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Koestenbaum steps into his cheekily arriere-garde ottava rima with the ease of an Augustan slipping into his bath. That he wants to play with the bubbles (and sometimes himself) instead of telling others how to bathe just means that he’s 21st-century...more
Koestenbaum steps into his cheekily arriere-garde ottava rima with the ease of an Augustan slipping into his bath. That he wants to play with the bubbles (and sometimes himself) instead of telling others how to bathe just means that he’s 21st-century, not 18th; that the bubbles are thick and fun but pop fast just means I’m 21st-century too, searching for the right drawer to store verse that addresses the reader with this level of lightness, prolixity, sociability and wit.(less)
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Brolaski’s distressed and gilded englyssche can go “Hellespontine onna Trojan sibyl” but knows too how “to be a common man in a dent truck.” It also knows that form’s for feigning, feigning fucking, and “to feign—not to fuck a form, Arnault/Is making...more
Brolaski’s distressed and gilded englyssche can go “Hellespontine onna Trojan sibyl” but knows too how “to be a common man in a dent truck.” It also knows that form’s for feigning, feigning fucking, and “to feign—not to fuck a form, Arnault/Is making shoddy deals.” Don’t let the four-letter fun fool you though; the advice here is really how “to hold a thorny thing tenderly,” salt mixed with sweet in “surly chivalry,” and to swoon without forgetting that “Love poetry is about knowing your references.” In the “sweet science of bruising,” Brolaski’s Einstein, test sheep, prof and champ: “Honey my prowess I take as it comes.”(less)
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The picture here is worth a thousand words. Poet CAConrad devised a somatic ritual—“#46 Your Mina Loy Portal”—in which you expand your green heart chakra by carrying quartz; type a passage from Mina Loy’s poetry and blow it up to the size of a page;...more
The picture here is worth a thousand words. Poet CAConrad devised a somatic ritual—“#46 Your Mina Loy Portal”—in which you expand your green heart chakra by carrying quartz; type a passage from Mina Loy’s poetry and blow it up to the size of a page; then cut a circle in the middle “big enough for your eyes and nose to come through,” just like the cover on this heart-green Trafficker chapbook, and use it to look at the world until your notes of what you see with it become the key to your next poem.
This writing is David Brazil doing that, for reasons discussed with clarity and green-heartfulness in the interview with poet Monica Peck at the back. The interview itself is a profound statement of poetics that goes far beyond explaining the process of writing the poem which precedes it, or explains the poem—really the making of any poem—as process, a process rooted in the “deep old anchoring shapes” of language itself (“like/passwords through the/generations”). So the role of the poet, as Brazil enacts it through Loy, is that of “reinsister”: insisting on affinities forgotten or erased (sun to Ra, body to house, nouns to etymologies, etc.), and making us sister again to the dead, whose limbs the poet gathers into “‘tremblin’ emblems’ of a redemption”—reanimate with anima, greened up with “Isis Shakti,” “worn smooth like touchspots of/ikons in the shrines that/pilgrims go to to be healed,” cut into a solar circle for re-seeing then passed on, Mina to Conrad to David to Evan to us.(less)
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I thought at first Peck’s title was ironic, a Pyrrhic victory blown up to epic proportions, with maybe the suggestion that all victories are Pyrrhic, all epics about the futility of war, even (especially) for its winners.
But my gender was all wrong,...more
I thought at first Peck’s title was ironic, a Pyrrhic victory blown up to epic proportions, with maybe the suggestion that all victories are Pyrrhic, all epics about the futility of war, even (especially) for its winners.
But my gender was all wrong, which is part of Peck’s poems’ point. Not Pyrrhus, win-to-lose king, but Pyrrha, the rumored name for Achilles during his extra-Homeric stint as a woman, hiding at a Greek king’s court. Odysseus comes to find him in this version, blows his cover and hauls him off to Troy. The interview at the back explains that guessing Achilles’s womanly name was a Roman parlor entertainment, which Joyce picks up on in Ulysses. Turns out the smart money’s on “Pyrrha,” meaning red-head, like Achilles was, which opens a wormhole to Horace’s otherwise unrelated Ode I.5, “The Pyrrha Ode,” famously translated by Milton, where Pyrrha’s former lover warns a slender scented youth of what pain’s in store for him in loving her. Or “hir”—except for the name, Peck tells us, Horace’s ode gives no grammatical information about Red’s gender, which means it’s not so hard to imagine this ode as telling the story of Odysseus fetching Achilles to the wreck of the Trojan War.
This is worth spelling out because it shows the intricate scale of echoes, allusions, and elisions Peck riffs on in these poems, and says something too about just how right her project of genderqueering Achilles and his loser war really is. Peck’s “xe” and “hir” in the poems aren’t innovations but corrections, an accuracy that serves the ambiguity original to the tale. In Peck’s re-retelling, “xe rages against the violence” of being fetched from hir island to be determinate, worn out by a war that serves only Odysseus’s greed. But the rage in the end gives way to water, our Pyrrha—“Copper aged with fear”—shedding hir armor and reborn (first time, Ma Thetis threw baby Red in fire) in the amniotic surf of the pacific sea: “Let disdainful thoughts and hurting names be lost.”(less)
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WTTN yokes together a decades’ worth of Spahr’s shorter works, linked by the locales (complete with street address and ZIP codes) in which they were written. The structure implies a thesis about place, and about the concomitant experiences of displac...more
WTTN yokes together a decades’ worth of Spahr’s shorter works, linked by the locales (complete with street address and ZIP codes) in which they were written. The structure implies a thesis about place, and about the concomitant experiences of displacing and being displaced, but when I went to extract it to write this, I found less a thesis than a process: a process of trying to be placed, to create a sense of place in places where one is, or was, but doesn’t belong.
Spahr’s process involves snapping pictures, walking streets, researching histories, taking ethnobotany courses, pushing writing back and forth through translation machines, producing lists and catalogues, but above all thinking, which may be the book’s home gerund, as in: “As I am always walking on Dole Street, I am always thinking about Dole Street,” or “I was thinking about a story I had heard about a French grandfather,” or “I was trying to think about______,” in which “think” isn’t the gerund but “trying” is, and “trying to think” is maybe the better key phrase for Spahr’s writing anyway.
What attracts me most in the work is how it performs thinking at the level of syntax, building up larger, complex patterns of repetition from relatively simple and straightforward phrasal units, a technique which owes something to Stein but reminds me even more vividly of the way Minimalist composers restrict and re-cycle their tones. Because thinking for Spahr primarily involves connecting—this here to that there, the body to a landscape, the present to a past, things included to things excluded—grammar itself, which sets rules for connecting, takes on a heightened ethical dimension in her writing, so that ecosystem and language system and biosystem and social system all finally stand in for one another, or are seen to be part of one another, just as “Some of we are all eating grapes” expands to include “Some of we are all together in the grapes.”
A paradox in Spahr’s writing for me is that as direct and inclusive as the mode of address is, I don’t finally feel a part of her “we,” except in the most general terms (which may be exactly the point) of having a white blood cell count or breathing or belonging to the set of beings included in a statement as broad as: “We are in this world.” What I sense instead in the work is a powerful mind thinking through serious questions in a unique and highly personal way, with the thinking, or the moral imperative of trying to think, being theme, virtue, and obstacle all at once:
“I wanted to end this piece with a scene of metaphoric group sex where all the participants were place names, but the minute I attempted to do this I got bogged down in questions of which places would penetrate and which places would be penetrated.”(less)
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“Brittle as cinders”: That’s a phrase I just found in Stephen Rodefer’s VILLON and instantly applied to Ward’s This Can’t Be Life, which I’m tangled in the glittery hoops of right now. Three sections of the book—“Roseland,” The Squeakquel, and 2010’s...more
“Brittle as cinders”: That’s a phrase I just found in Stephen Rodefer’s VILLON and instantly applied to Ward’s This Can’t Be Life, which I’m tangled in the glittery hoops of right now. Three sections of the book—“Roseland,” The Squeakquel, and 2010’s totally bravura Typing ‘Wild Speech’—appeared earlier as chapbooks, so if you’re a friend or fan of Dana’s (the self-exposure and conversational address of his work blurs the line between the two) there are some welcome anchor points.
The beautiful surface of the writing in the chapbooks—the fearlessness about aiming to be beautiful—extends throughout the full-length collection. Ward’s image hoard is one of gold, silver, fluidity, liquefaction, summer, twilight, glitter, carousels and slumber, a floating world of affect and glamour grounded firmly in an everyday life full of friends, partners, jobs, conversations, emails, smoke breaks, and political desires, and annealed with a sharp, subtly tragic sense of the darkness the aesthetic holds at bay.
What comes clearer reading the chapbooks all together, and interleaved with the other poems/prose/letters/journal entries (more blurring), are the delicate structures of inquiry and concern that Ward builds up over time. His writings divigate, pivot, carom, swerve, volute, twist, and loop from topic to topic—from “twilight’s newer gears” to “Speaking of Twilight, the movie I mean, have you seen it?”—in a way that feels casual, conversational, improvisatory, even slapdash, but that grows over time, within and across poems, into cindery armatures that threaten to collapse any instant, poetry into prose, idea into aside, thought into reverie, plan into décor, until, with a final set of twists, you’re surprised with a completed poem, the turns closed up into a perfect lemniscate.
Ward seems deeply aware of his own process—“O the badly managed metaphors are everywhere!”—and inures you to it with a disarming abjection, revealing his “gynecomastadons” or fumbling ways with sushi or moments of artistic humiliation in a manner that’s affecting and generous, but also central to his poetic: “the language of daily life drenched in intimate affect which itself is soaked in unchecked mediation.” Consider the twist in that—affect spun with mediation—or take it a little straighter:
“well, Hell. I couldn’t tell you any other fucking way.”
However you take it, it’s worth read after read.(less)
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We owe a debt to Paul Hoover for whatever punishing politics he went through to get this past Norton, then survive in the Balkans of small press poetry. I remember the jolt I first felt to see poets here that I’d never have imagined Nortonized: Joe C...more
We owe a debt to Paul Hoover for whatever punishing politics he went through to get this past Norton, then survive in the Balkans of small press poetry. I remember the jolt I first felt to see poets here that I’d never have imagined Nortonized: Joe Ceravolo, Hannah Weiner, John Godfrey, Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Ray DiPalma, Kathleen Fraser, Kenward Elmslie, Diane Wakoski, John Weiners, Diane Di Prima, and Amiri Baraka, to name a very few.
With word of a new edition under weigh though, Hoover still with his hand on the tiller almost two decades later, I pulled this off the shelf to see how well it holds up, and to guess where the updates might come. It was duller than I remembered, a function in part of how many of its poets were still mid-career, not in full flower; in part of the mandate to be representative and pretend like the Balkans were steppes. Many avant-gardists, pushing against the standard anthologized lyric as they do, don’t excerpt well, and the potted bios that set them up, while skillful and fair, can’t do justice to the swerves that bring a poet to her forms. (They also replicate a Romantic idea of poetry as a procession of separate gifted individuals, each with his or her own unique voice, which much of the history of experimental poetry and the scenes it comes out of undercuts both in theory and praxis.)
I wondered in the end if “postmodern” and “Norton anthology” were ever really meant to share a title page, if the one’s understanding of poetry interferes with the other’s to the point that we’re left with the signal cleaned of the noise. I guess this slipped some outsiders into colleges, but 20 years on and with everyone a Google search away, who but the folks down in Sales and Marketing can say with a straight face that was totally a good thing?(less)
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LONG FORM: I admire Rodefer’s writing as much as the next poet of my age, place, and proximity to Language, plus I knew him a little at Cambridge the year he arrived. Some of Rodefer’s earlier work in One or Two Poems from the White World and his ext...more
LONG FORM: I admire Rodefer’s writing as much as the next poet of my age, place, and proximity to Language, plus I knew him a little at Cambridge the year he arrived. Some of Rodefer’s earlier work in One or Two Poems from the White World and his extraordinary VILLON (which is later I think than Four Lectures) send the ball further for me though than these do. The insistent pacing, Borscht Belty antic tone, and unremittingly block-like textual units exhaust me pretty quickly, even where they show glints of the waspish aesthete through the sober Langpo threads, which never seemed to fit Rodefer as naturally as they do some others. I have friends who swear by this book, so I’ve tried and tried, but the prodigious intelligence, wit, and charisma I see here I find in greater concentration in some of his other collections. Has anyone seen his Baudelaire yet?
SHORT FORM: “Just the right hint of everything, pushed through a sieve.”(less)
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Brown’s Catullus is an experiment in translation, really an intervention to save translation from the academic taxidermists who empty, re-stuff, and try to fix the classics into their original positions. His method “resists the binary of fidelity and...more
Brown’s Catullus is an experiment in translation, really an intervention to save translation from the academic taxidermists who empty, re-stuff, and try to fix the classics into their original positions. His method “resists the binary of fidelity and treason which haunts the apprehension of the activity called translation” by “[acknowledging] the fact of detour” as “the preceding writing is absorbed by the body of the translator in the act of reading.”
That’s about all the theory you’ll need to get into the funhouse, where commentary, exegesis, autobiography, prosody, etymology, somatic exercises, homophonic ear jazz, celebrity sightings, letters to and collaborations from the coterie, urbane academese and a brilliantly charged vernacular become mirrors for Brown to watch himself perform Catullus in, the centuries stretched and blurred till you can’t tell one’s lovebird from the other’s, his crumbling republic from ours.
When’s the last time a book this important was also so hard to put down? Brandon, this will embarrass you, but surely not since Zukofsky, or Rodefer’s Villon, maybe not since “the two thousand years that slipped between Catullus writing Sparrow and me writing The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus.”(less)
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