Five poems in BlazeVOX12

Five poems in the giant new issue of BlazeVOX.

Concupiscent Fire in The Boiler

Thanks to Sebastian for including Concupiscent Fire in the latest issue of The Boiler.

Two in the Truck

Thanks to Elizabeth Kate Switaj who was the guest editor over at Truck last month and included two works of mine: “It was going on five in the morning” (after André Breton) and Monster Gardens.

And to The New Verse News for posting a short one.

Gobbet

Two poems posted today on Gobbet. Thanks Gobbet ed.

UCity Review #4

Three poems just posted in UCity Review. Others recently in print here and here. More links to online works here.

Poeta Nascitur Sed Fit

A "new" poem of mine appears in NYQ 66. Definitely a personal record for time between acceptance and publication. This one was accepted by the late William Packard in the summer of 2000, so it's been a full 10 years. The poem stands out for me mostly because it was one of the few I wrote in the winter of 1999–2000. It's more fun than usual seeing this one in print, seeing it now at 37, a poem I wrote at 26 about where I was at 19. And it's a nice issue, with the placement I prefer: very near the end. Yep, pretty neat, pretty neat.

Fare

The New Yorker arrived today and brought a pleasant surpirse: fiction by Daniil Kharms. Not your typical New Yorker fare.

Here's a link to a Kharms poem The Constancy of Dirt and Joy translated by up-and-coming poetry superstar Matvei Yankelevich.

And now it's off to the dayjob.
 

Heretic in the House

Chicago Review's triple-issue, Edward Dorn, American Heretic arrived today, and it's a tome, a striking tome. It will probably be the weekend before I'm able to really sink my teeth into it. About 250 of the 400+ pages are given to the section on Dorn, which besides critical appraisals and memoir, includes a transcript of one of his workshops at Naropa, a 1990 interview, and reprints of rare poems that alone make this 3/4 of a volume worth the price. In his preface, editor Eirik Steinhoff, notes that this issue "is not exactly intended to introduce Dorn," then quotes Robert Creeley: "Not even a sunrise could quite manage that." But Steinhoff's preface itself, in the span of about 15 pages, offers a solid, concise intro for those new to Dorn—not just providing a context, but also flushing out Dorn's geocultural poetics.

After the intro, we get Dorn's "Tribe", which begins with the poetry of origins—"My tribe came from struggling labor / Depression South Eastern Illinois / Just before the southern hills start / To roll toward the coal country"—grows increasingly political, and ends in polemical fireworks while not lapsing from the lyrical.

Then I had a salad for supper, and then I came up here to do this, while KC tired out Vaughn and got her to sleep. Before starting to type though, I happened into Jennifer Dunbar Dorn's "chronicle" of her time working with her late husband on the literary newspaper Rolling Stock, a great little bit of biography that I couldn't put down.

The only other part of CR I've read so far is CSU alum Piotr Gwiazda's fair and balanced review of Robert Pinsky's latest book of criticism. Sympathetic to the book's shortcomings throughout his review, Gwiazda ends with "Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (note the singular) is a graceful, passionate, and somewhat snobbish apologia for poetry in the United States."

In addition to the rest of the Dorn section, I'm looking forward to Andrea Brady's response to New British Poetry (see Mayhew's comment) and new poems by William Fuller.

Combo: The White Issue

Did I say I'm normally not a big fan of interviews? Funny. Because I have added Here Comes Everybody to the blog roll, and HCE (hickey, I guess) is all about interviews. And not just that: There's an interesting interview with Jerome "(and Diana)" Rothenberg in the recently released Combo 13, which I'm sure will come to be known more popularly as "the white issue" because of its pure white, nearly logoless cover. Among the topics Rothenberg discusses are how he came to his groundbreaking Technicians of the Sacred anthology and anti-war poetry in the time of Vietnam. Many of Rothenberg's anthologies are mentioned, but not Revolution of the Word (reprinted a few years ago by Exact Change), which disappointed me a bit, because it was the most important one personally, as it was really my introduction to Modern poetry. It was probably a year before I realized why I generally received a blank look when I asked someone, a bookseller say, about Eugene Jolas or Harry Crosby, and that they were not as "important" (as poets, at least: Jolas the publisher does qualify as one of the unheralded literary heroes of the twentieth century) as, for instance, Louis Zukofsky. Anyway, Combo, which is more aggressively experimental (in so far as that has come to designate more signifier-oriented work) than the other magazines I've mentioned in previous posts, has been focused on presenting younger writers alongside two or three of their most-established immediate forerunners for about seven years now. With content that rarely ceases to upend expectations and the most original cover designs going (one issue actually featured a silly-menacing photo of "The Rock"), Combo focuses serious attention on the politics of verse even while it has its own good fun (in the tradition of carnivalesque subversion). Other highlights in the white issue: a long poem by Ray DiPalma, a prose poem by Stephanie Young, a piece by Kristin Gallagher which demands returning to ("1842 / 'I have done it . . .' / dart darting / endless chain of buckets / emerging 'ugly monster' // 1891 / anonymous / 'They break up the skyline, / like huge / chunks of darkness . . . // nightmare buildings'"), and a series of poems by David Hadbawnik which riff off lines from other poets but shift into their own forms:

        but will I be        pure light or breath
        or just a hand on somebody's wallet
        will I be     (am I already)
        the gist of someone's dream
        the cc of a circular email
        crash of door        wind chimes
                        piece of mail
        will I be    I want to know
        what happens                            will I be

Let me add that if you're going to make one lifetime subscription to a literary magazine any time in the foreseeable future, commit to Combo. It has the best deal going. The many subscription options have been posted at Lime Tree.

The Poker 4

One of my favorite literary magazine sections was the "Reviews and Noticings" in Clayton Eshleman's Sulfur. Though it included the regular reviews commonly found at the back of poetry journals, it also presented more casual responses to readings, as well as commentary (the section was titled "Commentary" in later issues) on poetic goings-on of the day (or, sometimes, of the "New American Po" heyday) by the editor, contributing editors, and readers. Another favorite was "The Free Speech Corner" in Larry Smith's Caliban: instead of bios, contributors were given space to speak their mind: you might have Rachel Loden writing about her surprising experience with a Down syndrome child, or, as in the first issue, Ron Silliman considering the question, "How does a poem constitute its audience?" directly followed by Raymond Carver listing the books he had recently read. Then there was Exquisite Corpse, which, though printed on higher-quality paper, was the closest thing I've seen to a poetry newspaper; lively responses to the poetry scene(s) were scattered throughout its pages. I had imagined that the "End Notes" section of The End Review would become one of these places, and maybe it would have, had I shown the fortitude necessary for independent publishing.

With its fourth issue, The Poker introduces "what is projected to be a regular feature," a section manned by Steve Evans called Field Notes. The gist is that his essays will cover "the interlude between [issues of] Poker" with respect to the poetry world, especially its relation to, and situation in, the larger social and geo-political realm. Though one voice, Evans approaches his subject in a variety of ways, with the result that it almost seems more than a sole perspective—this is the main reason The Poker has me remembering Sulfur's Noticings. Among the issues Evans touches on: the hyperproduction of poetry (measured in books published), the allocation of prize money and awards (including a profile of the ideal winner, and the portion for established avant-garde poets), the make-up of an "independent" publisher, the zeitgeist (by way of a "kaleidoscopic account of the past eight or nine months" similar to a prose poem), and the value of numerous recent poetry volumes (via constellations, mini-capsule reviews, and a pure list of books reviewed in four prominent publications).

Good as Field Notes is, its place is augmented by the dialogue occurring in the rest of the magazine, which begins with a letter responding to an interview in Poker 3. Next is a short essay by Juliana Spahr also responding to the previous issue. And there are two reviews and an interview—normally I'm not a big fan of interviews, but this one with Ange Mlinko was the perfect length, and even made me want to get off my ass and write.

And, of course, there's poetry. Rachel Blau DuPlessis has perhaps the most striking piece, "Draft 63: Dialogue of self and soul", which covers six pages. Here's a taste: "I yearn to see the moon, to have clouds / break apart. Instead they close. / No metaphor. All flatness. No results." And later, "You say you want to see / what you do not see [. .. .. ] / Vision's blocked at every turn. / Accept it. This failure is the vision."

There are also new translations of Giuseppe Ungaretti, sections from Nathaniel Tarn's War Poems Yet Again, four poems by Hoa Nguyen, and impressive work by some I hadn't read before, such as Anna Moschovakis ("Because the couple felt Platonic that day / they tiptoed around the perimeter / and yelled at each other"), and Elizabeth Marie Young ("You pump the gas, / Blood rushes to my head. / Move over, numinous, this thing's on automatic.").

The Poker 4 is 92 pages and costs $10. There are other good magazines that give you more pages for the same price (i.e. Fence 13, 187 pages; Court Green 1, 168 pages; The Canary 3, 127 pages), but The Poker is 99% lean. On top of that, a three-issue subscription means only $8 per issue. And I'll even give it this stock phrase of praise: If you order one magazine this year, make it The Poker (well, or Skanky Possum).

First Words

Today when I got home from work, Vaughn (our seven-month-old daughter), voiced what sounded like "hi". This was the third or fourth time in the past week or so where she had made this noise upon seeing me. I guess this might be her first word, but that I have to qualify it with "what sounded like"—and that I find the word "noise" an apt description—suggests to me that this is not really it. I thought a poem might come out of this experience, but I really haven't gotten comfortable with writing Vaughn into anything yet. Though she's made appearances in a few decent poems as "baby" and "daughter", the domestic mind/homescape is not one I generally feel able to bring my full attention to. Which makes the works that have been appearing here and there by Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith all the more remarkable. They are really bringing all of their intense, word-musicing, imaginative gifts to bear on their domestic experience.

The key is that their work continues to be in no way domesticated. There's none of the melodrama and (in context) none of the banality which a phrase like "American domestic poetry" might connote. Nguyen's language and Smith's vision are as wild and active as ever. I was particularly impressed with Smith's Black Stone, which is something between a daybook and a serial prose poem. Hell, just writing this much with two kids, and editing an important magazine, and paying the bills (I assume!), is commendable. Posted temporarily on the Possum Pouch, Black Stone ought to be finding a print publisher before too long. Here are first words, primary words, words of the primordial imagination, as Smith rides the black stone through personal and political, sacred and profane, historical past and present: "What minds those first Europeans must have brought to this continent, this 'collection of cosmologies.' How many years does it take to absorb the power of a landmass? We're still finding out, I guess. K spits a rock from his mouth" (from 12); "Water once flowed here, a great coast back in dinosaur days. Now near blackness the president talks on the radio. Haitian rebels promise to surrender their weapons." (from 17)

Meanwhile, Nguyen's poem "[Sopping in juice    melons juicy]" leads off the latest issue of The Canary (which was reviewed on the Verse blog). It's particularly hard to excerpt one of Nguyen's uniquely elliptical poems, because so much of the experience is lost (well, and they also tend to be fairly short, but enough's there to chew on that their length occurs as only an afterthought). Form and content are really built as the poem progresses in a manner not dissimilar, say, to the "bop prosody" of Jack Kerouac. At their best, her poems are jazzy—read jazzy, sound jazzy, go jazzy, do jazzy—but I've never seen anyone describe them as such. I mean, they look like no poem you're likely to read in any of the jazz anthologies. But hear them aloud in your head. It's not bop—it's not Charlie Parker— it's not Davis or Coltrane, but it may be a bit of Sun Ra in the kitchen. . . .

                                                            Hilly
             mamma belly

             Let me in
             roasty        like broiled eggplant        Spun
             angel kisses and salty
                                                            meanderings

             Night is the time all the time        a pulse of pulse
             and digits popping 1 2 3
             Please do not tangle me

                   Hoa Nguyen
                   in The Canary #3

Some Related Links:
An interview with Hoa Nguyen with links to some of her poems.
Poems by Nguyen at Milk Magazine.
A glowing review of Smith's The Flood & The Garden.
A mixed review of Smith's The Flood & The Garden.

Court Green in Session

The premiere issue of Court Green, an annual magazine associated with Columbia College Chicago, exhibits a wide range of poetry (from Maxine Kumin to Ann Lauterbach; from Annie Finch to Joanne Kyger), most of it entertaining and some of it downright stellar. Here's the skinny:

Price: $10
Size: 168 pp (76pp general poetry; 60 pp poetry on film; 14 pp for twelve reviews)

This will be a little unfair, because there's so much that's notable, but anyway here's what really stood out for me on first reading:
• three poems by Joy Katz, "this stem poised now to write / deliberate as a coronation."
• Dodie Bellamy's piece from Fat Chance, "I spend 2000 years frozen underwater staring, waiting, dreaming of fat little fairies. The shadows do not introduce themselves. I'm a black dress and he's black Dockers and a brown shirt. The jet of his urine spells out apocalyptic messages in its expiring arc."
• Kyger's two poems, "You are the sum / of all you 'know' / and the more you forget / the more ordinary / you are really nothing / special   so why / all the anxious push-push / just hang // the clothes on the line"
• Finch's three poems, "and in the crown of a new place, / the rain carving out an old space, / dropping around the new space / as if it were old again.:
• Probably my favorite poems in the issue are the two by Carrie Comer. They reminded me of the first time I read John Olson, a selection of his poems back in 93 or 94 in New American Writing, which really blew me away. Anyway, here is the opening of "Miami in September":

   I am the heart of the burning chopper,
   the burning muscle in the fist. Below me, a green ribbon of fish.

   The heart, the flame, the firelock,

   fie for shame. In my other life, I stroll the sea floor
   masquerading as a man.

• Bill Kushner has a poem called "Film Noir" which reminds me: have any of you, my non-existent readers, noticed the rash of film noir poems lately? I went through a film noir poem phase a few years ago—unfortunately mine all sucked. The ones I've been seeing haven't sucked, but they haven't exactly made me jealous or anything. See, here's one called "Double Indemnity". Poor Kevin Young: his next book is a film noir novel in verse, but readers may have o.d.'d on film noir poems by time it comes out.

• Bellamy's review of the movie Sylvia, which doesn't just stand out because it's a movie review in a poetry magazine, "Plath wears red when she meets Hughes, Plath wears red when she marries Hughes, and after her suicide, when the paramedics carry out her corpse, a bright red cloth is spread over the stretcher. That's about as deep as this movie gets."

Criticisms: 1. Some of the poems are entertaining (or would be) to the point of being slight. 2. Range is great, until you hit upon consecutive poems that offer you nothing, and which you wouldn't be reading if the magazine had a stronger focus; still, I admit, I will usually err on the side of inclusiveness, so this is really only a half-criticism. 3. A subscription plan would be welcome, and I hope one will be added; even though the Court is worth the ten smackaroos cover charge, as small an enticement as three issues for $27 might pull more readers in.

Some Notes on "Winter Sex"

I was surprised to see Katy Lederer's Winter Sex, which was published in 2002, still on Jacket's list of unassigned book reviews. She is one of the more well-known of the new younger American poets, and I remember her first book as having gained much notice in the poetry world. This prompted me to go back and re-read the book, taking some notes with an idea that I might write up a review. I couldn't even make it through Jacket's style guide, however, so I'll just offer the following underdeveloped thoughts here in the public privacy of my unread blog.

  .  .  .

Both D.A. Powell (on the back cover) and Paul Stephens (in this review) link Lederer to Robert Duncan. And while such a connection is clearly evident in some poems, overall I read Lederer's Romanticism more in line with Wallace Stevens's contemplative poetry, especially as refracted through John Ashbery and even Ted Berrigan.

  .  .  .

Birds and trees figure prominently in Lederer's poems. They seem to suggest two sides of sexuality. The birds being the active, traditionally male aspect to the trees' passive, traditionally female aspect. From "Dulcinea": "The bird is the result of an expression of desire / and of refinement." Such connotative opposites as "desire" and "refinement" also appear frequently, as might be guessed of a book titled "Winter Sex".

  .  .  .

Since much of the book deals with sexual union, in all of its tenderness and violence, it's not surprising that there is a poem ("According to the Appetites") that reworks the creation myth of Genesis. The poem begins, appropriately, with Lederer's symbol of the Whitmanian "procreant urge of the world," birds: "Let birds, let fly / that it was good." Lederer also conjures up a Blakean prelapsarian world, where the good earth has "no rain, no no." Just those last two words imply a world where Reason has not yet writ "Thou shall not." A world about to be gone with the invitation in the next line: "When you touch delight, you will not die."

  .  .  .

For my money the best poem in the book, the poem which almost summarizes the whole of Lederer's main theme, and which, interestingly enough, is actually the title poem in disguise is "The Epithet Epic" (it can be found online in The Boston Review archives). The poem originally appeared in an earlier version in the seventh issue (way back in 1997) of the now defunct Mike and Dale's Younger Poets (but see Skanky Possum for Dale's [and wife Hoa's] current efforts) under the title "Winter Sex." The poem is a great example of Lederer's ability to deliver deadpan humor even as she maintains a sincere and serious investigation into eros, specifically, and "creative" urges in general. For instance, when the male character deems his ejaculant "epic": "It is early in the morning. When he comes he is ethical. / He will remember it. He will give it the epithet epic and leave it." That "he is ethical" only "when he comes" resonates later, in the second part of this two page poem, when "She tilts her head back and moans. She lilts her voice slightly and asks him if he loves her. / He does love her. He feels a very true love for her." In this poem we have perhaps the most satisfactory description of that welling up of emotion before orgasm which may be true or not.

The poem also achieves its effects by avoiding linear explication of the sex act, of which the literature is not lacking. The poem, like an epic (in another bit of subtle humor), begins in medias res, then digresses to a kind of violent courting scene, before shifting back to the moment at hand.

And here's a good example of revision at work, with lines "before" and "after":

      He commands her to speak in direct discourse.
      He indicates that he wants her to express her thoughts concisely and with precision.
      He finds this romantic.
      Most everything has remained unexpressed until this moment.
      They are in the country and her bodice has been cut with the knife that the two of them have previously purchased.
      Part of it hangs off her shoulder. In the distance she hears the sound of a gunshot.
      This makes her want to fuck the man.
            (from "Winter Sex", 1997)
 
      He commands her to speak in direct discourse.
      He indicates that he wants her to express her thoughts concisely and with precision.
      He finds this romantic.
 
      They are in the country and her bodice has been cut with the knife.
      Part of it hangs off her shoulder. In the distance she hears the sound of a gunshot.
      Their speech no longer serves them adequately.
            (from "The Epithet Epic", 2002)

  .  .  .

Some negatives:
      First, there's the issue, which is not Lederer's or Verse Press's alone, of not getting enough bang for your buck with contemporary poetry volumes, especially debuts. The last poem here is on p. 59, bad enough, but then you look and see that the Arabic pagination begins in the front matter with the half title, that's six pages. Then minus eight pages for part titles with blank backs and you're down to 45 pages of poetry. 36 poems, 45 pages, 12 dollars plus tax. Now, obviously, I didn't mind paying that much, but you can see why poetry is a tough sell, when a reader can pick up a 300 page trade paperback novel for just a little bit more.
      Second, some of Lederer's poems come off as little more than workshop exercises. They may not be, but that's the way some strike me (e.g. "An Interrupted Question" or "A New Way To Live"). If you were to offer me a choice between creativity and imagination, I will choose the latter every time. This is one of the problems, perhaps the main one, of the creative writing program: it encourages creative arrangements rather than imaginative inventions. It gives laurels to, say, James Tate, and leaves relatively unrecognized the likes of Robert Kelly, Clayton Eshleman, or Tom Clark.

Searching for Joe Ceravolo

I was introduced to the work of Joseph Ceravolo (1964–1988) in the summer of 94. The American Poetry Review reprinted a generous selection of poems, along with an introduction by Kenneth Koch, from the then forthcoming The Green Lake Is Awake: Selected Poems. Although I had only been reading poetry for little more than two years at that point, I did have some experience with avant-garde poetries,* primarily via Rothenberg's Revolution of the Word, Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, Sulfur, New American Writing, O!!Zone, and Exquisite Corpse. Still I had never come across any poems quite like Ceravolo's before. Poems with language so familiar, so often simple, it was actually child-like, yet that still managed to render everyday emotions in their true complexity. A poet of “Everyday Life” in all of its extraordinariness—if we would just slow down to see it. Which is one of the things Ceravolo's poetry does best: slow us down.

      Why does light diffuse
      As earth turns away from the sun?

      I want to give my food
      To a stranger. I want
      to be taken.
      What kind of a face do

      I have while leaving?
      I'm thinking of my friend.

      (from "The Wind Is Blowing West"
      in The Green Lake Is Awake)

Now, ten years after the publication of The Green Lake, Ceravolo's work is again receiving deserved attention. This time it comes from Fence magazine (Spring/Summer 2004), where six poems are reprinted along with a short "appreciation" by Anthony Hawley. It's a significant event because Ceravolo is on the verge of being lost. As Hawley explains, it's nearly impossible to track down Ceravolo's books. The Fence selections come from two "VERY hard to come by" volumes, Wildflowers Out of Gas (1967) and Millennium Dust(1982). Though generally not up to the level of The Green Lake poems, they do have the same energy. An energy derived largely from a clipped/Cubistic syntax ("He played with / He put canoe in river, strong eyes // like a rainbow / declines to go play"). Also present are Ceravolo's almost trademark interrogatives, which Clayton Eshleman once described as, “fall[ing] somewhere between ‘koans’ and maddening 4-year-old questions,” such as "Can I ever fade people?" and "Does a fly need to be / ugly?" These poems left me with that old familiar feeling of wanting more.

A few months passed after my “discovery” of Ceravolo until, in the fall of 94, I found more of his work in John Bernard Myers' The Poets of the New York School and Padgett and Shapiro's Anthology of New York Poets. Soon after, I picked up The Green Lake, but that was it for a while.

One poem I had expected to see in The Green Lake, but did not appear, was "Wounded Deer" which ends: "In what hungry woods / should I be walking to get hit / and killed? To be born / like a fire that went out." It's perfect really. Read aloud, the lines sound of staggering, which reinforces the imagery, and the use of the interrogative helps C approach material that could easily be sentimental. Also, the paradoxical last line, which I dare say would scalp ol' Emily D., besides offering a new take on the life-death continuum, echoes Tu Fu: "Borne headlong.../// Life whirls past like drunken wildfire (from "Winter Dawn", trans. Rexroth).

A couple years later, working for a bookstore, I noticed that Transmigration Solo could still be ordered. Surpirsed, I gave it a shot, not wholly confident it would arrive, as other listed books I'd tried to order by Ted Berrigan and Sotère Torregian were no-gos. But, in a couple weeks, I had received not just any copy, but a numbered and signed copy. Not usually the kind of person who gets excited about signed paraphenalia, I have to admit I thought this one was pretty cool. But in the years since, there's not much else of C's that I've been able to find, just Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, which I had already read through interlibrary loan (but found at a book sale for a dollar!), and o•blek 5.

In the spring of 1989, o•blēk printed posthumously seven poems by Ceravolo. The pieces are presented as “from Mad Angels,” which to my knowledge has never been published. For all I know it was never completed, but this is some of the best work not to find it's way into The Green Lake. These poems, like the ones in Fence, force the question: When will there be a collected poems? If we're getting Berrigan’s in 2005, could C’s be far behind? Yeah, unfortunately, it could. Rather than clumsily comment, as I have above, on the poems from Mad Angels, I will simply post one. Tomorrow or the next day.

________
* There's no right word for what I mean here. "Alerntaive" and "otherstream" marginalize themsleves and yield ground to official verse culture. "Postmodern" is sloppy from overuse, and anyway wouldn't really fit the Rothenberg anthology. "Post-avant" also would be historically inaccurate here. And as far as "experimental," for which I have much sympathy as shorthand, it really doesn't say much if we follow Stevens's lead (to paraphrase): every poem is an experiment. So I stick with the loose-fitting "avant-garde"—at least for the above instance.