and grab your daughter’s hand in traffic and catch her stacking rivers in / yard dirt<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>merrily, my father, a front a sea a flood, a Marxist, I love you.” I love this poem, this book, and this stunningly original poet, for how hard-earned this <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I love you</i> is, refracted against the rigorous rhyme and unreason preceding it. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">Lucy Biederman (</span><a href="http://lucybiederman.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-size: small;">http://lucybiederman.blogspot.com/</span></a><span style="font-size: small;">) is a doctoral student in English Literature at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. She is the author of a chapbook, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Other World</i> (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Literary Review, Parcel, RHINO, Ping Pong, ILK, Shampoo</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gargoyle</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-3142863315332042052012-12-13T22:35:00.000-08:002012-12-17T12:56:21.496-08:00MAP OF THE HYDROGEN WORLD by STEVE HALLE<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">GARRETT J. BROWN Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">“i fake it<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>i tell jokes<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>quote movies<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>anything— / gibberish<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>voices<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>vaudeville… / all I can hear / is my own voice speaking in tongues… / it was my first poem.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So announces the speaker in the opening poem of Steve Halle’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Map of the Hydrogen World</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This debut collection from Cracked Slab Books bravely seeks a poetics that can contain the multitude of voices and approaches that are so often at odds in contemporary poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And while poems that rely on a chorus of outside references, boldly incorporate borrowed material, and refuse any one style (formal or experimental) run the risk of seeming fractured or “speaking in tongues,” what emerges in Halle’s work is a genuine engagement with the poetic tradition in all of its incarnations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Embracing a modernist commitment to words as concrete objects, Halle isn’t afraid to grab found language and twist it, turn it, and shred it into something unexpected, as in “Gun Variation”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">what are you going to do when the guns are drawn?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">what</span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> are you <span style="color: white;">going to do when</span> the guns?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">what<span style="color: white;"> are you going</span> to <span style="color: white;">do when the guns are</span> draw?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">what are you?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">what are</span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> you <span style="color: white;">going to do when the guns</span> are<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">what are you</span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> going<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">what are you</span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> going<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">what are you</span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> go<span style="color: white;">i</span>n<span style="color: white;">g to do wh</span>e.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">In this nod to the work of Bruce Nauman, one can almost imagine the lines of the poem written in flashing neon, letters winking in and out of existence as new phrases glow in brilliant yellows, blues, and reds.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">But, unlike many who subscribe to a purely experimental poetics, this is a poet who doesn’t shrink from inhabiting a moment of lyrical narrative when the situation warrants—as the ending of “Obedients” demonstrates:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Sister whispered<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">while flames devoured the wooden door.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Deep in prayer, she did not look at the children<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">who put their heads down on clasped<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">hands, closed their eyes, and burned.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Halle is at his best, however, in poems where lyric intensity and linguistic experimentation are blended.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poem “materiality” is perhaps his most successful attempt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Splashing blocks of text in various fonts and sizes across the page, the poem explodes like a myriad of billboards over a Tokyo street.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And while some of these signs force us to confront words and phrases out of context (“suffer little children” attaining a double meaning when pulled out of the King James Bible) others provide us with moments of resonant narrative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Blending borrowed text from a variety of sources with language from museum labels at the Art Institute of Chicago, “materiality” expands to include not only the materiality of language but of art, religious ecstasy, and sexual desire as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is an elegiac poem that affirms the concrete reality of the world while simultaneously mourning its evanescence, as when Eleni Sikelianos imagines her sixteen year old father pulling a paintbrush hair from a Rousseau painting that “he fell for, and could not imagine living without.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The young man keeps this physical relic from a piece of art in his pocket for years, “fingering it until there is nothing left but a pinch of sand.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Whether drawing upon visual art or employing literary collage, Halle is constantly engaging with, expanding, or humorously toying with 20<sup>th</sup> century modernism and its descendent movements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“the love song of homer j. simpson,” easily the most funny (and fun) poem of the collection, achieves all of these effects most effortlessly:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">what jimmied donuts i’ve scarfed, and where, and why<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">i have forgotten, and what subtle chocolate iced cake<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">or boston crème lies staling on the countertop until morrow?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">A recording of Halle reading the poem (available on the National Council of Teachers of English website: <a href="http://www.ncte.org/tyca/poetrymonth"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">www.ncte.org/tyca/poetrymonth</span></a>) contributes an additional dimension.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His Eliot impression is so well done, you can almost hear the scratching record in the background—“materiality” (here of the human voice) emerging yet again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Garrett J. Brown is the author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Manna Sifting</i>, which won the 2009 Liam Rector First Book Prize from Briery Creek Press.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His poetry and creative nonfiction has appeared or is upcoming in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poetry East,</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">TriQuarterly</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Natural Bridge,</i> the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Poetry Journal</i>, the<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Ledge</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pif Magazine</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-22893529404383771712012-12-13T22:30:00.000-08:002012-12-17T12:55:49.205-08:00HART ISLAND by STACY SZYMASZEK<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">JAIME TOWNSEND Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; mso-bidi-font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">HART ISLAND</span></span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-weight: bold; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> by Stacy Szymaszek <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">(Albion Books, Philadelphia, 2009)</span></span></i></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-weight: bold; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">DISINTERNMENT: upon Stacy Szymaszek’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">HART ISLAND</span></i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Great things have happened / On earth and given it history</span></span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">(George Oppen - “A Language of New York”)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">I have to begin this as a lesson in space. In between lines how everything happens, how the dirt beneath us moves and suddenly we are ‘there’, faced with another that is the same, the future. Ghosts are more conditional, experiential; they are marked and marked over with something solid of our choosing. Within the possibilities of an endless cemetery, the breakdown of a unilateral dialogue begins; traces placed in the midst of a wordless space, only to be revived, called up as witness. And to imagine a ‘here’, the contemporaniety of each body that has ever existed; of stories, shared vestiges linking to form a core channel of breath. This site, where overheard lines become the picked-up construction site of a complete and resonating locale, a poetry—reading on the heap of a particulate history. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Like the absence in the pulse of the city, a silence that follows each beat:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‡<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Island of one<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">policy named for<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">its organ shape defunct<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">shoe compost TB<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Award winner un-<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">identified East Village<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">apartment dividend<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">soft body area<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">by 25 years<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">‡ Stacy Szymaszek’s long poem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hart Island</span></i> is a work of presence & material bound in real time, an “encountering” in the same way that George Oppen applied the term, describing the intimate relationship between mind of the poet and the flesh of the poem: “the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet’s perception, the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness” (“The Mind’s Own Place”). Our perception of time is real only insofar as we are interpenetrated by it, that it aggregates a multivalent<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> us</span></i>, drawing the relational together into a model that, by its nature, resists the strictly linear or straightforward. As each line opens itself up to hinge on the “real”, immediate moment, (which is never static but rather all-encompassing) a quiet, yet forceful pulse responds. Echoing sense, not declaring it. This is where enjambment and caesura can illustrate “one” to be “one million” – an island of humanity that is concurrent, full, yet metered by isolation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">‡ A meter couched in physicality; the poem’s consistently variable prosodic feet suggest walking – all the slight alterations of tension in the line’s musculature, insistent movement, the open-endedness of mobility (especially of a plotted mobility) that continues to unfold layers of experience. It’s a type of site-specific poetry that gets carried around by the poet, an aura or heat map radiating out from a seemingly singular point of reference which grows to encompass all of the daily activities that find a common resonance within it. Further, there are the latent potentialities that this form carries by its very nature – constant discovery, a simultaneous recognition of location and disruption (movement’s force), a fullness in the potentialities of place: “one foot in the other world / the other foot in the other world” (Ted Greenwald – “ONE FOOT”). I am thinking about George Albon’s book-length poem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Step</span></i> in connection to the duals paths traced throughout <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hart Island</span></i>; how both works display the ways in which a singular, natural, and unforced rhythm of thought will invariably take you to unexpected places – how sparseness on the page is not a constriction but, instead, an allowance for expansive conceptual movements that progress along a forking line; literally how much can happen between points of reference: “print as enlarged / location, geographies / of the whorl”<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </span></i>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Step </span></i>51). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">a woman applied<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">for a disinterment Hart<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Island chaperone leads<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">her to “he calleth his<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">own by name”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">manifest with a<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">number she chews<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">the mouth has to<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">go dry a rose<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">a day a congenital<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">day<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">‡ The day, and the rose, both placed on a grave, each holding the space of immediacy, each yielding to an overwhelming tension between the transitory (a clipped rose’s rapid necrosis) and the eternal (in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Paradiso</span></i> Dante envisioned the form of the godhead to be a golden rose, that which is constantly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">unfolding</span></i>). The unfolding of the day, as a cut rose incrementally shedding its petals and leaves, or drying between the pages of a book, elucidates this balance between the non-contemporaneous now which eternally calls us to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">become</span></i> and very real condition of physical existence within the inescapable condition of physical mortality. In Stacy’s work what is put down, in the sense of forming a marker on the page or in the public record, creates a dialogue with the body that is forgotten, buried in an unmarked plot – “no exhumation record / of the bodies beneath / the Waldorf-Astoria”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Someone’s song, some<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thing</span></i> that has not completely passed beyond, can be experienced again through this very political act of attentiveness. Exploring these forgotten landscapes, both exterior and interior, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hart Island</span></i> is very much a poem of New York, of Manhattan specifically, but also of its shadowy, inverted mirror, anchored just offshore. A bustling land of the living must have its consequential filmic negative, its reciprocal. Here, an appropriated, politically walled-off potter’s field / cemetery / prison / abandoned missile battery haunts Stacy’s mellifluous descriptions of the day-to-day on the Lower East Side.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">‡ The questions of quantity and potency break in again and again—deceased bodies numbered in their plots, relegated to a sense of organizational value, just as living bodies are numbered for use: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">citizens freeze<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">on the avenues<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">film crew warms<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">in a row of trucks<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">a church<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">lives off artists<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">frozen citizens<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">arrive with numbers<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">in trucks<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Frozen in time, or through a sense of relegated capital (or even more immediately in the physical conditions of a cold winter day in NYC), the dead and the living share the same conceptual value in the machinery of the immanent, neoliberal regime. The leveling perspective presented in Stacy’s work, that time and/or physical conditions (even of those between life and death) create no real dialectical opposition, addresses how these systems work to number, and thus regulate, the body within the labyrinth of exploitive historical record. Who really is that upper limit that holds the power to name, to construct importance in terms of the individual (who is always a reflection of and proxy to the multitude)? Reimagining the conditions that cause this troubling separation, Stacy expresses an uncanny, astonished joy in the bare recognition that there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can be</span></i> more than one, that the self is a braid of the relational, the all-unified: “the other is another / literal body<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>o limit / and radiance”. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">‡ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A no go zone. We fly out above to the bordered, abandoned expanse. A dot in the Long Island Sound, a cut in the widening Atlantic, growing more severe in the approach. Filled in with classification, the body remains a secret something, buried, hidden. We create stories for it, shear them, sterilize the site, hide the remains. Personal myth piles up around discarded missiles, mouldering, still deadly. The “we” forever a convenient dumping ground. An imprisoning – to constrict the expanse of a single life deep within a list of names. Or to forget outright. A silo, streamlined for an exacting, brutal delivery.</span></i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">a million exhausted bodies touch<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">totally compos mentis ex-missile flue<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">empath of cold terror air <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">conducts brainwaves where the wardens <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">prohibited themselves<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">‡ Something larger than life reveals itself within <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hart Island</span></i> – a rare, stunning conglomeration of self-assurance and abjection, singular perspective and solidarity, forthcoming in each line. Stanza by stanza, section by section, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hart Island</span></i> sings it’s immediacy in a tone that is acutely present to (and within) all times, all at once. Its music plots a course both horizontal and vertical where time meets vibratory tone, proportioning a field, street-map, and skyline, but never defers its restless activity entirely to tonality, or gesture. Within, there is the sense that something is always occurring —great leaps in each seemingly captured moment—this dirt that has never stopped spinning the same events, descriptors, scenes, and people past our eyes. Where a small patch of land holds not just the remnants of close to a million that are gone, but the millions still remaining, and their echoes; the vibrant heart of the city beating even in its daily margins of forgetfulness. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">++++++<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="font-size: x-small;">*source-text for quotes: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">From Hart Island</span></i> (Albion Books, 2009)<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">*****<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Jamie Townsend is the managing editor for Aufgabe, as well as the co-founder of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">con/crescent</span></i>, a periodic hub of creative mumbo-jumbo. He is author of the chapbooks <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">STRAP/HALO</span></i> (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs; 2011), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Matryoshka</span></i> (LRL Textile Editions; 2011), and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">THE DOME</span></i> (Ixnay Press; 2011). He was selected to be a 2012 Millay Colony fellow.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-70249350970398096482012-12-13T22:15:00.000-08:002012-12-17T12:52:22.562-08:00FOUR PAINTINGS BY GUY BEININGTOM HIBBARD Reviews<br />
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<strong>Four Paintings by Poet Guy Beining</strong><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">THE RAIN ON FOREGROUND-BACKGROUND STREET:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">GUY BEINING REMEMBERS THE </span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">MISTAKES OF DEATH<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Evening colors linger on the mountain path”</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> -Tu Fu</span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p><v:shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" id="_x0000_t75" o:preferrelative="t" o:spt="75" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" stroked="f"><v:stroke joinstyle="miter"></v:stroke><v:formulas><v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"></v:f></v:formulas><v:path gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect" o:extrusionok="f"></v:path><o:lock aspectratio="t" v:ext="edit"></o:lock></v:shapetype><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<v:shape id="Picture_x0020_1" o:spid="_x0000_s1026" style="height: 260.1pt; margin-left: 4.5pt; margin-top: 68.55pt; mso-position-horizontal-relative: text; mso-position-horizontal: absolute; mso-position-vertical-relative: text; mso-position-vertical: absolute; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 204.75pt; z-index: -1;" type="#_x0000_t75" wrapcoords="0 0 0 21426 21521 21426 21521 0 0 0"><v:imagedata o:title="" src="file:///C:\DOCUME~1\Eileen\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.jpg"></v:imagedata><w:wrap type="tight"></w:wrap></v:shape><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">The ideas of “perspective” and “dimension” in art are points of embarkation of the modern tradition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During the Renaissance, paintings of objects were done in a new mathematical way in which the artist was able to divest the mind of an ingrained image and portray that object as it appeared <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in common observation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though the artist—and everyone—knew that two sides of a street were in fact long and at every point parallel, the artist portrayed them with converging foreshortened lines, capturing the visual impression of looking at a real street as it vanished into the distance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this way, painting advanced into three dimensions—a momentous breakthrough in humanity’s understanding of itself. </span></span></i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisv1dGvgOgWxvFkZfv_nq22GpWpUDy-ImoDdAcewyvlazIgko3D4AN-gTXa0eBirnMsLFywcq8RE3gszgfBuXVYs8PTB79ziRyeq5aByp-J21hJcy9x9TiE22qkMX_ysmeyFQOPqridRU/s1600/Beining8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisv1dGvgOgWxvFkZfv_nq22GpWpUDy-ImoDdAcewyvlazIgko3D4AN-gTXa0eBirnMsLFywcq8RE3gszgfBuXVYs8PTB79ziRyeq5aByp-J21hJcy9x9TiE22qkMX_ysmeyFQOPqridRU/s320/Beining8.jpg" width="242" yda="true" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><em>Perspective, dimension might be called the birth of realism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are notions that continue to evolve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perspective surely must have something to do with the style of painting called </em>“trompe l’oeil”<em> (fool the eye).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perspective is an expedition into terrains of visibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is the guiding principle along the labyrinthine corridors of impracticality and deception.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In one early 1900s painting, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted a portrait in which the face was viewed in profile with colors and features similar to Egyptian painting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In doing so Kirchner probably was criticizing the world in which he lived as incapable of modern compassion and understanding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></em></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><o:p><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">A 20<sup>th</sup> Century experimental painter such as Henri Matisse might paint a street differently and more fancifully than the streets and squares and churches of the Renaissance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The lines of the depiction might be naively curved and nonmechanical. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The lines of each side of a street might get farther apart as they vanish into the distance rather than closer together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The colors might be whimsically altered and stars might appear all around the object depicted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this way, Matisse and many other painters place their artworks in no “naturalistic” but rather a quantum or a timeless abstract, imaginative realm in which the barriers between the mechanical and the poetic have disappeared.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></o:p></span><br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko’s paintings invariably consist of two panels with a horizontal line between.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Viewing them in series, one realizes that each painting is a version of an archetypal setting of foreground and background.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rothko’s repetition of the image leads the way in showing us that this foreground and background might be considered symbolic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The pictures waver between the flatness of the canvass and the three dimensionality of landscape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rothko’s artworks become a model of our ability to view and estimate the problems of society, our need to distinguish symptom from cause, to place a specific<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>action or event in the larger context from which it takes its true meaning and effect—in short, to distinguish for ourselves a variety of degrees of realism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Andy Warhol’s paintings are similarly about perspective in that the shocking “unnaturally” colored<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>iconography is a foreground without a background—devoid of perspective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<v:shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" id="_x0000_t75" o:preferrelative="t" o:spt="75" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" stroked="f"><v:stroke joinstyle="miter"></v:stroke><v:formulas><v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"></v:f></v:formulas><v:path gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect" o:extrusionok="f"></v:path><o:lock aspectratio="t" v:ext="edit"></o:lock></v:shapetype><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_2" o:spid="_x0000_s1026" style="height: 255.35pt; margin-left: 271.65pt; margin-top: 61.2pt; mso-position-horizontal-relative: text; mso-position-horizontal: absolute; mso-position-vertical-relative: text; mso-position-vertical: absolute; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 181.95pt; z-index: -1;" type="#_x0000_t75" wrapcoords="-178 0 -178 21444 21547 21444 21547 0 -178 0"><v:imagedata o:title="" src="file:///C:\DOCUME~1\Eileen\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.jpg"></v:imagedata><w:wrap type="tight"></w:wrap></v:shape><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The advance into abstract painting brings into art and literature a new “dimension” that is as significant and notable a breakthrough as the advance into three-dimensions made during the Renaissance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This new dimension is the inexhaustible virtual and conceptual dimension of thought and mind, so that the visible and the literal are no longer the exclusive purveyors of “realism.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A definition of the word “perspective” is wisdom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The scene of modern or, perhaps, Post-modern artworks is the discourse of visibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a fourth dimension of permanence, knowledge and measurement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This new perspective and dimension comprises a collage of qualitatively diverse components—photographic images, mathematical symbols, verbal fragments, visual fragments, actual objects, blank space, historic evidence, naturalistic representations, mass media data, scientific diagrams, stream of consciousness, text, types of fabric.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most importantly the “objects” in these types of paintings are presented, via a deconstructive aesthetic of freedom, in their meaningful substantiveness rather than their superficial physical impenetrability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The resulting works are a conceptual ensemble that presents a credible, transcendent type of reality—a psychic representation with a more varied, insightful, moral, reliable, far-reaching and creative “perspective.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7UnoMX92D4Cbgs4y0M4wjc1mVKORWHj4FNoerHPwhIXI1i5LM1aL2eHrnTYxtN1sYVIpqsJ1dQ3-uZibMVU3fw4ktjpsUnNO3-_ZqreoOfjvMcVPWPf-kJfvyT1uHaTw9g2Tofit7RhY/s1600/Beining1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7UnoMX92D4Cbgs4y0M4wjc1mVKORWHj4FNoerHPwhIXI1i5LM1aL2eHrnTYxtN1sYVIpqsJ1dQ3-uZibMVU3fw4ktjpsUnNO3-_ZqreoOfjvMcVPWPf-kJfvyT1uHaTw9g2Tofit7RhY/s320/Beining1.jpg" width="206" yda="true" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">It’s been quite a while since I first viewed the work of artist and poet Guy Beining in such neo-Dadaist Xerox <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘zines as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">PhotoStatic</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raunch-O-Rama</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps the centerpiece of his new work is a four-by-six pamphlet <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Out of the Woods into the Sun</i> from Kamini Press, Stockholm, Sweden/Hydra, Greece.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The book has a small rudimentary color artwork on the cover—similar to the cover artwork of Jack Kerouac’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poems All Sizes</i>—a color thumbnail painting of the author by Henry Denander and orange endpapers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The contents are reproductions of fifteen of Beining’s color artworks, each of them, imbued in surreal and symbolic color, depicting suggestively but attentively—gently with quiet understanding—what might sarcastically be called the actual human form, in extreme philosophical nakedness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Forbidden to add on anything outside the empirical, the line drawings and water colored spaces contain flabby protoplasmic bodies of indistinguishable gender, nudity deformed from the inaccurate yellow of adamant lipstick, garbled foreground-background both producing and inhibiting formal development, geometric spaces between people, confusingly extra-complicated polluted freedom, the seductiveness of the intentional.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<v:shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" id="_x0000_t75" o:preferrelative="t" o:spt="75" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" stroked="f"><v:stroke joinstyle="miter"></v:stroke><v:formulas><v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"></v:f></v:formulas><v:path gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect" o:extrusionok="f"></v:path><o:lock aspectratio="t" v:ext="edit"></o:lock></v:shapetype><br />
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<v:shape id="Picture_x0020_3" o:spid="_x0000_s1026" style="height: 274.25pt; margin-left: 1.5pt; margin-top: 88.25pt; mso-position-horizontal-relative: text; mso-position-horizontal: absolute; mso-position-vertical-relative: text; mso-position-vertical: absolute; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 205.5pt; z-index: -1;" type="#_x0000_t75" wrapcoords="0 0 0 21502 21442 21502 21442 0 0 0"><v:imagedata o:title="" src="file:///C:\DOCUME~1\Eileen\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.jpg"></v:imagedata><w:wrap type="tight"></w:wrap></v:shape><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">These fifteen small works convey what occurs as the arbitrary mythical justification of Mankind’s Ptolemaic self-conception endures the unavoidable disasters of infinite foreground-background. These are the instances that require humanity to search for more well-founded explanations of itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Science with its uniquely impartial methodology is invented.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Metaphysical events begin to take shape, such as life’s <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>origins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reasons have to be found for every occurrence and every law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problematic of pleasure—of what is acceptable behavior and what is “sin”—arises.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Essentially the word “sin” is thrown out as arbitrary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The language of individuals begins to carefully avoid presumption and exaggeration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Objects begin to be scrutinized and questioned in systematic detail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A marvelous picture, based solely on unbiased truth, of humanity and the physical setting in which it dwells, comes into being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKb9Mbo5h3ouakrwStm56LFiUX88zvIHUR3xd4wZIwzcPDjysrmKTF5XUpAdJppIAcDB7ZNrs17NjxjcYH0YWe58GGd5QTPb-bxJ9xc5e2HVa5ok3t9w4OhNJ-lVsLk8rAUIRebW1EYx8/s1600/Beining7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKb9Mbo5h3ouakrwStm56LFiUX88zvIHUR3xd4wZIwzcPDjysrmKTF5XUpAdJppIAcDB7ZNrs17NjxjcYH0YWe58GGd5QTPb-bxJ9xc5e2HVa5ok3t9w4OhNJ-lVsLk8rAUIRebW1EYx8/s320/Beining7.jpg" width="232" yda="true" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Beining’s pictures are of humanity from an anthropological perspective, without predisposition toward humanity’s value or worthlessness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In many ways, Beining’s portraiture of human reality is similar to German Expressionism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In content more than form, Max Beckmann’s famous painting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Night</i>, with its cluttered pastiche of abuse and criminality, has the same philosophical resonance as Beining’s amorphous, indeterminate blobs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The theme of Beckmann’s paintings is inner structure in transition from the the religious to the philosophical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though they patently don’t appear so, the people in Beckmann’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Night</i> are as unformed as those in Beining’s paintings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much of German art at the beginning of the 20<sup>th</sup> Century is similar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Brecht’s slapstick morality play, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Threepenny Opera</i>, the underworld characters sing such lines as, “Or is it only those that have the money/Can enter in the land of milk and honey?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And “So gentlemen do not be taken in/ Men live exclusively by mortal sin.”</span><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="font-size: small;">The world is poor and men are bad<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><span style="font-size: small;">There is of course no more to add</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">What Brecht is asserting is that the iron-clad ideals surrounding good and evil have been replaced by a more ambiguous and lenient, less arbitrary standard for judging human actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Depicting what is hidden, the mistakes and failures, the baseness of humanity—rather than those times that it achieves the impossible and conforms perfectly to inhuman expectations—increases self-knowledge and realism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than excusing crime Brecht is laying the foundation for its elimination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A pre-determined imposed iconic visibility is replaced by a subjective style of virtue; unquestioned formal behavior is replaced by the unaided, intense “technologies of the self.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The title <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Out of the Woods and into the Sun </i>indicates this transformation—parallel with the shift in Christianity from the repetitious sacrifice of Mosaic Law to the solitary suffering of individuals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Beckmann’s paintings, in Beining’s paintings, without referencing anonymous structure of pre-established authority, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">raison d’etre</i> of the artwork has to find a derivation in new, less arbitrary, more vigilantly grasped sources.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has to apply its discoveries and insights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has to observe and rely upon other support for human action—curiosity, imagination, utility, application, </span><v:shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" id="_x0000_t75" o:preferrelative="t" o:spt="75" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" stroked="f"><v:stroke joinstyle="miter"></v:stroke><v:formulas><v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"></v:f></v:formulas><v:path gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect" o:extrusionok="f"></v:path><o:lock aspectratio="t" v:ext="edit"></o:lock></v:shapetype></span><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_5" o:spid="_x0000_s1026" style="height: 254.7pt; margin-left: 287.25pt; margin-top: 55.5pt; mso-position-horizontal-relative: text; mso-position-horizontal: absolute; mso-position-vertical-relative: text; mso-position-vertical: absolute; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 168.75pt; z-index: -1;" type="#_x0000_t75" wrapcoords="0 0 0 21498 21504 21498 21504 0 0 0"><v:imagedata o:title="" src="file:///C:\DOCUME~1\Eileen\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.jpg"></v:imagedata><w:wrap type="tight"></w:wrap></v:shape><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">thought, living together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has to answer difficult questions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In saying that “Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself,” Sartre emphasizes absolute freedom, but he acknowledges in this freedom the possibility of a deeper sense of the divine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only axiomatic ground rules are “death and taxes.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything else has to be mined from beneath the windswept surface.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In some ways, initially art produced in this manner is “slower” and more clumsy, less precise and focused than the arbitrarily justified work—which is what Beining’s artworks in this chapbook especially portray.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But eventually the new work demonstrates a deeper and more immense, a more powerful<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and persuasive efficacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Donald Kuspit, in his article on Beckmann’s “Psychotic Realism,” writes that “Modern means to strip away superficial social appearances to reveal existential reality.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The whole of the 20<sup>th</sup> Century was permeated with this desire for greater perception and involvement, more penetrating and generative understanding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Karl Jaspers writes of the artists of his time:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #244061; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-themecolor: accent1; mso-themeshade: 128;">They wanted to take themselves seriously; they searched for the hidden reality; they wanted to know what was knowable; and they thought that by understanding themselves they could arrive at the foundation of their being.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The removal of unquestioned, unquestionable support in humanity’s conception of existence—such factors as predisposition toward moral precepts—gave rise to the movement of the Modern aesthetic endeavor of revealing in comprehensive terms the circumstances surrounding human existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has made our species into voyagers in the dimensions of our own understanding, the discoverers and inventors of our own spiritual purpose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What’s interesting about Beining’s paintings is that he seems to depict this endeavor as in its early stages. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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*****<br />
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Tom Hibbard has had recent work published in the Australian issue of <a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-rolfe-rb-hibbard.shtml"><em><strong><span style="color: #dd6599;">Jacket</span></strong></em></a>, and the current issue of <a href="http://www.moriapoetry.com/hibbard888.html"><em><strong><span style="color: #dd6599;">Moria</span></strong></em></a>. He also has a new collection of poetry, <a href="http://www.moonwillowpress.com/category/titles/the-sacred-river-of-consciousness/"><em><strong><span style="color: #dd6599;">Sacred River of Consciousness</span></strong></em></a>, from Moon Willow press. He is currently involved in the political struggles in the U.S. and world against mindless far-right extremism. <br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-52755660030752149202012-12-13T22:05:00.000-08:002012-12-17T12:51:23.390-08:00BODY OF WATER by ERIN M. BERTRAM<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">BILL SCALIA Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Body of Water</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"> by Erin M. Bertram<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">(Thorngate Road Press, Kennesaw, Georgia, 2007)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The challenge of writing a critique of Erin Bertram’s poetry is that the form is so tightly interwoven that it’s difficult to find a way to address the work as a whole.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is also the great joy of Bertram’s work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On some level, form is the subject of her work; Bertram utilizes form not to constrict, but to liberate latent emotions in the juxtaposition and interweaving of images and motifs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The skill that Bertram displayed in her 2008 chapbook <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Urge to Believe is Stronger than Belief Itself </i>-- her unerring ear for rhythm and phrasing, her deft working with aesthetic conventions, her flawless usage -- are evident in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Body of Water</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That these skills are evident is no surprise to me, given the evidence of the later book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Urge to Believe</i> is not prepared for by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Body of Water</i>; Bertram has written two completely different books.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Body of Water</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"> is comprised of 14 distinct (unnumbered) 14-line poems, plus one final poem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bertram’s conceit is that the last line of each poem opens the next poem; the 14 poems constitute a series.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The final poem is comprised solely of the 14 “repeated” lines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each poem establishes in 13 lines an observation and a meditation on that observation; line 14 serves as summation, and also as thesis for the next poem in the series.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes the unifying conceit of a series of poems (as in a chapbook, say), can seem contrived, as though the writer is struggling against the form.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not the case with Bertram; her poems are both self-contained and connected, and one has the sense that, in Emersonian terms, the thought has found its form.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The first poem establishes the theme and the motifs:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Alchemy comes in varied forms, as in that summer.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">We sat porch-side weekends hurling creek stones<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">& indecision at the vacant lot next door stitched through<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">With weeds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the gravel-crush & purr of a car<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Easing up the drive, a quickening in the belly not unlike fear.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Or, uncontainably, its opposite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your dog has just <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Had surgery, ambled across the yard in a not undignified<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Stupor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her underbelly a zipper of pale flesh, <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Stubble-stitched, as if, should she let us, we could reach,<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Slowly, right in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The suture of this place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Impossibly, <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Poppies surviving thistle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The tug of it incessant. <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">What I wouldn’t do for the sun to slit us clean through -- <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">The alternate blessing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amorous wind & the sparrows’<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Restless wheeling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then wasps’ nest stirred.</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Suture -- nature stitching the world together, the dog stitched after surgery, and, in a larger sense, the poems in the book sutured by the repeating lines -- is for Bertram a kind of alchemy, which, as she states in the opening line, “comes in varied forms.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the book (itself a suture, a stitching of pages, as she states in poem 5) explores them all by elevating the idea of stitching to a fundamental condition: the tension between what has been closed, and what lies inside the closure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stitching is a process to bind two (or more) things together; underneath, or inside, the stitching, is something fluid, like a “body of water.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Note the semantic finery in the double negations of “not undignified” and “not unlike fear.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Not undignified” does not mean the same thing as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dignified</i>; the double negation in this expression doesn’t cancel out, but states a condition that approaches dignity without <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">being</i> dignity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Likewise, “not unlike fear” approaches <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fear</i>, but slips around the exact idea of fear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is no accident.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bertram utilizes this technique (as well as the imagistic “&/or” in poems 2 and 5) to slip inside the suture, into the “body of water” where identity, location, and meaning itself is unqualifiable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">In the title <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Body of Water</i>, the emphasis is not on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">water</i>, but on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">body</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The body of water in the book is the human body, both an actual body and also the metaphor through which Bertram views the world, connected by the ligatures not only of experience, but the desires that structure this ligature:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Opens one wet eye.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then, slowly, squinting, the other.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Dear X, an uncanny resemblance to sincerity.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">These days are you feeling well?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">From long ago, friends, some, now dead, now dying.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Dissolve, more or less; a dissolving.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">How did I get to be so scattered?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">With a dark, steady rain, I feel it, that is, stronger.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Who’s to say desire halts at fulfillment?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Not I. Not even me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To the river. Walk with me<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Strangely down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bridge, it spans.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">The water, it currents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Slaps the riverbed.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Hollers truisms at the deep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Welcomes the following echo.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Makes for the right side.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tells me this will never stop.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">And if it does, tells me it will never end.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The only body of water (in the more conventional sense of that expression) is found in poem 13, at the height of the book’s dramatic tension.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The trip to the river (Bertram, I’m certain, is conscious of the significance of rivers in American literature) knits, again, many of the book’s themes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sexual tensions are most evident in this poem (“Who’s to say desire ends at fulfillment?” is one of the great thematic statements in the work, and maybe the penultimate question).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the last six lines of this poem only reinforced the themes of sex and desire, they would be justified; but, Bertram seldom allows a group of lines to do rudimentary work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part of the joy of reading her work is realizing the skill with which she unveils multiple dimensions of her images.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Poem 14 (which contains the wonderful line “The hydraulics of novelty never fail to astound”; there are volumes of implication packed into her use of “hydraulics”) closes with the line “Alchemy comes in varied form, as in that summer.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is, of course, the same line that opens the first poem in the book, and is expertly utilized; the line not only closes the seamless formal aesthetic of the body of work, but at the end of poem 14 “that summer” has a significantly different allusion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the first poem, the demonstrative pronoun points to a summer we (as readers) are about to experience (in the reflective voice of the speaker); in poem 14, the same pronoun points to the summer we have just experienced along with the speaker.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What was preamble in poem 1, line 1, has become shared (re)experience in poem 14, line 14.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Unfortunately this makes the last poem of the book, poem 15, comprised of sutured opening lines, unnecessary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The book is closed -- in keeping with the theme, one might say <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sutured</i> -- by the final line in poem 14.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The form has done its work beautifully.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is my only complaint with the work, and it is a minor one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the whole, like the other Bertram work I have read, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Body of Water</i> is masterfully constructed by one of the most skilled poets I have read in a long time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;">Bill Scalia has published essays on literature and film in the journals <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Religion and Literature</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Literature/Film Quarterly</i>, and in the anthology <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also edited the anthology <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Classic Critical Views: Ralph Waldo Emerson</i>, and is currently at work on a book concerning Emersonian aesthetics, poetry, and film.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dr. Scalia teaches literature and writing at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-13367929999753094162012-12-13T22:00:00.000-08:002012-12-17T12:53:51.781-08:00ANGLES OF INCIDENTS by JON CURLEY<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">EILEEN TABIOS Engages<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Angles of Incidents</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> by Jon Curley<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">(Dos Madres Press Inc., Loveland, OH, 2012)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Something I noticed immediately about Jon Curley's </span><i><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Angles of Incidents</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> is how it shows the poet to have an affinity for short lines. Not all the poems contain only short lines, but it's something that came up emphasized in my read. It's easy enough to provide examples as this collection also includes three hay(na)ku sequences; the hay(na)ku's basic form is a tercet with the first line being one word, the second line being two words and the third line being three words.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Here's an example--an excerpt from "Metafizzles":<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">cannot <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">see so<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">mind wears visions<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">next<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">place new<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">grace for All<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Weil<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">wore woe<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">weal like wheel<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">lustrations<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">pour rain<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">onto mire (mine)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">afresh<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">flowers bloom<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">from thorn crowns<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">meaning<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">no matter<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">in the hereafter<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">sightings<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">of no<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">saints just selves<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It can be difficult to write long <strong><a href="http://haynakupoetry.blogspot.com/">hay(na)ku</a></strong> sequences (i.e., more than one hay(na)ku tercet chained together) without occasionally giving too much weight to merely-connective words like "and", "the" or "a". Of course these pop up in Curley's hay(na)ku but they're not as stressed as more significant words. The result of each word being significant is that the poem achieves what Jose Garcia Villa (and other poets) claim about effective poems: </span><i><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Each word must be necessary.</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And such necessity exists in Curley's other finely-achieved poems. Here is one poem which I present in its entirety as there are so many pleasing lines one might choose to excerpt (that beginning: “Silence absorbs the reach”!), until I just decided to share the whole </span><i><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">thang</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> of it:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Death Valley</span></b><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Silence absorbs the reach. The whiteness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">of these salt flats tends to emptiness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Sky scans, seeps into the great distance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Lie like the burdens of rock, christened<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">into a furious rusk, breeched<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">into crystallized counterparts,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">glistening like mica,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">be like the sense of this silence,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">itself unsure of itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Now along the casual main grain<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">we find perhaps the striations<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">in the surface, forwarding a new face<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">whose sculpture is etched<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">into a view salt-licked<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">that embraces<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">that desolate ground space<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">as more likely than any<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">other feature or future that the rain-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">soused mind could grow or imagine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We reel in the expanse and find<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">masks discarded on the mountains.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Gods of rock found eternal time<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">to masquerade as the land they created<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">here. Homage to their work<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">is the etchings we leave as footprints,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">as lived, markers, as signatures<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">that express our silent appreciating<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">of craft resembling nature.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The (or, a) key to Curley's prowess is his ear. There's a fine music throughout the poems, though the sample I share below rests more overtly on sonic play:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">About<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">A boat<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Ab oat<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Ad out<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Efflorescence<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Ever for vengeance<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">(from “Stuttering Alphabetic Codes: Modern Multilingual Historical Edition”)<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I don’t say much about the content (so to speak) of the poems because Curley’s poems can be considered open-ended, which is to say, the reader is allowed the space to interpret the poems as they wish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is hearkened within (yes, I’m now speaking to content so I’m so expansive I contradict moiself) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the stellar, almost-title poem, and last poem in the book, "From This Angle".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here are excerpts from this poem which offered pleasurable reading:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">From this angle—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">containment and not alignment<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">seems a torrential sin<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">that give shelters, not quarantines?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">[…]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">From this angle—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">the angles of incidents<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">are the angels of incidence<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';">As a result of turning “angles of incidents” into angels of incidence,” I recommend this book. And I would have recommended it even if the poet hadn't cheerfully waved at me--and Marie Howe, Samuel Menashe, Seamus Heaney, Michael Heller, Ed Foster, Ron Silliman, Mark Young, Ann Lauterbach, Les Murray, Michael Gizzi, among others--in the witty poem, "Profiles." Of course, you must read the book to know what I mean--and I encourage you to do so!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> ******<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by <em>Galatea Resurrects</em> because she's its editor. But she is pleased to point you elsewhere to recent reviews of her books. </span><a href="http://marshhawkpress.org/tabios5.html"><strong><i><span style="text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><span style="color: purple; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA</span></span></i></strong></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, a collaboration with j/j hastain, is reviewed by Joey Madia at <em><strong><a href="http://www.literaryaficionado.com/2012/05/review-of-eileen-r-tabios-and-jj.html">New Mystics Review</a></strong></em>; Edric Mesmer at <em><strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/11/publications-byedited-by-megan-kaminski.html">Yellow Field 6</a></strong></em>; and Zvi A. Sesling at <em><strong><a href="http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-relational-elations-of-orphaned.html">Boston Area Small Press & Poetry Scene</a></strong></em>. She also just released a new poetry collection, <em><strong><a href="http://5shadesofgray.blogspot.com/">5 Shades of Gray</a></strong></em> (i.e. press, Florida, 2012).</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-89982167733067114402012-12-13T21:55:00.000-08:002012-12-17T12:50:19.562-08:00DECK OF DEEDS by RODRIGO TOSCANO<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Deck of Deeds</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"> by Rodrigo Toscano<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">(Counterpath, Denver, CO, 2012)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">A Note on</span></b><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deck of Deeds</i> by Rodrigo Toscano<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">The cards one is dealt in globalized capitalist culture aren’t from a straight deck. The deck has been<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>tampered with by the “big others,” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the mediators, elites, deal makers and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>deal breakers. The odds, like they say, are with the house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That house exists to fall on us. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deck of Deeds</i>, Rodrigo Toscano goes after the house, overturns the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>virtual card table and draws a satirical bead on playahs from all spheres of the contemporary message board. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Deck of Deeds</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"> takes the form of a series<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of prose poetry portraits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each piece is titled in Spanish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Servants, engineers, financiers, experimental writers, trust fund poets, soldiers, drug addicts, drug traffickers, sociolinguists,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>experts, collaborators, spies, politicians, therapists and others all steep in the same petro-hormono-chemically infused linguistic environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The effects are intensely kaleidoscopic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The humor bites.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">What Toscano is writing about with great vividness and passion is what Zizek calls “the <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lacanian difference between reality and the Real.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Zizek and Lacan:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">“…'reality’ is the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, while the Real is the inexorable ‘abstract’ spectral logic of Capital that determines what goes on in social reality. This gap is tangible in the way the economic situation of a country can be considered to be good and stable by the international financial experts, even when the majority of its people are worse off than before—reality does not matter, what matters is the situation of Capital.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">--from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism</i> (Verso, 2012), 244.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Or, as Toscano’s Financiero realizes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">“Being ‘pregnant’ with ‘the reality’ of ‘current conditions’ means you can’t get ‘pregnant’ again (he knew this before, of course, but not like this).” ( 89)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Deck of Deeds</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;"> is the real deal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; line-height: 115%;">Tom Beckett is currently at work on a project called <i>Appearances: A Novel In 365 Fragments</i>. He doesn't believe corporations are people and he doesn't think of them as friends.</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-38010840886791439792012-12-13T21:45:00.000-08:002012-12-17T12:48:26.035-08:00IT CAN BE SOLVED BY WALKING by JENNIFER WALLACE<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><em>It Can Be Solved By Walking</em></b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> <strong>by</strong></span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Jennifer Wallace</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(City Lit Press, Baltimore, 2012)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The mind is its own place</i>…not exactly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or with many complications, is the answer given in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It Can Be</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Solved By Walking</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The mind of the solitary walker in Jennifer Wallace’s poems does make, but also finds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And as the walker goes daily through the ordinariness of an alien, contemporary city (Baltimore here), the place becomes that thing both made and found, home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I keep coming back to the idea of home in reading these poems, although that may be too blatant and loaded a word for Wallace’s sense of place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In an author’s note at the end of the book, she writes of looking for a “psychoecology” that is the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, I’m struck with how the book is a tacit argument against the sentimentalism that wishing makes “home” so, a dissolve of anyplace/no place made by simple decision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Place in these poems confronts, must be confronted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That has something to do with the particular place described: the book is haunted by the public topic of the dying of major American cities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Wallace’s Baltimore, if shabby, is still vital with the lives lived in it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those lives become lived into the walker’s life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What the walker encounters includes the people of the streets and sidewalks, and, surprisingly, the animals of the city—pigeons and the occasional rat, but also the occasional hawk, even bald eagles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unseen lives are a stronger presence:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the station, passengers enter the city….<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They inhale a new world; it feeds them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each out breath amplifies the streets.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The pigeons perch in trees growing with their memories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is a consciousness of all that stays unknown, also a presence in being unknown:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A squirrel on the wire running….<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">running</i>?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or something more squirrel-like—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not: “I want that walnut,” but something<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>squirrel-voiced or voiceless.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A mind can’t know what it is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The poems are arranged in three groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those of the first section are largely vignettes of things seen daily, with some of the feel of jotted notes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One, “Particulars, holy and minute,” starting with a quotation from Blake, breaks through to a Blakean “infinity in a grain of sand”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The door opens and closes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and a deep field arrives in t-shirt and jeans.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Outside: the storefront<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>with its warm yellow light, lonely as Hopper’s,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and a source we believe but cannot see.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But most of these pictures of the quotidian stay with the quotidian, the juxtaposition and relationship of parts becoming a ground, filling in a blank:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roofline—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>where pigeons study the intersection of Aisquith and North.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A particular building<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the particular intersection<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>bus stop, gasoline<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>burgers and ribs<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>evidence of<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>two species<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>at rest, a red light<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>20 drivers: 20 birds<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>incomplete in our differences, our likenesses.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Wallace’s Baltimore is not an “unreal city” where the multifarious turns blankly oppressive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Things seen are sturdy building blocks here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The later poems take a loose form of musings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Through all the poems runs a binariness, of word, of idea, linking a concept and its opposite together:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That I am part and therefore partial.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One lives in a world<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is lived in by a world<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is something of a conversational tic in our time, but for Wallace it becomes an instrument, an epistemology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Duality runs through what the walker looks for:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If ‘one truth moves from the inside and one from the outside<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and when they meet we see ourselves,’ then I can see a dense muscle<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>pumping against its hollow core; that fist-shaped organ—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>how it beats and beats its delicate wings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Overall, the out-there is a means (though not reduced to a means) of realizing the inner:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See what the world is like?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A grammar without language<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but striving for language.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Endangered if not actual, if not spoken of.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The experience I would call home is where the poems of the book end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The penultimate lyric is the song of an everyhuman quest:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We seek a form, a shape—adequate enough: the kitchen table, mother’s leg—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the thing to hoist ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Barely arrived, we already aim at the sun.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>……………..<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is wished for?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be tree-like, god-close?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Outside of time?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are preoccupied with prominence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The point, through whatever haze or light,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Always farthest from ‘what is.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Something in us <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">knows</i>/there’s something we must find.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of that—and its goal, after all, is an inwardness:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>…We would arrive at the deepest eye, the one<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that would let itself be entered, be taken in and taken.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What would we, then,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>what could we,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>name the seeker?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The carrier of thought, and all its structures?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is known—at last: a certain rust and beetle-bitten ruin, the sure return<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to all we’ve ever feared or dreamed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The poems make up most of the book, but it also contains a section of city photographs as well as a short prose afterword.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The photos, which Wallace writes were some of the working notes for the poems, sometimes could serve as illustrations for individual poems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Others catch the derelict, sunlit eerie solitudes that are part of our troubled cities now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Standing out most are the pictures that show the city interface of the natural and the manmade—vistas of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>both trees and buildings, birds at home in an iron environment, a nest with interwoven plastic sheeting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the concluding author’s note, Wallace writes of how the poems came out of an attempt to write an essay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The essayistic impulse is still in the poems and is one of their strengths.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The linked pieces work together like an essay; they find and make their meanings non-discursively, but in an essayistic diction, various, onrushing—no pauses for brittle finenesses—become electric with its discoveries.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">*****</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Allen Strous is the author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tired</i>, The Backwaters Press, and one of the authors of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fifth Voice</i>, Toadlily Press (reviewed by Julie R. Enszer in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Galatea Resurrects</i> #4). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1182873083481616607.post-11097032406348292892012-12-13T21:40:00.000-08:002012-12-17T12:43:00.904-08:00BEYOND THE CHAMELEON'S SKILL by DARIUS COOPER<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Beyond the Chameleon’s Skill</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> by Darius Cooper<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(Poetrywala, Mumbai, 2011)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">In the opening line upon the first page of Darius Cooper’s poetry collection <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beyond the Chameleon’s Skill</i> under the heading “This volume of poems is dedicated to the following:” he announces “I am not a poet”. A peculiar start to a book of poems, but maybe not. There’s little false humility evident here. Cooper acknowledges “one spends a lifetime trying to become a poet”. As a long term academic, having published two critical texts on the cinema (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The cinema of Satyajit Ray: between tradition and modernity</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In Black and White</i>) Cooper is not at all comfortable with so brazenly labeling himself with the title of practitioner in an art he highly respects. He knows better. As he notes, “one has to dutifully perform one’s aarti for all those significant beings who went out of their way to help you find your own voice, entangling it first with other voices they recommended and then showing you, gradually, how to liberate your own voice from their offered chorus.” (‘Aarti’ is from the Sanskrit and represents a Hindi form of paying respects for dues owed appropriate deities.) Or, alternately as he puts it in “An Archive of Myself”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">My own voice hesitantly emerged<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">between the rhythms of rock music<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">and the bhakti beat of abghanas.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">poised like that calendar baby<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">near my uncle’s Multitone Murphy radio<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">whose short-wave knobs<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">had to be constantly adjusted<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">by the skill of a<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">carefully placed rubber band <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Born in India in 1949, Cooper’s been living in the States making regular visits back to his homeland since 1980. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beyond the Chameleon’s Skill</i> brings together poems spanning decades with divergent themes and subjects, including food, race, class, language, faith, and fatherhood. While Cooper’s side-bar life as a scribbler of daily reflections is obviously imbued with insights form his personal life experience. Reading his poems is to not only step into his own set of life circumstances but to also be carried into the lives of others comparatively disadvantaged. Cooper has clearly lived with open ears and bared his imagination to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the other</i> wherever and whenever encountered. He documents the all too common life of a battered Indian woman in “Ten-foot-by-ten-foot-by-ten-foot-by-ten”, where the husband has<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">…brutalised<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">her dream of wife and mother,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">and the dangling lantern<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">below the cart<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">had suddenly burst into flames<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">burning her wedding trousseau…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">her daughter<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">had started bleeding<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">a month ago,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">and when she had asked him for money<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">to buy their child <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">discarded saree rags<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">lecherously sold<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">by the housing-colony dhobi<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">he had sneered:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(and it was one of those days<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">he was strangely sober)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">“And what about your electric bulb?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Or will a lantern do?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Blood:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">whether wife’s or daughter’s<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">was of no consequence to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Despite his modesty, it’s clear that Cooper has the poet’s ability of projecting one’s self keenly into other feelings and surroundings beyond his own skin. Repeatedly the speaker’s voice in these poems is that of a woman in a position of struggle and despair. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">So, when you leave, stranger,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">close the door<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">with some kind of dignity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Don’t let that street wind<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">evaporate all my sweat.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Laid with so much love<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">and with so little effort,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">somewhere in your being.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">I’ll lie awake<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">till your foul midnight breath<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">invades mine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Then only will I fall asleep,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">certain, that<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">that </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">woman next to you,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">so dutiful, so obedient, so passive,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">won’t really have to<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">care or mind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(“Under This Woman”)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Cooper’s poems swing back and forth from his life as husband and father in Southern California to a mixture of memory and reality caught between the India of his youth and the India of later visits, spanning the gulf between dual realities. His struggle for clarity in the poems keeps them refined as precision of concise statement. This holds particularly true with “Twenty Tentative Ways of Approaching God” where Cooper’s dilemmas of his faith are articulated in intimate address to the beyond. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">17</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">I have never felt at home<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">in my body<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">or in my mind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Maybe, O lord,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">you prefer to live<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">within the homeless?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The unassuming nature which comes through in Cooper’s writing naturally attracts the reader, providing possible avenues to introspection and states of reflection with which to identify. These poems don’t solve the many problems of our ever increasing international, multi-ethnic lives but they do provide a sheltered space in which to acknowledge the occasion of its passing by and ponder the various ramifications awhile. Whatever may come of our world, Cooper’s poems are doing their part to nudge it in the best possible direction. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">*****</span><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"><o:p><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco. Things are appearing in <em>1913, Amerarcana, American Book Review, Bookslut, DeathandLifeofAmericanCities, HtmlGiant, Rain Taxi, Shampoo, Switchback</em>, and <em>The Volta</em>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</o:p></span></div>
<o:p></o:p></div>
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