S. Scott Whitaker's Blog, page 11

"How to Teach Children About Desire" -Up on the #GoodMenProject, #poetry

How to Teach Children About Desire -:

This was published back on April 20th, as part of National Poetry Month, but it slipped my radar. Nothing like finding one of your creations wandering the wilds of the internet. Thanks to GMP and company for their publication and perspective on masculinity in the modern age.


'via Blog this'

John Sibley Williams debut is a work of negative space, spare words, #poetryreview

John Sibley Williams debut collection, Controlled Hallucinations $14.95, FutureCyclePress, is bare ghostly work of vision. It is a work of negative space, a work of spare words, a work of economical images, and a work of ache.

It’s a numbered collection, the poems themselves lacking titles, one poem sequencing into the next. The title evokes a Rimbaudian world of fever, delirium, and excess, but Controlled Hallucinations is just that, controlled, honed; the excess is cut from the carcass, leaving spare poems that form a body that aches.

The collection opens with a dedication to the “coming extinctions” and prepares the reader for an apocalyptic vision, however, Williams’ apocalypse is a personal one; a collapse of relations, of love, of family, and work. The opening poem is call to vision, a call to being. “To be the effect./To be a thoughtful pause/and restrained response...To be the scent/translated as toxin/or perfume...To be love/itself,/neither the loving/nor the beloved./To be translatable.”  The book prepares the reader for a voice that wishes to be anything but it’s throat; to lose one’s identity in something greater than itself is often associated with spirituality, as well as art, and Williams seeks to cut down his vision to the point where the identity is nearly stripped from the poem, where the poet is enveloped in the poem.

Williams choice of poetics is bareness, and at first glance recalls the shoestring imagery of William Carlos Williams, or the spare blues of Sam Cornish, but Williams creates a shimmering world where he gives the reader an image, and then in the next instant removes the image, a illusory trick where the reader is left with afterimage. And like a photographer Williams captures landscapes, people, bare rooms, and offers them up as waste from our excess. “The doors are open,/steps drawn down to the pavement--no bar blocking my way,/no driver...What if the seats are all empty/and I cannot sit?/What if they are all empty/after I occupy them?”

Williams’ eye scours the landscape, eats it up, and the collection begins and ends with a landscape. A “man on an adjacent building,/silhouette cut from the skyline,” which over the course the book haunts the speaker, this desire to “cut out the roof/he stands on...cut out the mountain/in the distance” to wonder what “it means to touch,” and by end of the cycle, the end of the collection the landscape rises up once again, “rough edges of a church’s cornerstone/or the guilty side/of a prison wall” remains to be discovered, “As it should be.” The environment lingers, transcends and enters the speaker, as it does for all of us, if we let it. Which is part of Williams journey here to “Look up to discover/a tiny tear in the cold blue curtain/and struggle the rest of your life/not to pull down the sky.”  

Throughout the collection, a unified vision, the poet is giving his gift over to the senses, to the very world, in an act of discovery. To discover what, you may ask? To discover all that feasts before us, the great plate of living in our rich and decadent world of sensation.   A cat playing with yarn, a lover or a partner in a photograph, a moth or bird fluttering at the edge of light and flinging its song across the air.  These poems are not lamentations, they are poems of focus, and Williams uses short spare lines, for the most part, to mark the territory, and when he breaks from the short, shoe-string lines, he retains the economy, the simplicity. Consider how all of the world’s pornography and lusty nakedness form into one body, one the poet can use, and perhaps us as well, to define the self with. “I concede there is no true nudity left./ I make love dressed in all the world’s lovemaking./The pieces of other bodies combine perfectly/Into my outline.”
One can almost hear Williams’ synapses firing as his sensory neurons catalog what is there, and then with his poet’s eye, ear, and pen, erase the world to bare essentials. And as Williams discovers, one cannot unlearn, or un-discover what is seen, touched, eaten, and loved, “there is no un-/knowing.”

Jacob Appel's The Biology of Luck is high comedy, #fictionreview

Jacob M Appel’s The Biology of Luck is a wonderful novel, a love song to both New York and to beauty. It’s a comedy, a satirical look at human folly and desire, fame and fortune.  The novel is two stories, one about Larry Bloom and his adventure to navigate the city of New York during a particularly tragic-comic day, trying to both find a letter from his publisher, and reach a date with Starshine, who is the heroine of Bloom’s manuscript The Biology of Luck.  Bloom hopes he will become a published author and perhaps literary darling, and he hopes Starshine will fall in love with him. His book is about the day where she fell in love with him. Bloom hopes and yearns for Starshine in an earnest way reserved for the lucky or stupid.  The manuscript is basically a pick up line, and by revealing his manuscript about Starshine to Starshine, he hopes to win her heart. The second story in Appel’s The Biology of Luck is excerpts from Bloom’s fictional manuscript where a fictional Starshine has her own adventure where she navigates New York on her way to deliver a fruit basket to her aging aunt. Along the way we navigate Starshine’s complicated heart. She loves everyone and no one. Bloom is a looming figure in her romantic landscape, and offers comfort, but perhaps not enough.  The conclusion of the novel hinges on whether the real Starshine will meet with the real Bloom for a date, and fall in love with him.  

Appel’s sharp prose, keen wit, and ear for dialogue make the dual narratives lock and flow easily, and the meta-ness of the premise melts away because the story is ultimately one and the same, a love story about youth and beauty, and our misconceptions of beauty, ugliness, and gender. Starshine is funny, endearing, annoying. She’s lusty and messy, and caring and selfish. The reader forgets that the Starshine we get to know is often Larry’s fictional Starshine. But it matters not, for the zany detail of both worlds hold hands together in Appel’s zippy read. You won’t care, as a reader you’ll be drawn into the food and travel porn of Appel’s writing. The city is a beaming character in the story, and Appel uses Larry Bloom’s tour guide job to plant the reader in the heart of the city that never sleeps.

Larry is funny, endearing, and frustrating, but Larry is ugly, and Starshine is beautiful. They are both getting along in the city, about in it, without having money or fame they are simply living in the city without glamor. Larry Bloom and his ugly mug, his constant moping about will he or won’t he be loved grows more comedic as he continues to find himself in the middle of social messes, from Rita Blatt’s clutches, to his schemes of his boss, all which threaten his relationship to Starshine.

And of course Starshine may not even like Larry Bloom in the same way she loves her men, the on lam rough Jack Boscomb, and the rich Colby Parker. But Larry is hoping she does not know that she in love with him. This hopes floats him through the hot city madness.

Appel nails love’s anxiety, and the city life as it parades through our senses. The city happens in Luck, and love happens with Luck, along the way Appel shows us a human existence that is longs for joy. Many of the characters here are ugly people, either physically or in following their own selfish compass. Storekeep philosophers, roommates, and Dutch tourists become voices of reason and of the heart, and Larry Bloom is given plenty to dissuade him from his quest. Larry is aware, heck he has even written about it, but remains hopeful. Strong almost. Starshine is the type of young woman whom men cross the street to proclaim their love for, and Larry Bloom knows he must bring a lot to the table to rise above her other suitors. His earnestness, his resolve, and his ability stop, drop, and roll make him a winning protagonist. Will Starshine feel the same? Appel handles the inevitable resolution masterfully.

Blood & Roses: Dan Gutstein's new work “occupies” #poetry, #review

Blood & Roses: Dan Gutstein's new work “occupies” poetry
Perhaps it's that ubiquitous word of the last six months: occupy, that makes me view Dan Gutstein's newest work of poetry, Bloodcoal & Honey,as a piece of architecture, a living one that occupies imainative and emotional space. Or perhaps it's Eric Grienke's perspective on how poetry should evolve, still fresh in my mind (see my review of his work in the last BKR), that BC&Honey manages to landscape experience, firmly grounded in emotional places. Gutstein's poems take various forms and create a physical and abstract space for our imaginations to wander.
His poems occupy space.
It's a feeling, mind you, when you find a poet who tells stories without giving away any ending, or cause. BC&Honey's language is precise “I crouch on the edge of the wheat/as the wind doubles back” as it is visceral “gun clatter off brick./ I followed blood clots behind a dumpster....” and his elegies for the mysterious Warren lay a foundation for the book, which later sections return to and rip from, like brickwork detail, or a bit of accent color unifying the poems as a whole.
It's no secret that I equate poetry to record albums, and dusty indie finds that pieced together my adolescence, and Bloodcoal & Honey reminds me of dark moody European post punk album, or at the very least a place where one might hear such a record, playing in a dark but cozy cafe or pub. And to a degree, BCH is that, dissonance & lyric, narrative & elliptical, sipping coffee, or stout, a lone cigarette smoker near by.
But it's bigger and warmer than hipster cool, in section III, Gutstein looks his family in the eye, and captures generations of small moments that like black and white photos, capture an innocence and danger; tension between light and dark.
I like the narrative without constraint, the elegiac compositions that features repeating whispering personaes, abstractions, tension of lines placed against jarring lines, such as in “What Can Disappear” the subject of a conversation about structure and form written with long Whitmanesque lines that make the poem an visual ironic statement on form.
Gutstein's work is composed, and controlled, the tension between loss and love like a sharp corner; a building with two doors, on opposite sides, each leading to a brownstone's worth of damp rooms and cozy places.

The Dream Geni: 13th century gets modernized in Deannuntis' Master Siger's Dream #fictionreview

The Dream Geni: 13th century gets modernized in Deannuntis' Master Siger's Dream
If you like your 13thphilosophy and philosophers stoned, drunk, and mish-mashed with anachronistic technology ala steam-punk, oh yes, and emeshed in papal and religious conspiracies then A.W. Deannutis' Master Siger's Dream is up your cobblestone alley.
Deannutis turns historical fiction upside down by introducing us to his brilliant, bumbling, and libidinous Master Siger of Brabant, whom I had no idea was actually a person, much less a revolutionary of philosophy who pissed off the Catholic church. Siger was guilty of teaching “double truth,” saying that one idea could be found true via reason and the opposite through faith; whatever that means. It is argued and accepted that Siger was as important as Thomas Aquinas to Western faith. Now I'm no philosopher, but the tale Deannutis dreams up makes the heady intellectualism go down like candy. One of my favorite moments has Siger meeting Pope Nicholas at the golf course to discuss mankind's thirst and search for enlightenment while they smoke pot. Sometimes the anachronistic imagery is an excuse for Deannutis to pluck and plow ideas around via the character's dialogue, and that's part of the truth the author wants us to see; ideas matter, pushing boundaries matter. The raw basics of much of what Siger and his contemporaries argue over can be seen bubbling up in the Occupy movement: you can't kill an idea, you can't control everyone.
Siger bounces, drinks, and fornicates his way around Europe, investigating the death of Brother Thomas (Aquinas), all while moving and shaking with the elite minds of the 13th century; the Pope a shadowy menance, or ally, his eyes and ears everywhere.
Deannutis clearly has fun taking shots at man's desire, man's folly, the church, intellectualism, and his own prose. He announces and declares his chapters, and with grand gesture too; as grand as the ideas themselves were in the 13thcentury. It's hard not to see the author winking at us throughout the narrative as the 13th century is meshed with the cacophony and pornography of the 21st century.

And there is a dream, beyond the imagery and imagination of the anacrhonistic landscape, one where nuns are S&M Goddesses, and torture poor Siger with the truths of his future, the future of the church, and even his own influence. And like the dream, the novel is a tease, flirting both with entertainment and burden of great ideas, and that's part of the point; how can one really know anything?

Exercise in reduction, a de-evolution of text: Bradley Harrison's Diorama of a People Burning, #poetryreview

Bradley Harrison’s Diorama of a People Burning, from Ricochet Press, an imprint of Gold Line Press, is a exercise in reduction, a de-evolution of text , and sequences, or cycles of poetry. The chapbook features six poems, and their variants whose parts have been “erased” by the author to reveal a new poem, a process that repeats until the final variation is little more than a shoestring poem. Each poem contains the words and images for the other variants in the sequence, as if the poems were Cornell boxes that the author rearranges.To understand what is happening on the page, we should begin with an explanation. The sequence of poetry begins with “Her Problem of Gravity” which is followed by “Her Probe of Gravity,” and then “Her Gravity” and finally “Gravy.” The erased variants look as if the author has used white out to reveal a poem hiding underneath. The good folks at Ricochet Press have even pulled out the stops so we can almost see the text ghosting out from under the white out, a visual confection. “Her Problem of Gravity,” a prose poem, or perhaps a flash fiction piece, is an elegy about a pretty woman in a yellow dress walking down a dead, deserted, sun-blasted street. A fine work of both loss and yearning that is followed by “Her Probe of Gravity” which features a landscape of words spread out by long dashes of white out that reveal a poem that is all about Isabella, the girl from the first poem. Harrison has stripped down the poem, the images and the language, and this process continues. “Her Gravity” is a further reduction of “Her Probe of Gravity,” and the final poem “Gravy” is an eleven word reduction of the poem that preceded it in the cycle, “Her Gravity.”Harrison has set up an interesting conceit: what hidden works are underneath. He is poet as archeologist, as reductionist. One poem, a variant of the title poem is entirely whited out, reduced to nothing, and the final poem is cast in reverse, building itself up over the sequence from a five word poem to a full blown block of text.The chapbook as a whole would have made a wonderful gallery installation, all of these manuscripts blown up impossibly large, looming above the viewer, the dashes of white over the text like a bandage over a wound. Poetically, the language moves from evocative to elliptical, the reduced text skirting the Eastern edge of American letters; poems that sound dangerously like haiku but are not rooted in the forms of the East, only in their quick haunts. I wonder how many drafts of reduced text Harrison had to go through, for he offers up something writers, especially poets, know so well: that you are never done with the writing, there’s always something to be cut out.

Vittorio Carli's work is punk rock #poetry

A Passion for Apathy: The Collected and Rejected Poems of Vittorio Carli, a small press gem of punk rock poetry, carries poetic traditions in its teeth. Punk rock because of the in-your-face-anti-establishment irony and earnestness in Carli's presentation of his verse, traditional in the homage and muse tradition of poetry. He writes to and for those and that which enlarges his voice.  Carli's work reads like a cross between cultural commentary/homage to persons as varied as Lawrence Welk to Woody Allen, to snapshots of socio-political unrest, which are flags of protest. My favorite is the “The Trouble with Librarians (for Andrea)” where Librarians are cast as the progenitors of closed information; they are “all closed books/with a couple of pages missing.”

He's a poet, and I imagine him in some stacked room typing madly, or in transit,  to and fro Chicago, scribbling on the back of brown paper bags. He works it. He's out there living poetry.  Proof. My copy of the book included his hand-written edits, which reminds me that poetry isn't confined to slick, glossy, university backed volumes, but pops and sizzles in small presses. Still. Technology has infiltrated poetry so that the most cash strapped starving artist/small press can create copy that appears in design and aesthetics as if it came from a cash rich publishing house. The Press of the 3rd Mind,  a Chicago based indie, bound and printed Carli's book, which means people touched, and handled, and cared for the book.  For someone who is isolated from a local poetry rich community (the region is dripping with it, mind you, if you care a two hour drive through farmland and small towns) it is evidence that poetry is alive and kicking.

Andy Fitch’s 60 Morning Talks, from Ugly Duckling Presse, is essential reading for fans of contemporary #poetry

Andy Fitch’s 60 Morning Talks, from Ugly Duckling Presse, is essential reading for anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry. The premise is this: Fitch interviewed 60 poets about their most recent work, exploring language (and l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e), the future of print, the state of poetry, and anything in between. Talks belongs on your bookshelf right beside I Wanted to Write a Poem, a transcript of a conversation between Edith Heal and William Carlos Williams about all of his published works (and anything and everything in between). Both books are about poetics, and both books are transcripts, and both lay bare, or at least attempt to, the machinery of inspiration, language and presentation.

Fitch eschews academic pretentiousness. He doesn’t open Talks with an essay, or a thesis, he just gives us the interviews, the questions, and the answers. Reading Talks is like reading a script, or listening to a conversation (it would make a great independent film--or series of youtube clips).  At times, some of the writers who dialogue with Fitch put on airs, or perhaps overindulge their own artistic and intellectual tendencies, but keep in mind fair reader, my own personal tastes for dialogue about poesy skew towards a more working class, anti-exclusive, anti-establishment diction, but I’m digressing, for I found it thrilling to read conversations between poets so passionate about their own work. Make no mistake, this is a book for poets, linguists, philosophers, and writers, not for the general casual poetry reading public.

Talks is structurally setup for short reads. It’s easy to digest a short conversation, skip the ones that bore you. The short interviews make it palpable for the subway commute, the gym, or even the bathroom. You can get your poetics on in short metered doses. For poets with a traditional background, Talks reads like a who’s who of experimental art over the last century. For those poets with an experimental background, Talks should affirm, and remind you of the weird, and wonderful rebelliousness and restlessness of the last century of art, as well as point you into the direction of where it all might be headed.

Talks reveals as much about Fitch as it does the writers profiled. Fitch loves Gertrude Stein, a reference point for so many of the interviews, and Fitch loves structure, hidden structure, and new ways poets can stretch the concept of structure utilizing technology.  The opening talk between digital poet Amaranth Borusk and Fitch explores how the reader/viewer engages in the text and structure of his book Between the Page and Screen during performances. How the reader manipulates meaning, how the act of holding the “book” at certain angles, etc, would create and change meaning and form. Fascinating stuff.
The conceptual ideas behind many of the works discussed in Talks is as interesting as the content.  One talk with Srikanth Reddy centers around appropriated text.  The conversation with Amanda Nadelberg focuses on the book length poem. Poet Tyrone Williams discuss with Fitch the importance of the Black Arts Movement. Fitch is interested in it all, and his own passion for the genre and where it has been and where it is going is front and center. 60 Morning Talks is a perfect read to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Natalie Peeterse's first chapbook, Black Birds: Blue Horses, An Elegy, is a walk through grief, #poetryreview

Natalie Peeterse's first chapbook, Black Birds: Blue Horses, An Elegy, is a walk through grief, a mystic catharsis hammered into leaping images and sweeping environs written for Nicole Dial, killed in Afghanistan with three others as they aided the International Rescue Committee. The elegy begins with a machine gun phone call  “one two: three four:...The heat blasts on...”, and the speaker is off, and in a classical sense becomes a walking poet among gods, a prophet against war. Her capital is not Rome, but Washington, and of course the heart, where all things human are governed.

Peeterse's imagery allows for taxi drivers, muggers, and DC streets to become points of reference as she travels through spaces, “a slide of time,” almost crossing over into death as she passes through stages of grief as if they were neighborhoods, boroughs, "glittering roads."  The DC setting is loaded, for sure, but wisely used as geography versus political soapboxing. It's not that the speaker cowers from making a statement, the places are allowed to be what they are without any further symbolism, keeping the focus on Nicole, rather than a cause.

The speaker's elegiac voice invokes broad music, Peeterse's lines are tight, stanzas compact, as the images leap with every poetic step.The effect is wholly spiritual, mystic. Grief, anger and quiet sorrow are trans-mutated by her journey, by her intensity. The stars become hung children, tourist  dumb june bugs. Accosted by a mugger, she unleashes Nicole's death as a sandstorm, and as some sort of poet-as-superhero vanquishes the mugger. The speaker is empowered by grief, she wields it, the spirit within the muse.   At the final steps of her journey, instead of an urn bearing Nicole's ashes, a jar of sand is left for the speaker, and her final poetic invocation is to open the world of Kabul, as a protest, as a warning, as a bridge to the underworld, as a bird of sorrow:         a jar of sand on my doorstep...I want to take it down to Pennsylvania Avenueand shake it into the street...To watch the road to Kabulopen up before me---

Regardless of the kind of relationship the speaker had with Nicole Dial, the speaker's memories of Nicole are fluid with the poet's imagination. It doesn't matter whether the speaker is a lover, sister, daughter, friend, parent, stranger, because the reader experiences a moment of from each of these connections with Nicole.

Death, one of the most common and misunderstood phenomenon of the human experience requires a kind of elegiac process to understand. If we are bakers we bake, if we are painters we pick up a brush, if we are tradesmen we go back to work, lucky for us Natalie Peeterse is a poet.

Elisavietta Ritchie's Cormorant Beyond the Compost burns with eroticism and life, #poetryreview

From oustide the lines: Cormorant Beyond the Compost By Elisavietta Ritchie   Cherry Grove Press, 2011
Elisavietta Ritchie's latest volume of poetry Cormorant Beyond the Compost burns with eroticism and life, and reading some of her poems is akin to watching a wick sizzle down on a firecracker, waiting for the pop, the smoke, and the final hiss.

In the first section, Saint in a Box of Glass, Ritchie's world is polarized, the artistic voice versus the real world. There is a tension that builds in the opening poem “Tradecraft in Iambic Pentameter” where “true tales remain confined within the cage/of my long skull” and continues  through the first section where the speakers of these poems struggle with waking with reality, to creating one's own reality, best illustrated in “Ito Jakuchu artist b. 1716, Kyoto” where the young painter resists his father's ways, arranging vegetables in the market, soaking his senses in the fresh skin and smell of the produce for sale, his eye on the animals that cuttle and coo in their cages.  Later the boy draws, and it is in these moments he is free of burden, free of being his father's son.  

It's not just the artistic voice weening away from the reality, here Ritchie focuses on the natural world as it comes into focus against the backdrop of suburban and urban landscapes. “I perch on a Subaru tailgate.../then a vee of Canadian geese/flies...overhead.” A reminder, nature's appearance, be it a hawk after Tai Chi, or toad turning up in the garden, of the struggle to adapt in this modern age to a world that changes its face every few years.

Ritchie does not shy away from passion, and the backbone of Cormorant is the erotic desire that builds at the end of the first section and continues throughout the volume. Lust after all is a way to beat back death, and whether she is owner of her love, like a “Harley” in “Proprietary Codes” or lusting for the “moon-mad pull of the tide” in “The Midwesterner's Lust for the Sea,” Ritchie's speakers know courage, and face bleakness of tsunamis and hurricanes alike with a fiery and contemplative voice.

All throughout the volume, though particularly true in the section Ancestors to Die For, the speaker is an outsider. Whether looking through the scrim into death, or looking back through history at her own family, I imagine Ritchie to be some mad cheerleader for passion, stealing blackberries, loving a dying friend, or recuperating from a bad mushroom trip, all the while refusing to give up, to be satiated.
Throughout the seven sections that make up Cormorant, Ritchie roots herself in two worlds, the natural and the poetic. Consider the title, the coastal hunter lurking beyond the compost pile, which smells of ripe and rot. Life and death. Passion and its opposite, her touchstones if you will, that give her voice power, after all “like fire,/when we no longer burn, we die.”