R L Swihart's Poetry and a Few Old Book Reviews

Perhaps I'm a bit late to the party, but today I thought I'd mention three book reviews that have been penned (quite generously) about some of my books throughout the years.

The first two are online, so you can easily follow the links (see below): both were written by the author and co-publisher (with his wife Isabel) of the online journal Off Course, Ricardo Nirenberg.

The first review Ricardo wrote was for my very first book: The Last Man (published in 2012). He writes that it's hard to decide which poem in the book is his favorite, but finally settles on "Algorithm" -- an early poem that I wrote while I was teaching high school mathematics.

"It is hard or impossible to decide, yet -- for sentimental reasons, as the song goes -- I think one of my favorite pieces in this book is titled ALGORITHM." And then he includes the entire poem:

ALGORITHM 

Take any segment and drop out the middle third. Take the remaining thirds and repeat the process, i.e. take each of the two segments and drop out the middle third. A million iterations should be sufficient. 

Sometimes I find it helps. I applied the algorithm to last April and got impossible results. I placed all the pieces in two Ziploc bags and labeled them accordingly: Gaps and Dust.

Ignoring the gaps, I was able to save a young girl, who’s still learning perspective, a few sleepless nights.

Working with the dust, I created a beautiful mosaic. A sleeping seed is juxtaposed against a small white arm flexing up through black in a plastic cup. A certain kiss, though stuttering, takes on a life of its own. Though borrowed, the arrow Borges launched is still resting on the page.

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In rereading this old poem (which I haven't done in years), I've noticed that I still used "full stops" (periods) at strophe's end (which, probably for spacing reasons, couldn't be indicated in the Off Course version -- but I've included them in the version above). Anyway, I eventually ditched that practice.

Ricardo doesn't stop after quoting the whole poem. He takes time and energy to give "a few glosses," and seems to enjoy himself along the way:

"Perhaps here a few glosses are called for.  The “Algorithm” piece refers to the Cantor set, which can be described as the set of real numbers between 0 and 1 whose ternary expansion (i.e. their expression as a sequence of the digits 0, 1 and 2) does not contain the digit 1.  The set is famous because it can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the whole set of real numbers, yet its measure is zero, as Georg Cantor showed.  Any math major would (or should) know that, and know how to prove it; but I had never before seen it applied to last April, to the continuum formed by each and every one of the time instants of the cruelest month.  Impossible results, as Swihart says.  The intervals removed are the Gaps; what remains in the Cantor set is the Dust.  And Gaps and Dust, two fraught words, are the twin principles of life, or, if you wish, what remains of it after it’s done.  You may weave the rest ad libitum in your imagination, but I would like to add that Borges’ borrowed arrow was borrowed from Zeno the Eleatic, and the fact that it is still resting on the page has a lot to do with the old paradoxes and the new conundrums of the continuum, one of which is the Cantor set.  So “Algorithm” is a good place to start taking a measure of the breadth and depth of Swihart’s poetic universe."

Thank you so much, Ricardo Nirenberg.

Ricardo's entire review of my book, The Last Man, can be read here:

Ricardo Nirenberg's Review of The Last Man

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Ricardo Nirenberg also did a gracious and fantastic review of my second book, Matman & Testudo (published in 2018). 

He starts off with a word of encouragement to the prospective reader, then a word or two re what he sees as my "method":

"These poems are not easy fare, but they repay the reader's effort. Swihart relies on vivid images to catch and save the accidental, and then memory and thoughtfulness are on the ready to transform it into something that simply had to be."

He then dives right into a poem of his choosing:

THE TWO MINDS OF VLADIMIR SALDI  

There’s the voice of reason: All poets slip into the ridiculous 

re the underpinnings of poetry (cf. Coetzee on Brodsky) 

Which doesn’t negate the call: In this instance the mantic, 

Mosaic fire the sun sends across the water 

The girl with the gecko tattoo stops jogging in order to stretch on the canal’s white railing

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And then, as is Ricardo's wont, he gives a few words of explication and insight:

"I don't know if all poets slip into the ridiculous when they try to explain the nature and function of their art, but many who try do slip, and Swihart gives the example of Joseph Brodsky, who pretended that he, the poet, was but a vehicle, a voice—a sacer vates—of the whole history of poetry.  For which Coetzee took him to task on the pages of the NYRB, about twenty years ago.  Nevertheless, knowing the risk, Swihart hazards to identify what moves him to the poem ("in this instance"), and it turns out that it is "the mantic, Mosaic fire the sun sends across the water."  That's quite a line (well, a bit more than a line).  Mantic like in praying mantis, mántis a Greek word that appears early in the Homeric Iliad, when Agamemnon calls the seer Kalkhas mántis kakôn, seer of evils.  Indeed, what can be more mantic, more akin to a seer, than the sun and its fires?  "Mosaic" means, I think, law-giving.  Why can't it be something formed out of small pieces of marble or suchlike?  Because of the capital M, since, as you can see, Swihart does not capitalize the first letter in a line that is not at the beginning of a stanza.  So Mosaic, as in Moses."

Again, thank you so much, Ricardo Nirenberg.

Ricardo's entire review of my book, Matman & Testudo, can be read here:

Ricardo Nirenberg's Review of Matman & Testudo

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And now onto the last old review (from 2021): this one on my third published book of poetry, Woodhenge (published in 2020), which is a bit of a hybrid: 50 "selected" poems from the earlier part of my career, 50 newer poems. This review was written by another author, Ivan Head, poet and frequent contributor to Quadrant Magazine, out of Australia.