A poet might have a deep and truthful scientific knowledge of how nature operates: how redwoods bloom and the like. But even a nature poem is not a biology textbook, and it details not facts, but opinions that as readers we absorb as facts, if only for a moment. A poem is the place to guess at the nature of nature. What does nature desire? What do spiders think about during down time, and what do humans actually think about fire? A poem is a forum for the poet to ask nature questions; sometimes a poem, or perhaps the poet, is confident enough to answer them.

But if the poem comes off sure of itself, arbitrarily so, then the readers won’t like it. That’s what a poet fears. Whose place is it to say she understands the workings of all nature? The people in our lives we view as stupid— perhaps they’re humble, they’re often great to party with—they are more likable than the arrogant brainiac, whose confidence in her intelligence makes it irrelevant whether she actually is. A poet certainly wants a happy medium. Publishing poems is a kind of social interaction, and the poet’s awareness of this is often tangible in the poems. By simply expressing how she is experiencing nature, and not claiming some great wisdom, she’s less likely to offend. How do you become a master, anyway?

What Is Amazing (Wesleyan University Press), the book of poems by Heather Christle, is overwhelmed by the world. The world occurs so phenomenally, that the only narcissism the poet commits is to speak of it at all. Christle’s poems in Part I of her book are captivated by nature, by mountains and swans and flowers—and though the speaker holds on to her autonomy, she can hardly focus on anything but the beauty around. The speaker begins the first poem, The Seaside!: “This is a wall of great intensity and furious / it kind of hums yellow and hums / green and never shall it hum purple Captain”. But despite her awe of this wall, she informs the captain of the ship: “I can tell you things I’m not a piece of foam”. It’s the minimum arrogance. Though she’s reacting to that nature which is so “humming brightly,” she certainly has the capacity to speak of it.

What Is Amazing, published on Valentine’s Day 2012, is Heather Christle’s third book, following The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011) and her debut, The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009). I had read The Difficult Farm earlier last year—though it was in parts too casual and not particularly vivid, it was hilarious, and I was watching something being invented. Christle often loaded her speech with humor and nuance that sounded like enjoyable real-life conversation. Of course, human conversation is often ineloquent, and the book had to suffer that. The poems were grand and deadpan, contemporary fables in which a human wanted very much to be animal, despite this world of nurses’ offices and news anchors. When I began reading What is Amazing, I was at first startled—something proclamatory was absent from Christle’s voice.

Human beings in this book are realizing themselves to be within nature, and it becomes clear that Christle is separating the two. In Amazing’s third poem, Teamwork Should Come From The Soul, she begins:

They were projecting a hologram onto my snowsuit

A hologram of nature A snowsuit of white

Nature was not moving but I was moving and that

was most of the plot We got good ratings

Nature is not moving— the speaker is. There is also a distinction between “They” and the speaker—whom throughout this review I will call Heather, and the poet I will refer to as Christle. Heather and They have a relationship like that of Producer and Reality Star, or Scientist and Test Subject. Heather is an experiment, dictated simultaneously by the other humans and by nature’s careless tundra. But these humans are collectively unified by their humanness; they are trying gradually to manipulate nature, that which is not human. “They” want to study nature for its benefits. Heather is simply enraptured.

Part I of Amazing is almost entirely void of standard punctuation. Except for the occasional exclamation point, the sentences escape from the speaker’s mouth uncontrollably, running into each other, and would be indistinguishable if not for capital letters. She begins Way out in the Country: “But how does it work I said Are there women / No women said the star I think it was talking”. This speedy rhythm has a short learning curve, and it explains Heather’s enthrallment with the world. If she were to speak too loudly, or slowly, or occupy too much space, the world might forgo her. Periods imply a confidence, and this unpunctuated style, in any book, will always risk a lack of confidence— lines or the whole poem might speed by too fast to end resonantly, or with an overwhelming realization. And while this does happen very much in Christle’s lines, they end instead with another kind of resonance: possibility. Some examples from the ends of lines in No Light and No Hands:
Line 6: “It was in the field”
Line 8: “In the daytime I was a hole”
Line 9: “I could be nothing if I wanted”
This field disembodied by night is a magical, natural phenomenon, and she doesn’t claim to know what’s going on. Heather is aspirational. She is confident in her wants and in what she’s saying, but she’s only at the beginning of her tasks, her understanding of her worldly potential.

It’s enjoyable to read. The speaker is youthful, and coming into herself. In reading the earnestness of her expressions, I felt both a nostalgia and an excitement for a more appreciative future.

But Heather Christle is aware of that the language is simple. It’s part of a tradition, to revere the sky and the flowers, and to pull it off now takes a contemporary wit. She must prove the poetry isn’t a cliché, that it is not the garden-loving poetry ubiquitous throughout the past 500 years. The poetry in What Is Amazing is certainly complex. The feeling found in the words is that a human is seeing the world as it is, but only as much as a human can see. That complex self-awareness is there, only softly, in the tone. But while the poetry is complex, words like morning, star, garden, and crab, are of the most basic and automatic vocabulary. While Christle’s language can appear to be made of simplicity and perfection, as in poetry like “I lie down again on these yellow flowers they / will teach me that my goldenness is dim”, we’re not intended to absorb it as simple. Instead, Christle wants us to believe in the rebirth of something pure and simple, in the context of our modern time. In that sense, our love of Heather’s earnestness is as willfully ignorant as her earnestness.

Despite her grateful amazement with nature and its details, nature is relevant to Heather because of her own place in it. She is not absent from nature— her body is on fire, she wants it to be winter—and she’s not just passive— she is lying down on daffodils and crushing them. She expresses that in the self-conscious and wicked funny To Kew by Tram. It’s the epitome of how Heather’s looking at the world: she’s fascinated by what holes she’s making (and even has the option to make!), where they are, and that “When I return as a giraffe the holes / will have to change”.

Christle has established that the speaker is in awe, and so now she gradually infuses a confidence into the poetry, experimenting, and asserting things, which is bold. There exists a certain poetic formula… it connects, metaphorically or not, two concepts usually not associated. It goes something like “X is Y,” “X is like Y.” “How like an island we are in love”, she says in How Like an Island, and then, “An island never sleeps”. And in More Swans and More Women: “A swan makes a bad pet It is a murderer / but very beautiful just like a woman”. This is gorgeous and deconstructively aware of swan clichés. But these assertions of “how things are” are purely statements, based more in thought conjecture than a realistic speaker’s story—created more in the brain than the real world. Thus the poems can feel “too poetic.” A reader does want those realizations, to read something new and brilliant: to learn the world through the unity of two separated concepts. An island as a lover— it is good poetry! But this structurally simple formula is used often in the book (and in poetry everywhere), so much so that the poems’ wisdom can feel basic. It is too linearly constructed.

Christle weaves in the story to balance the thought conjecture. The speaker continues in Swans, “I was very safe but I forgot / how to talk and when I came home / people could not see I was a woman”. Many lines in Amazing, like these, I read and could only feel: so what? The words are so frankly simple— and the ideas within them are refreshing, airy and even confident— but equally as simple. At least I was kept in anticipation, but even at a poem’s ending, often the words contained only mystery, open-endedness, a simplicity that promised something else was coming. Surely the author does this intentionally— using simplicity as a very modern subversion of that popular poetry, the dense and talkative stuff. A poem can be anticipatory, an exaltation of the possible; certainly a reader can sympathize that state of mind. But there are distinct gaps, where Christle is about to explain the world, nature, herself, and then she doesn’t. The words speed by and into the next poem.

Part II begins its poems in the setting of an apartment. And even after these, the poems here are united by their immersion in the man-made, the human. The first poem is We Are Not Getting Anywhere, beginning:

On the telephone there was a new message

It could have been anyone       It was the shark

Heather wishes she could help the shark outside, who says he is dying. But the comfort and security of the home makes the outside, and the effort it’d take to join it, seem difficult and distant, and only vaguely regrettable. No longer does Heather feel “Oh no love and all alive in the garden” as she exclaimed at the close of Part I. Now her poems study the home as a shelter, away from the intimidatingly passionate nature. Heather’s fine with this separation— she says in Saturday, “We could see our domain           Our domain glowing / a lavender glow I did not mind”. Inside is a place where the speaker has her own space and time, so she can feel safer about philosophizing. She couldn’t do this in the garden, where nature distracted her and rushed her, growing much more confidently than she.

The poems become determined now; they mark the speaker’s rising will, and her desire to do the right thing—to love the right thing. It Feels Like It Is on Purpose is a wonderful poem, in which the speaker is spiritedly aware of her mission, despite her clearly domestic melancholy. “When today I leave the house / I hope someone will see me / and use me as an example / of a person not thinking”. The voice here is quivering, hopeful, like Piglet’s, and this sort of brave resolution is made only more truthful by the self-awareness that punctuates that same voice. Heather is realizing her capabilities in hypothesis, that she can mentally experiment. The lines no longer run into each other, but are usually enjambed at the clause or end of a sentence. Heather is comfortable enough with assertion to enjamb her lines where they naturally punctuate themselves: (in And Then We Clap Ourselves Together), “My shadow is of a staircase / but I am just a moat / I am looking at a man / and I am looking at his shadow”.

The last poem of Part II is the title poem, What Is Amazing. It begins,

The man thinks he is a man

but he is a candle.

Who will tell him?

Going into the poem, I expected the same shaken wonder of nature that defined Part I (and, somewhat sarcastically, Part II)— a discovery of the talented and beautiful gardens and oceans. But Christle knows the reader expects that, and What Is Amazing is a poetic Fuck That. She explains it deadpan, with the book’s first periods, how we humans and animals are crowded in a dark and unsafe room. We should expect little from the future, or even from the completion of our goals. This poem is not in first-person, but rather second, so it feels less like a continuation of the character’s voice than a new narrator—a poet, treating this hypothesis on animal nature as her thesis. “Some animals // are friendlier than others / like roosters”, she says, one of many instances of a poetic “fact,” certain and explanatory as would be a line found in the Wikipedia page for roosters. Perhaps, some poems just have to be certain, and suffer the didacticism. Many of the lines are gorgeous, elementary revelations: “What is amazing is how / the animals won’t stop sleeping. / It’s like sleeping is where / they hide their goals.” But the poetry feels not founded in a real place, but only in itself, the poet’s  brain. It is a conceptual explanation of how to survive, but with no credentials actually earned in the physical world. Thus this poem feels like the assertion poem that Part I feared in its youth.

Finally, Part III is the reemergence. After bedrest comes the garden again, and Heather is tasting the outside world with the caution of having lived intellectually. She begins with the poem What Will Grow Here, “another miracle / is to forget”— the inside world, that is, and its thought provoking but suffocating biome. The poems have a calm elation of humans and nature, but from a speaker who understands now why the outside world is amazing. Without it, humans lock into their own minds; within it, human beings can use their consciousness to not just think, but experience. Parking Lot uses the archaic “O” with the intention again of reclaiming a Pure Love of things: “O face wound bleeding profusely! / O pressure applied by the quick-thinking cloud!” The whole poem is in Shakespearean vernacular, which is fun, but Christle delivers a more important, contemporary ending: “You are the ruined thing / and the world is what loves to repair you”.

Throughout this book, the ends of poems often lack enigma, and resonance—the feeling of a miracle having just happened. It’s the result of Christle’s simple and unpunctuated words, and certainly reading the poems was enjoyable. In their most confident murmurs, they were uplifting.

But there was not a moment that disturbed me, transferred into me with such an inevitability, that I had to put the book down. It’s not that the poetry was light, or even small; it only felt easy. Part III’s poems felt the most confident and trustworthy of all. Towards the end, Christle focuses intensely on the sky, the clouds, moon and sun, moving beyond the earthly gardens and into her realization of how far nature goes. Heather, our speaker, closes some of the ends she left open. She begins A Long Life with a resonance a long time coming: “It was like this.” Christle is vitally aware of our thoughts, what a rich sadness we have in them, but her exploration of them goes not far beyond the realization that they exist. She closes Under the Moon the Knocking with “Oh soldiers your children are glowing / at such a great distance / they seem more like thoughts”. This is a devastating connection, that distant children are both as small and mind-based as thoughts. However the word “thoughts” rings out like only a reference, almost delved into, if it weren’t for the speaker’s separation from them.

The poem Route 109 amazed me. It’s immensely spirited, and has revelations, one after another, on what we don’t notice when driving. In Heather’s voice, or Christle’s, perhaps we hear a human that has driven, just as we have; separated from all of nature by only glass.

I travel all day with a window before me

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

glass is the part I don’t see

while all day apparent the sky

What Is Amazing was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2012. My sincere thanks to Heather Christle, whose website should be explored for things about her.

TFT Review of ‘The Starboard Sea’ by Amber Dermont

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The concept behind Dear Editor, by Amy Newman, should be painfully familiar to anyone who has taken part in the precarious dance that is the process of seeking publication. Every poem in the collection takes the form of the submission cover letter, that inevitable, often obsequious kind of awkward-but-essential piece of epistolary. The brief descriptions of the work in question, in this case poems from X = Pawn Capture, a presumably fictional narrative by a presumably fictionalized Amy Newman, become the device that in its permutations— and eventually in its absence—drives the work as a whole. I can’t help but be reminded of the high-concept poetry of the late Paul Violi (the author of “Submission,” a poem dressed in the same costume) and the inventive kinds of approaches found in Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s or Peter Davis’s Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!. What is particularly successful about Dear Editor is that it doesn’t fall into the easy trap of being insular or snarky about the field of poetry itself, but with its self-reflexivity is able at once to satirize and empathize with the plight of the struggling writer. And beyond that, the poems— these letters—as they develop and with each iteration, start to point to concerns far graver and grander than merely the hassle of getting published.

Much in the way a chess game always begins with the same configuration, self-imposed constraints become the source of this collection’s invention. There is something inherently appealing and absurd about the situation that the reader is brought into, but it is in the repetition and variation of key elements that a certain kind of pathos is revealed. X = Pawn Capture, so tells us “Amy Newman,” revolves around “a particular kind of chess game played within my family,” the significance of which—in a manner mirroring the anxious voice of a writer attempting to ingratiate herself to the gate-keeping editor— constantly changes. It is at times “a game my grandfather once insisted that young children shouldn’t play,” elsewhere “a game not of skill but of worry,” or a “lyrical exploration of chess moves and the desire to know the world’s inner workings in a language unencumbered by doubts.” In the letter dated “17 October,” you get this almost painfully solipsistic, emotionally fraught ramble:

I picture the chess board as the field on which my grandparents first made love, and atop this, the series of black and white squares represent commitments and arguments and unholy sacrifices for the children who will never live up to their hopes: the chess pieces are grandchildren that further disappoint them.

The grandparents cast a shadow of guilt, of the un-redeemable, on the speaker, seemingly judging her while pantomiming a cold, loveless relationship. The old world they represent, becomes personified by the Saints and martyrs whose stories— and essentially unattainable ideals— then become woven into an adolescent narrative: “Mary of Egypt might have danced with men she didn’t know well, or kissed, as I have, football players from her high school, without any real desire, because how embarrassing to have to say no.” A strange matrix of guilt and desire, or perhaps the absence of desire, manifests as visions haunting “Amy” as she is kissing a boy:

what appears over his shoulder when I unclench my eyes then: the flashes and flecks and the face of Saint Theresa against a backdrop of pretty lace, and Saint Dorothea wearing her headdress of roses and pears, nodding and calm, their arms practically porcelain, and their stubborn haloes like platters as they appear on the holy cards because they existed before artists understood how to render perspective?

I like how the visions here immediately arrive as objects: “practically porcelain” arms with “haloes like platters.” Their appearance immediately (and surprisingly) terrestrial, mediated, more the representations of saints than saints themselves. And of course this sense underlies the work as a whole, a level of representation always hangs between the author and the reader: we are forced to rely on the cover letter to make our own judgments. X=Pawn Capture on “19 November” is “a manuscript about how chess may be a metaphor, and in this case the dry and silent intellectual play of the board acts as the absence of my grandfather’s desire. If my grandmother gets to have a metaphor, I choose the calendar that hung against the cellar door.” In the self-consciousness, here, a kind of metalepsis: a movement between different levels of narrative and the associated anxiety. On “18 February,” for instance, it is  “troublesome… that I am so taken by the emergence of lady saints who show themselves to me at times, although to the workshop class these visitations would be foolish fancy and I should write no more of them.”

Such moves become especially fascinating when you consider who the “editor” might be, and how much agency this figure— and by extension the reader— is given. In “3 April,” the editor seems to become increasingly god-like, somehow set into a Catholic seeming cosmology:

Yet I seek Your Substance in the mailman’s scuff and trumpery of his walk away without leaving a sheet of paper bearing your response to my queries, that bit of flesh I would so gratefully receive for I am not worthy to… But I trust you hear me; that is my faith. Please consider these poems for publication.

And as the letter progresses, this kind of supplication— I am tempted to use the word ‘submission’ in its more frequent connotation—  to a divine “Editor” achieves a remarkable, somehow humble desperation. “You know my stubbornness is a silhouette,” she writes, as if finally shedding hope, “my tiny mortal weakness in the shadows Your Trees cast.” In the end, I’d like to think that the divine, here, stands in for the promise of communication through writing itself. Nothing done by mortal hand can truly stand in for the promise of art, for a true analog between interior emotions, longings, desires, and the work itself as it is cast off. There is something equally hopeful and hopeless in the effort, and it is captured in all of its wonderful imperfection, here:

I would like to know passion, to know it in the same way saints know the world, which is to say in the most pure and untouched version as it hovers and penetrates, before it is reduced to dry ink in a single file of letters.

One could call Tom Savage’s poetry a procession of ideas. In the face of their often kooky, evocative imagery, there is a didactic, conceptual flare that subverts their ostensive subject-matter, critiquing the conditions of aesthetic experience in the contemporary age. Brainlifts, Tom’s most recent book, utilizes ekphrasis as a platform from which both self and world are surveyed at a disinterested vantage point. The poems in Brainlifts are remarkable for their honesty—for (among other things) their total refusal to mimetically coincide with their themes. Instead of passively dramatizing superimposed experiences, Brainlilfts offers readers the greater possibility of deviating from the givens of circumstance, while remaining mindful of the personal and collective histories that shape our experience of culture.

Writers like Olson and Ginsberg are so difficult to accept due to their moralizing insistence that an everyday experience of the world has to be recreated in poetry. Thus, the rhetoric of advertising is echoed in Olson through words like “polis” and “pejorocracy”; and an authoritarian sacrificium intellectus is apparent in Ginsberg even at his most politically fervent. By contrast, the poetry of Tom Savage avoids all appeals to pseudo-entertainment and immediate enticement. His poetry is non-Whitmanic:

You were only a statue, after all.
When your plywood pedestal collapsed
You fell apart. The Metropolitan Museum
Now apologizes to Tulio Lombardo,
The sculpture who is, of course,
Conveniently dead. When I, a mere
Volunteer there, walked through
The sculpture court,
I enjoyed your naked, perfect body,
An unattainable ideal,
Even your perfectly formed cock and balls.
Are these latter why you fell off your pedestal
Or, more correctly, it failed you?

(from “Ode to a Once-Beautiful Adam”)

The lines here brim with a decided confidence in the intellect’s power to distance subjectivity from the objects it encounters in the world. Sensual immediacy translates into the reflective cognition of beauty, and humor wins out over morbidity and nostalgia. Conceived in this way, the lines here quoted find  their poetic antipode in the final lines of T.S. Eliot’s “La Figlia che Piange.”

The ekphrastic character of Brainlifts is not motivated by any naive desire to reenact in language  the conventions specific to another media. Tom Savage utilizes ekphrasis as a tool towards reflection, thinking into a notebook while watching an opera, a little-known film, or an off-Broadway performance. These “source-materials” (to call them that) are indicated at the end of each poem; but the poems nonetheless stand by themselves, as indirect communications of the poet’s consent or rejection of the spectacles absorbing him. Take, for example, the marvelous opening lines of “Dreams”:

The computer is sleeping.
Foxes get married when the sun
Shines through rain on a
Too hot day in the fall.
A stationary raindrop falls
On a tree trunk but refuses to dissolve.
Fox delivers cutlery for self-immolation.
Foxes shelter under rainbow rooves.
Seeing something you shouldn’t
Means sharpening the rainbow.
The ghost princess gives a split-second audience.
Where can you buy an orchard in bloom
Of weeping trees?

I’ve never seen Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, but I’m sure that the sense of these lines cannot be established more clearly by watching the film and looking for correspondences. And yet the lines were “written while watching Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams.” Such an acknowledgement of source apart from the poem itself indicates that the poem relates to its source without being overdetermined by it. If every aesthetic implies an ethics, then the poetry of Tom Savage is radical in the very process which gives it life; it works against any notion of freedom that would conflate autonomy with decision among several superimposed alternatives. The fact that Tom is explicit about his atheism and his preference for reality over illusion is only a further adaptation of content with process:

From now on I’ll look at
Sculptures of real men and women,
Like Rodin’s fat, naked, middle-aged Balzac.
I hope real people can be satisfied
With real, imperfect lovers
And not be permanently deceived
By Gods, angels, or ideals
In stone like you.

(from  “Ode to a Once-Beautiful Adam”)

Having discussed the aesthetic origination of the poems in Brainlifts, and also commented on the social importance of ekphrasis as Tom uses it, we should make mention of the fact that Brainlifts is firmly entrenched in what some might call the “NY School.” Despite the lack of hypotactic constructions, the poems collected in Brainlifts will probably remind the reader of John Ashbery more than any other poet—mainly because they’re so fun. “My Life in Pink” was written “while watching Ma Vie en Rose by Alain Berliner,” and is short enough to quote in full:

My Life in Pink

Don’t scratch your balls if you want to be a girl.
All you care about is sexual confusion soccer.
When I’m no longer a boy, will you be my wife?
Mother goddess turns the sky into a fish tank.
Reality has to face us in my world.
Pick up the vicar who marries boys to each other.
She didn’t kill the pope, yet.
Don’t go to hell in some psychologist’s handbasket.
Don’t expect miracles; you may be both a boy and a girl.
Jesus, the wise guy, stood my chromosomes on their heads.
Every girl’s sentence has a period.
When formulas become flesh, they sometimes hit a brick wall.
Emptiness is scary but it’s all we’ve got.

This poem can be pictured as microcosmic of the kind of universe Brainlifts will introduce to the reader—a universe not lacking in a certain stylized inelegance, but which is as playful and enchanting as it is profound.

- – - – -

Brainlifts was published by Straw Gate Books in 2008. More of Tom Savage’s poetry can be found at October Babies (http://octoberbabies.wordpress.com), where Tom is a weekly contributor.

The photographs aren’t particularly artistic and the captions aren’t particularly poetic. But the recent collaborations of Jon Cotner and Claire Hamilton – slideshows that document walks – are deceptive in their simplicity and extraordinary in their impact. In photos and quick text, they replicate – amazingly! – the sensations of walking: the pace of a stroll, the way details present themselves, recede. More so, more so, these slideshows remind us to look. They remind us that there is the possibility of surprise, of dazzlement, of the strangeness and loveliness that’s there when you allow for it, when you pay attention.

For The Believer’s art issue, Cotner and Hamilton’s slideshow narrates a walk across Fire Island. A photograph of downtown Cherry Grove shows three men walking the boardwalk and front patio seating of the Cherry Grove Café; rainbow flags hang from a storefront down the way; there’s an orange hotdog-shaped balloon rising erect in the breeze. The accompanying text reads: “Downtown Cherry Grove is jubilant. Real-estate offices display million-dollar listings. Most guys wear swim trunks. We study the Cherry Lane Café’s lunch menu, and decide to move on.” A simple moment, classic summer scene. Straightforward and true.

Stranger things happen. A deer appears on the path; they follow it; it leads them to a patch of dozens of colorful lawn ornament flamingos stuck into the sand. “Our tour-guide reveals this flock of plastic flamingos, then vanishes in beachgrass.”

Hamilton’s photographs are crisp, well-framed snapshots, and this is for the best. Art photographs, even Instagram effects, take reality and skew it. This is what this looks like right here in this moment. You see what they see, not over manipulated — not one individual’s vision of the basketball court or the dogs on the dune, never alienating in that way. They are matter of fact, well-composed.

Cotner has good practice narrating walks. The slim and beguiling Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse), on which Cotner collaborated with Andy Fitch, includes ten narratives about moving through New York City on foot. The observations, in the slideshows, and the book, range from the matter of fact (“Atlantique’s marina is packed”) to the lyrical and impressionistic (“glowing accidental things”; “While his feet kick drums and his hands play guitars, he’ll blow into a harmonica or sing”). The atmosphere is captured, an afternoon on earth. Bits of dialogue are sprinkled in, small encounters with strangers the two pass on their way. Pleasantries exchanged – a man in a white Speedo tells them he’s look for a place to pee. Fire Island has no cars. An old couple and later a young mother mention how much they love to walk.

The fragments become something flowing and whole.

The same can be said for the slideshow of a walk down Bedford Ave in Brooklyn the two did for the BMW Guggenheim Lab.

We tend to tread the same paths. Apartment to subway stop. Around the block in the evening after dinner. The same sidewalks and blocks and scenes seen over and over. When it’s all familiar, it’s hard to pay attention, hard to see what’s new or strange or lovely right in front of you. In presenting us with something we so easily take for granted, breeze by, Cotner and Hamilton defamiliarize our neighborhood. They give each expedition – the stroll to the corner store for milk, the walk along the river in winter – potential, opportunity for something transformative to take place. And if it doesn’t on this particular walk, the promise that they make, unspoken, is that over time, the accumulated experience, the presence and paying attention, will transform you. The work makes an argument for presence. It makes an argument for noticing, being awake.

In a project called Poem Forest, Cotner distributed 15 lines of poetry selected from two-and-a-half millennia of nature poetry along a trail in the New York Botanical Garden. Walkers of the path were urged to recite the lines, “bring them to life,” then to take a moment to contemplate the scene. Cotner’s work encourages us “to inhabit the present more deeply.” It is, as he writes, “a reminder to keep going.”

Creo que vengo de la poesía. – Roberto Bolaño

Perhaps surprising to some of his fiction fans, Roberto Bolaño touted poetry as the superior art form, above fiction, nonfiction, and everything in between. In an interview back in 2000, he jeers novel writing, calling it “an imperfect art,” “a vulgar beast,” and perhaps the most disparaging: “like returning to the work of my illiterate grandfather.” He praises poetry, calling it “purity,” and “a great desolation,” able to approach an infinity in which “you become infinitely small without disappearing.”

This is sanctimonious stuff, I guess. Frankly, I’m too proud to hear this kind of plea made on behalf of poetry the art form. No one, including Bolaño, should have to make the case for poetry itself, so I invite Bolaño’s fans to investigate his newest posthumous collection of poems, Tres, without the aid of Bolaño’s meta-commentary. Written in both prose poetry and lineated verse, and translated dexterously by Laura Healy, Bolaño’s Tres peers at the infinite through three series of compelling, surreal, and cinematic poems.

His first section, comprised of prose poetry, is especially cinematic. In this series, Bolaño splices and edits together the scenes of an unrequited romance much like a French New Wave director. Reading “Prose from Autumn in Gerona,” I expect Anna Karina to appear among the images, in a close-up, applying her eyeliner. Through the splicing and jump cuts, we watch a screenplay unfold as it is being written, with all its signal textual formatting:

CLOUDY DAYBREAK. Sitting in an armchair, with a cup of coffee in my hand, before having showered, I imagine the protagonist in the following way: his eyes closed, his face very pale, his hair dirty. He’s lying on the train track. No. Only his head is over one of the rails, the rest of his body stretched out to the side of the track, on top of the whitish gray stones.

Now, this prose section is not a collection of simple narrative screenplays that just so happen to contain poetic language. Conversely, Bolaño injects cinema into these poems, which is why Tres can brilliantly disrupt the traditionally unilateral gaze, thus:

Reader <–gaze–>  Bolaño  <–gaze–>  Screenplay writer  <–gaze–>  Protagonist  <–gaze–>  Beloved

(That, dear Bolaño fans, is the power of poetry that takes risks.) The poet, the narrator, the film’s protagonist, the reader (or the you/thou) change places in the kaleidoscopic screenplay, each with a bidirectional, eyes-on-back-of head type of gaze. In summary, it’s trippy.

To complicate matters, Bolaño frames the first section of poems within a kaleidoscope, which dazzles the mind and fractures the scenes. As children, we might gaze upon this geometrical mirrored pattern of beads, shells, stars, stones, or whatever, and trip out on all its rotational symmetry. Inside Bolaño’s kaleidoscope, “in addition to the reflection that sucks up everything, you notice stones, yellow reefs, sand, hair on pillows, abandoned pajamas.” Startlingly, the protagonist might catch sight of the reader’s eye in the reflective mirrors. We gaze upon a reflected and replicated protagonist, and the “Quick fragments of circles, cubes, cylinders give us an impression of his face when the light presses him; his lack of money morphs into love’s desperation; any gesture of his hands morphs into a plea.”

Interestingly, if you dissect the word kaleidoscope’s Greek parts, phoneme-by-phoneme, the word means “a tool for examination of the beautiful form.” The sections are indeed beautiful, and Bolaño remains ever faithful to his favorite form: the catalogue.

I can guess that Bolaño wouldn’t appreciate me calling his work formal. In the same interview mentioned above, he disparages the works of Laura Esquivel, and Alberto Fuguet, dismissing their exportation of a folkloric, “exotic” form of literature, which sucks up to royalty, in so many words. He also declares that poetry, “in its usual metric…is already dead.” Bolaño was a critical maverick, and a petulant one at that. But I think after some arm-twisting, I might convince him that as he abandoned the more established forms, he took up a new form with his catalogues.

Whether Bolaño catalogues a series of diaries written by mediocre, un-famous poets in Savage Detectives, or reports brutal las muertas in the fictional town of Santa Teresa in 2666, or generates an encyclopedia of works written by make-believe writers in Nazi Literature in the Americas, Bolaño painstakingly follows the form, unashamedly reporting even the most grotesque or banal.  In “A Stroll Through Literature,” his third part in Tres, he leads us through a catalogue of dreams with literary figures. From a hellish dream with the ancient Greek poet, Archilochus, to a wet dream with Anaïs Nin, Bolaño details the subconscious landscape that Hélène Cixous describes as “an extremely inventive hell” in her Dream, I Tell You, an inventory of her own dreams written to Jacques Derrida.

Bolaño’s inventively hellish dream poetry certainly pays tremendous debt to the surrealists. The pages are composed seemingly “automatically” with their strange associations, as if written just after a Magnetic Fields binge.  Each dream contains a Freudian mother lode. Here we have the dreamer in his most primitive state: “29. I dreamt I was translating Virgil with a stone. I was naked on a big basaltic flagstone and the sun, as the fighter pilots say, hovered dangerously at 5 o’clock.” Bolaño weaves his detective fixation into a few dreams, one in which the dreamer is “a really old Latin American detective.” He explains, “Mark Twain was hiring me to save the life of someone without a face. It’s going to be a damn tough case, Mr. Twain, I told him.” While conjuring up a hugely eclectic selection of writers, the dreams jump from apocalypse to quietude to comedy.

Bolaño’s comic sense really ascends in the second section. I’d like to call “The Neochileans” a light interlude, an intermission of sorts between the two catalogue sections. However, this longer narrative verse returns to Bolaño’s “great desolation” with a wonderfully severe case of melancholia with comedic characteristics. If we follow the cinematic theme, we would classify his second section as a road trip movie, a more desperate Easy Rider, in which an un-famous band, the Neochileans, whose groupies are teenage prostitutes, tour South America.

The band plays “in empty banquet halls/ And brothels converted/ into Lilliputian hospitals” with a feverish lead singer, who takes on the role of the surrealist storyteller. Writing the poem in Blanes, Spain, Bolaño uses a signature Cervantes technique: the tale within the tale (and also, later, a poem within a poem). The lead singer, sick with god-knows-what, relays the tragic tale of two legendary figures, “Caraculo and Jetachancho,” roughly translated as Assface and Filthymug, as the band wanders the continent. (What a great translation decision among many to keep these names in the Spanish, keeping with their “original” legendary form).

At one point in the tour, the band grows quiet:

And the rain was the only
One talking.
A strange phenomenon: we Neochileans
Shut our mouths
And went our separate ways
Visiting the dumps of
Philosophy, the safes, the
American colors, the unmistakable manner
Of being born and reborn.

Bolaño quilts together the three sections, interconnecting each discrete series into the whole with a thread of common references and unblinking intimacy. Reading Tres, with all its filth and truth, I thought of an excerpt from the Savage Detectives. Bolaño’s character, Joaquín Font, confident of his knowledge of “Belano’s” artistic intention, posits, “There are books for when you’re sad. There are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write.” “Belano,” in the novel, wished to write for the heartsick and the wretched. And if writing desperation literature, “full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs,” was indeed the real-life “Belano’s” goal, he hit his mark with Tres.

More Faster Poetry:

The Kids Are All Right

Myth Machine: TFT Review of’Wichman Cometh by Ben Pease

Paige Taggart’s Polaroid Parade (Greying Ghost, 2011), Ben Fama’s New Waves (Minutes Books, 2011), and Genya Turovskaya’s Dear Jenny (S U P E R M A C H I N E, 2011).

In an era when much fuss is made about the “death” of print, independent presses such as Minutes Books, SUPERMACHINE, and Greying Ghost are as vibrant and inventive as ever. It is precisely because the format in which most readers encounter text has become digital, that the idea of the book itself has shifted. In a sense, print has gained aesthetic capitol by becoming something more akin to an art object. Whether you choose to be troubled by it or not, we may well be in the beginning of an era in which reading an actual bound book— a stack of paper— could be considered nostalgic. Call it the boutique-ification of the publishing world: the strictures that defined the possibilities of the printed word pre-internet and Kindle no longer apply. Readers are becoming collectors: as appreciative of the tactile and ultimately ephemeral nature of the work as, of course, the writing. Such tendencies bode well for the presses that deal in contemporary poetry, where the robust tradition of the slim-volume chapbook rubs elbows with the D.I.Y. ethos of the ‘Zine movement.

This is certainly the aesthetic underlying Paige Taggart’s Polaroid Parade, published by Greying Ghost Press (www.greyingghost.com). The chapbook is a series of poems that work like a stack of photographs; spoken through shifting narrators, seen through different eyes looking through the same view-finder. On the smaller rectangular pages (about the size of a photograph) the poems are framed boxes. “We the fraternity of regrets” begins the second poem “(I speak for myself), broke into a gated/ community…”. In the way that actual Polaroid photographs materialize slowly— the image emerging from faint grays to full resolution — the poems in the series seem to foreground their own inception, to emerge as you read it. “Her teeth are puzzles, with pens in her mouth she records you, over there,/having a picnic”  later develops into “She makes dinner her vocabulary. She makes a/finger her future, pointing that over there is mine.” Taggart is facile, able to cleverly play on the possibilities of narrative, without sacrificing that sense of what’s really at stake. The sixth poem begins:

I’ve been writing fifteen-memoirs; I make Polaroids fill sheds. I use hammers,

build ledges; then obliterate, in the same vein. I’ve asked for a healer to bring

relief, to twist the arm of every accomplice. To stop calling myself dear Mr.

and Mrs. I-don’t-know-your-name.

In a tiny space, the futility of remembrance, or rather of any art form’s ability to perform that act, echoes the collapsed notion of a unitary self, a “Reduction in the glass vial of/ my multitudes.” Indeed, who is the “I” in memory and how much does the act of remembering affect it? Crystalizing this notion, the proclamation: “We hold up a signature of ourselves to the sun” is pleasurably and subtly tricky. It is something like looking at a photograph of yourself at that party last summer in that it can never really take you “back.” You are no longer the person pictured, either, and the photo stands in for the experience. It becomes that party the way your signature becomes “you.” More than poems about Polaroids, then, these poems become them and even address them: “We proclaim, Polaroid, Polaroid you’re blind.” And, hauntingly, the series drifts away with a same sense of the ephemeral, the passing: “Cross trees, hail litanies, let Polaroid collapse into wading.”

Published by Minutes Books (minutesbooks.blogspot.com) Ben Fama’s New Waves, though not as formally focused, seems similarly involved with the interface between the technological and the emotional:

and now you always

appear in my chat list

if only you would

take me into the sea

after that I would ask

you to paint over everything

I could imagine such lines coming from the voice of a not unsympathetic and somehow affected robot, trapped somewhere between the ephemeral world of his wiring and a desire for meaning, even mysticism.  The language of these poems is typically direct and unadorned, lucidly shifting in register and often hiding a layer of complexity. “Whoever you are, I’ve tagged you in a/ dream,” Fama writes, “Please escape my thoughts with care.” At their best these subtle inversions of logic create compelling ambiguity, drawing the reader in with the signposts of gravitas. At other times these types of moves are self-consciously affected, creating a distanced, campy effect. For instance, the lines “Branches lifted slowly,/ as if under water. The universe is breathing/ she said. I said yes. What is it saying she said./ I said I don’t know,” reach for what might be an unattainable kind of scope. I cannot tell if this is meant earnestly, or as an ironic commentary on the futility— in this hyper-conscious, technological era— of capturing the sublime and the mysterious. Nonetheless, New Waves certainly succeeds in creating a kind of spare cosmology, “Own the zodiac, own the script.” It declares, powerfully, “One by one my dreams come to follow.” The post-hipster astrologist poet, then, declaring his love, or perhaps the painful absence of it, on G-chat.

And it is Fama’s press, SUPERMACHINE, (www.supermachinepoetry.com) that has published Genya Turovskaya’s absolutely stunning Dear Jenny. The underlying ‘project’— here a series of ten epistolary poems addressed to “Jenny”— seems to lend itself perfectly to the chapbook form. Turovskaya’s lines drift across the page in a sprawling manner that on some level underscores the constant motion and sense of travel that informs the piece.  As if already receding into a kind of horizon, the series begins “Dear Jenny, I feel I am growing smaller,/ the map on my lap is the world, not the map of the world.” From the get go, the tension between the ‘real’ world and the way it is represented is foregrounded and moments of self-consciousness, of the broken down fourth wall, recur. The narrative anxiety in the fourth poem (“I no longer trust myself to tell it/ like it really is”) becomes splintered in the fifth (“Because it is my mind, we live inside it, Jenny, you and I,”). By the eighth poem the distance between narrative voice and subject becomes merged in a surprising, almost spectral way: “I have another/ face underneath this face./…I have another life underneath this life.”
At times, Dear Jenny (and to varying degrees all three of these chapbooks) seems to pick up a thread that leads back to Walt Whitman himself. The freewheeling electricity of the long lines evokes the old master and there are certainly moments of what might be termed a very democratic kind of celebration. This can be seen in the sixth poem:

Jenny, let me sing to you in my language, my great language, my beautiful language

which can be your language too.

I know you can hear me. Can you hear me? Listen! I remember how

our feet shuffled to this very song, this light-headed song.

As a counterbalance, however, Turovskaya seems in equal measure to retain control with her fastidious and surprising line breaks, and her sparse, poignant images. The underlying mood is certainly not a celebratory one:

I want to say that I have made something stop

moving: the sweeping machines, the weeping machines. I was ready

to commit acts of folly and great danger: Jenny, I have slipped

my books into your library…

One cannot receive a letter without thinking about the distance it has traveled, without holding the envelope, without unfolding the text. A letter is also a leap in time, a snapshot  from the past, a kind of vessel. It is a medium that—like the printed book threatens to be— in its obsolescence gains poignancy. There is nothing like opening up an envelope: there is nothing like cracking open a book.

Deep within John Ford’s fictional one-horse town of Shinbone, a newspaperman delivers a most memorable line: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.“ The newspaperman in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” Ford’s 1962 western, rips up his reportorial notes very deliberately and hurdles them into a wood-burning stove.  He sets the moveable type of Shinbone’s printing press and at that moment, a real man’s mythic story is born.  In much the same way, I imagine the editors of Monk Books, a young, small press, set their type and delivered Wichman Cometh: Selections from a Blockbuster in Verse, a gorgeous collection of epic verse and illustrations by poet and artist, Ben Pease.

Some scholars claim Hercules was a real man, whose story became a legend. Before I go any further, I must hereby swear on a bible that Ben Pease’s hero, the Wichman, is real. I know the Wichman is real because I had the fortune of meeting the Wichman at a party in Manhattan, New York, NY. A facebook photo probably proves this. I met the Wichman because, sometimes, the sophisticated New York metropolis doubles as a one-horse town.  At the time, I didn’t realize the Wichman would be mythologized in a collection of poems. Else, I would have asked more questions of a seemingly ordinary man.

At face value, Pease follows the Herculean form, blockbuster-style, sculpting the real-life Wichman with mythic clay. The Wichman saga pays tribute to both the ancient tradition and the recent tradition of American genre storytelling. Pease tells a myth the way myths have always been told: The plot of Wichman Cometh is thick. The hero must reckon with a tempting femme fatale and a mysterious tuxedo-wearing soothsayer. The hero’s enemy delivers his poison via arrow. The Wichman is bound and gagged. The ancient chorus chimes in to untangle any complications. The Wichman overcomes his trials to benefit all mankind. Et cetera. Pease knowingly uses all the trappings, artfully and humorously. His true talent is his invention beyond the heroic tropes.

To help illustrate, let’s dissect The Wichman saga using a few of the 17 monomythic stages Joseph Campbell developed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell established the idea of the monomyth as a basic, universal narrative skeleton of the hero’s journey.  Campbell applied this structure to both ancient and modern cultural narratives, including all the big cheeses, e.g. Buddha, Moses, Christ, and Prometheus. And George Lucas named the monomyth as a major influence in his Star Wars series.

Monomythic stage example: The call to adventure/refusal of the call: The Wichman is made up of equal parts James Bond, Achilles, and an over-confident stoner, resting on his stoner laurels. Pease invents a reluctant and apathetic demihero. At first, the Wichman is unable to realize his own heroic image. Most of the Wichman’s hurdles are internal and metaphysical. In Pease’s creation, the hero is relatable. I mean, who hasn’t been faced with perilous adventure and wished for this instead:

In Wichman Cometh, Pease introduces the characters of “Sage Editors,” who create this image of the mythic man (well before The Wichman actually demonstrates anything hero-like in the story). These mythmakers, “understood / The Wichman himself / was mythologically / inadequate as is.” The Wichman is imperfect. Pease’s hero has one foot in elevated, Greco-Roman fantasy and one foot in pure, disappointing realism.  The Sage Editors proclaim him as a hero but The Wichman questions:

So much of Wichman Cometh is about realizing mythic potential.  To what degree can a person become extraordinary if he is told he is extraordinary? In Wichman Cometh, the myth makes the man, but only if he is willing to embark on the quest.

Monomythic stage example: Supernatural Aid / Talisman: the Wichman finds the following, listing the members of one of the most heroic professions in an adolescent’s eyes:

I hate to call the idealization of astronauts adolescent, but I find it easy to imagine a pre-pubescent, unrealized hero begging his parents to send him to astronaut camp. The lunar landing is the ultimate quest realized by mankind.  Bearing this list of the greats before him in his memory, the Wichman decides to enter the so-called Belly of the Whale.

Monomythic stage: Woman as temptress: the Wichman’s temptress is the hot girl downstairs in his apartment building in the modern story, named after a nymph in the Greek tradition. She is:

Pease is a good storyteller. He practices the art of suspense and spectacle. The Wichman gets himself into jams from which he can never unjam himself, or so it seems. You can almost hear the stings play discordantly before the turn of each page. If Pease were to rewrite Emily Dickinson’s line, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant, “ he would advise us to “Tell some of the truth and tell it with Spectacle.”

Monomythic stage example: Apotheosis: the hero achieves a divine state, where, in Campbell’s words, it dawns on the hero: “what [the hero], and all things, really are is the Everlasting, dwell in the groves of the wish fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord.” This stage, among others in Wichman Cometh, are televised:

If one ticks off the monomythic requirements in a list, one could say Pease followed the rules. But Pease doesn’t introduce each of the Wichman’s stages procedurally. Throughout Wichman Cometh, abstract, black and white images work in tandem with the verse. Pease reduces each image (e.g. the figure if a man) to its white points of light. As Pease boils down the literary image of the hero, he boils down the visual image as well, and the effect is captivating.

Pease straddles more than fantasy and realism. He braids the ancient and modern, the genre blockbuster and metaphysical contemplation, and art and prose and enjambed verse. Make no mistake, however: this is not crossover stuff. Pease did not dilute his artistry down to vapid pop. His concept is rich and his imagery is groundbreaking, smart. All storytelling, to some degree, is the output of the undying myth engine. John Ford’s newspaperman runs that engine. Homer runs that engine. Twain oils that engine late into the night. As writers, we might borrow and revise archetypes from the myth engine, especially if we are working within genre. Pease’s Wichman cometh straight from the humming myth machine itself.

Mark Leidner’s Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me (Factory Hollow Press, 2011) revels in the possibilities of parameters: each poem seems quick to establish its field, its project as it were, lofting it and then playfully pushing back at its self-imposed boundaries. The language, in general, is deceptively direct, underlying a mode that becomes self-conscious if it gets too elevated or ambitious in its scope. While reading, I was tempted to think of a poet like Frank O’Hara, whose lists, casual and insular references to his peers and to Coca-Cola bottles— I guess you could call it plain-speak— seemed at once to throw stones through the windows of the Church of Poetry while simultaneously making the mundane sublime. Break down the fourth wall and add a dash of James Tates’ casual surrealism, and you might have something that resembles this collection. Almost despite itself, Leidner’s is a masterful and contemporary voice: Like a great rock drummer, he can get fancy or play cacophonously, but is able to tuck back into four-four time without losing a beat. The man’s got rhythm, knowing when to be irreverent, when to be clever, and yes, when to inject gravitas.

The poem, “Yellow Rose,” for example, immediately builds a humorous and profane duality, beginning “When it snows I get a boner,” and then listing other moments (“tornadoes,” “the presence or absence of a woman,” “garbled rap/…out of/ white dude’s iPod”) which inspire the voice’s decidedly masculine arousal. The form of the poem creates an effect of comic accumulation, which crystallizes into self-consciousness: “And at what age do men mature?/ I wonder this and get a boner”. At this point, however, and without shifting in register, the poem takes a dramatic turn, exploring the things that do not give the speaker a hard on: “the level of tranquility/ a Jeep of body bags achieves,” “Faces ceasing to exist,” “people being/ shot like dogs, like nothing” which build into “War/ in general, and in particular.” At play, here, is the guilt of the pacifist non-combatant happily and unhappily existing far away from the bedlam and chaos of war while being painfully aware of it. What is interesting to me is the way in which Leidner almost immediately undercuts not only his critique, but the agency of the art form in general. He writes: “But who could possibly care/ what I have to say about this war?/ I could say anything here,/ it wouldn’t matter.” As if to prove this point, Leidner then creates a frame both around the mundane and commercialized, “I could say,/ ‘I am Motortrend car of the year,” and the elevated and poetic:

‘You are the yellow rose
corkscrewing out of the slippery rocks
that gird the river of black water.’
‘I have seen a thousand moons
wax and wane to completion
since we last touched.’

These lines, set as they are in quotation marks, create a pointed ironic distance from their charged, even overly sentimentalized bearings. Leidner creates a web built on oppositions: casual phallocentric humor in the face of atrocity, poignancy and perhaps even longing set against the futility of the poetic project. It is in such moments that the poet reifies his position of authority while knocking down the artifice of what he does.

At times, however, this self-conscious and premeditated approach yields weaker results. Although a good fit within Beauty Was The Case That They Gave Me, the poem “Lily Pad,” to my mind, errs too much on the side of the casual and anti-poetic. It is a poem that seems intentionally bad, in the vein of the muumuu house poets, shooting for a kind of lowest common denominator aesthetic. In parts, it almost works. There is a charm in the simplicity of:

The fold is love
and love is rad
and I love the rad gray fold of love
as well as the round green pad.

The simple monosyllabic rhymes inject an almost child-like delight in the way things come together. But, ultimately, I feel a bit cheated, like the joke is on me. It is as if the sentiments fit together too tightly; a set of well crafted building blocks to the kid that wants to make a Lego castle. Even the synesthesia of the last line, “and I love the long green fall into the rad black hole,” though clever, is not enough to redeem the hyper-simplicity of the work. If “Lily Pad” were a painting, it’d be the kind of abstract that evokes the response “my 8 year old could do that” from the confused parent. In this sense, I would suspect that the poem actually ‘wants’ a scornful response from those who take the whole thing too seriously.

And of course, Leidner is at his best when he convinces his readers that he is not being serious at all. His poems are provocative and comedic, working and reworking a quickly established formula so thoroughly that they transcend their jokey set-ups. It is an effortless seeming and often dazzling process, in which, for example, the Einstein of “Biographies of Einstein,” “lived a hard life/ in and out of rehab, and quantum physics,”  and “could make the chalk write out/ equations on the blackboard/ from thirty miles away, at another university.” Einstein becomes a kind of anchoring image, alternately a physicist wizard, a 60’s swinger (who slept with Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy while a bound and gagged JFK watched), an angry child, and a messianic figure. It is an approach that plays with and eventually strips away the pop-cultural associations around the scientist. What really makes the piece tick, though, is the poetic apotheosis of the physicist imbedded in the last stanza:

They say it is helpful to think about Einstein
more like melody, more like phenomenon
than man.
They say he floats like a finger of cloud
across the full moon of technology.

Einstein, here, comes to represent both the possibilities and limitations of human progress: a scientist whose work at once revolutionized our understanding of the Universe, while laying the groundwork for our own atomic undoing.

What arises is a complexity built of simple and ingenious parts, poems alternately enthralled with and glib with their own subject matter. This breaking down of presupposed boundaries drives “What’s Cool Changes,” which reclaims the false categories of what is “cool” and what is “lame” starting off:

Probably nine tenths of people mistakenly believe they are cool… They think that what they think is cool really is cool, but I’ve got news for them. It’s not. It’s incredibly lame. And what’s lamer than somebody thinking they’re cool when they’re not?

To brilliant effect, Leidner is able to sustain a prolonged absurdist commentary on the ephemeral and ultimately meaningless nature of this duality. His thesis, as it were, and the engine that drives this poem is, of course, in the title. Systems of valuation, what’s hot, change: There is no underlying or inherent quality of coolness or lameness, but rather, these categories shift and become one another, especially in the era of irony: “It’s a moment to moment, day to day proposition.” In the vein of Gertrude Stein, the repetition of these categories make them “change,” shaking off their original meanings to become meaningless. A paradoxical construction remains, in which “those who believed what was original cool is still cool, but not really, and are willing to alter their entire belief structures to keep pace with what’s cool as it changes, are, in the end, and all alone, completely cool.”

In a way, I found my own reading of Beauty was the case that they gave me similarly subject to these kinds of false categorizations: I still cannot decide whether I think the work is cool because it is trying to be cool, or if it is so because it is trying to be lame. Either way, and especially as the first collection of a young poet, I think this collection represents the debut of an inventive, funny and vital voice. I hope that it isn’t “lame” of me to think so. These things change.

Fog Gorgeous Stag, the latest tumultuous effort from Sean Lovelace (June, Publishing Genius), is first and foremost a book obsessed with its own existence as a linguistic deity or idol: a literary tower of Babel, striving towards the sky. Much like the arrogant architects of the days of yore, Lovelace seems to have lost control of his own personal poetic structure, and much like the occurrence of a proliferation of different tongues served as a punishment then, so too does Fog seem to suffer from a malignant form of malformed and confusing verbiage—but with one caveat: it is a delightful disease.

Lovelace has crafted a long series of poetic moments that excite even as they confuse: fat and heavy paragraphs rife with metaphor and little time to breath, acerbic and terse parenthetical remarks appearing from no where, long lists and random catalogues of everything finite, as well as things unaccounted for. He has done so with an authority that truly does affirm the awesome Olympic power of a group of well crafted sentences. An entry entitled simply “God” begins with the line “Gorgeous are the chemists,” noting the beauty of synthesis in the world (specifically writing) and Lovelace has accomplished his alchemical feat with a steady hand, creating literary AU out of pulp and ink. Though at times Fog and Lovelace (it seems only right to speak of this book as its own entity separate from the author) ask a great deal of the reader, or demand, rather, as the meaning behind the more eccentric moments can be sometimes rather hard to cull from the white noise of the ink on the page, but they certainly do not ask for forgiveness, and if the reader is game to follow the book up its pillared steps towards the heavens, there will not be any disappointment when that destination, wherever it is, is reached.

Consider six lines from “Six Lies” at the onset of Fog:

Someone better, better do something soon, but no one does a thing. THE PLAN IS TO LOVE YOUR LONELINESS…There is something sheen/sweet/hard about flesh, you whisper. Listen to me: There is no plan. We should be ashamed… [This is not dress rehearsal/Check]

The lines spread throughout a paragraph jumbled with reference to Josephine Baker and a fractured heel, exhibit a desperation of thought, of contemplation, and yet a stark realization of the moment at hand. No matter how hard we try to connect with the world, our brains are just lonely cells, and if that’s not scary enough, there is another secret: No plan. Despite this dire idea Lovelace makes certain to check the box at the end, admitting that there is only one rehearsal, which we should relish, because as it turns out, this dry run through is actually the opening night. There is an engagement here between the page and the reader that is obfuscating and honest, muddled and crystal clear. Fog passes before the eyes like a murky creek, the water swirling and every once in a long while clearing up, quickening the flow to reveal a shimmering, smooth pebbly bottom, just for a second, until this faltering image is again obscured by the muddy water.

In “Several Useful Prayers,” the beginning piece of a series of “prayers” that include “The Prayer of Gun Ownership” and “Additional Prayer (with List Of Potential Summer Employment,” Lovelace fights with the language he seeks to master and loses, drawing the reader into the death: “Now my heart falls gun-shot, all crabbed, snarly, and stupid. Prayer for 7 ½ seconds. Prayer for words to revisit the throat, the hole filled, the silver hearse without any wheel at all.” These moments in the book, when Lovelace admits defeat, and concedes that perhaps the language is too powerful and can’t be controlled in any conventional sense, that Fog reaches a depth of feeling and raw potential that send a pulse of electric fulfillment up the spine of the reader, reasserting that unnerving feeling that we haven’t mastered anything at all and there are still paths that lead to discovery. But these moments are in equal proportion to the instances where Lovelace exhibits complete control of his faculties and puts the language through its paces without regret for the wear and tear.

To wit, the opening lines of “After Doing Smiles”:

I jump now at the slap of light. At the kick and silences of glistening (as in words). At my name. She gave up too. Pause. I will not talk paper.

Lovelace begins to build his vague argument, calling into being the physical memory of waking, of being called out by name, of a woman- the things that bring us to the surface of our lives. Then he takes its further, to the depths of language, the hidden corners of the spoken word that have no counterpart in the tangible universe:

If I talk paper I will mumble limbs crack/crumble/fall into a thousand breaths—there is bound (bind, binding, binder full of albino wolves) to be swaying. I said pause. Her skin was leathery.

The rhythm here is unmistakably wrought and tight, the words twist against each other and engulf one another, feeding their syllables into the sentence like raw meat to a lion. The words call into existence the power behind Fog: that last area of uncovered map, of untouched forest, the sign that reads: Here There Be Monsters- the way that though it seems language has done all it can, there is still so much left to do. Fog takes the reader there. But this is not to say Lovelace is our guide to this new territory, but rather a scientific and faithful observer, wondering at his own place in the vast expanse of the page. In the same piece he continues:

Why must someone wake me? Why not wake myself? … How do I know I still exist?

It is a question that seems, in light of all the other points of departure and digression within the text, to be the artery that supplies life to the rest; is any of this truly happening?

Despite the heavy overtones here, Fog never gets bogged down in over analyzing or weighty cerebral spelunking- Lovelace matches every single philosophical conundrum with a flippant instance of light heartedness, bordering on the absurd, though with a decidedly dark side to the humor. Nearly the entire text of “Firing Squad” reads as follows:

-Do you have any last wishes?

-Yes, I do. I would like a ceiling fan. I enjoy the white noise of a ceiling fan.

Or a few lines from “Free: Blue Hanging Folders”:

-Every problem can be traced to this: someone thinks.

And:

-I do regret the consumers

Or, more verbosely:

-I woke to coughing down the hallway. I crept through the bog, into the Living Room. There tottered an old man atop my television set- he had long legs and hot pants. He said, “My name is Robert Frost and I am wise in a simple way and depressed in a happy way and I am the first poet to be on your TV.

Fog Gorgeous Stag is a daring feat of language and a testament to the reciprocity of conviction and audacity. Lovelace has a sense for words and what they can and can’t do; it can’t be put more simply than that. The language works for him in ways that are astounding and at times exciting. The snag in this whole apparatus is that this type of reading takes time and energy- a willingness to give up the will to the author of the text, and accept that yes, he/she is god until one closes the book and whatever is said, goes. This type of authorial authority can become tedious at times, and especially with subject matter as heady as the material in Fog. But perhaps this is Lovelace’s gift to us, to show us that with a little effort there is still so much left for language to give us, so much left for us to discover within the acts of writing and reading, and that above all, the written word is not dead- though the reader may, as Lovelace puts it in “Transcript [2]”, be lost in acquiescence to the accepted ideas of literature- “[obedience: born into a grave]”. In one of the final pieces in the text, “A Multidisciplinary Approach to Obesity” Lovelace seems to reinforce this previous notion, and remind us that if indeed the text here is a deity, then like many myths and legends, on must believe in order for them to exist, or in other words, the text will only give up on the reader, if the reader gives up on the text:

I forgot abut the odor of rotting storytell-ers. Fallen words. Cockroaches fly very well. Darwin’s bathtub, for example. You should go home. You should witness unbelievable airborne activity. This is serious. But you’ll never {?} say so. What? I forgot to tell you that God has left us; She now huddles curled inside every poor play of chess {all}. Fallen leaflets. Look around. Shut up. We have people in the North. We sing fondly of hell. So. I said drink. Take a slow breath. Listen. To this God: I see, She whispered, and saw nothing.

Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud,
Translated by John Ashbery
175 pp. W.W. Norton & Company, $24.95

That one of America’s leading poets has taken on the task of translating Rimbaud’s llluminations, a series of radical prose poems with a history as elusive as their author’s own, is something to be excited about. The rock star pairing alone is enough to get you going; that the two have interacted in the form of John Ashbery re-seeing the Illuminations is deeply satisfying.

Ashbery, who has translated many modernist French writers in addition to producing volumes of his own poetry, prose and art criticism, has mostly chosen to engage with esoteric works and poets. The best example of this might be his pioneering work on the late 19^th century poet and general madman Raymond Roussel. Before Ashbery’s diligent investigations and translations, Roussel was largely unheard of in America and his work elicited little more than bafflement from the better part of his French audience.  It is only recently that the French have begun to embrace Roussel and regard him as a serious contributor to their literary tradition. (An exhibit on Roussel, curated by Paris-based art critic François Piron, will open this fall at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid and will include several pieces from Ashbery’s collection.) There is an undeniable thrill in being the first to recognize greatness—something akin to possessing a secret of serious value. Perhaps Ashbery, who knows much of the adventure is over once the secret is revealed, has for this reason tended toward the enigmatic, unseen artist.

It is difficult to imagine a poet farther from the literary sidelines than Rimbaud. Aspects of his life and work, which, as with most towering figures, have assumed a certain aura and mythology, are familiar to many. In her insightful NY Times review of Ashbery’s translation, Lydia Davis mentions a handful of common associations with the poet-rebel: The “highly romantic photograph” of the authentically unkempt artist at 17, his indelible eyes a pellucid blue; his freeing and grammatically-torqued assertion “Je est un autre”; the dramatic and inspiring romance with Verlaine; that he gave us stunningly original and substantial collections of poetry before his 21^st birthday, abandoning writing thereafter; and that he lived out the latter part of his brief life traversing far-off lands and taking up such strange jobs as gun-running in Choa. These fragments constitute a basic sketch of the man who set off a series of literary avalanches in the minds of his heirs: poets who, like Ashbery, populate the most interesting places in modern and contemporary verse.

But in popular depictions, the romantic facts of Rimbaud’s life often eclipse its bleaker realities. Born in 1854 in the northeastern town of Charleville, Rimbaud was raised (quite literally) under the hand of his deeply devout and callous mother, Vitalie Cuif. In 1860 when Rimbaud was almost six, his father, an infantry captain, left to serve in Cambrai and never returned. In his biography of the poet, Graham Robb writes of the inordinately severe punishments to which Vitalie subjected Rimbaud and his brother Frédéric: “temporary starvation, isolation and sudden physical pain.” Rimbaud seems to have survived his mother’s austerity and the tedium of Charleville, of which he complains at length in his correspondence with his mentor Georges Izambard, through intense reading and study. He greatly surpassed his peers at the Institut Rossat, and did so again at the Collège de Charleville, where he won prizes for his work. (Vitalie sent Rimbaud to Charleville only when Rossat seemed to be heading in the direction of more liberal politics and practices.)  Rimbaud’s anti-religious views, expressed in early poems like “Les premières communions,” may have something to do with his exposure to the darker realms of religious ardor, and to the moral and intellectual rigidity found therein. Religious references emerge throughout his writing and appear in unusual ways in the Illuminations, which begin with a re-imagined Eden: a hare pauses to say its prayer not to God but to a rainbow after the flood. Life begins once everything is washed away, and suddenly all is possible.

Rimbaud breathed life into French language and poetry with the publication of Illuminations in 1886 and, a little over a decade earlier, with his darker suite of equally oneiric “proems” Une saison en enfer. The neologisms, juxtapositions, torrents of images, and novel play with rhythm and rhyme in these prose poems, exploded the language with great force. Illuminations is full of captivating images and themes: real and imagined pulsating cities, glimpses of bizarre characters on the streets and in dreams, the theater of humanity and the role of the performer—all of this intertwined with Rimbaud’s reflections and contemplations. There were predecessors of the prose poem form: Aloysius Bertrand introduced it with his collection Gaspard de la Nuit, first published in 1842, and Baudelaire developed it in his own ways in Le Spleen de Paris. But neither anticipated and affected 20^th century language and literature as significantly as Rimbaud. In new ways his poetry inhabited that mystifying brink between active, visible reality and imaginative expanse. Ashbery, too, stands at this non-space or “threshold,” as Rimbaud scholar Roger Little calls it, in much of his own poetry. And there are other similarities: sinuous lists of rushing images; keen attention to a poem’s visual aspects; and undercutting of “significant” moments with sudden and seemingly unrelated lines. These are characteristics of the Illuminations that have attracted editors and translators to the work again and again.

Indeed Rimbaud’s masterpiece has been the darling of many translators, notably Louise Varèse—whose English translation was the first to be published in America (by New Directions)—Wallace Fowlie, Nick Osmond, and Donald Revell. The fact that the text has had so many English incarnations makes the work of translating it all the more daunting. Eugene Richie, a close friend of Ashbery’s as well as the editor of his Selected Prose and (with co-editor Rosanne Wasserman) an upcoming collection of his translations, has noted that “taking on Illuminations, which has been translated so many times, was a major challenge that [Ashbery] was able to meet by keeping close to the original French and by only consulting a few other versions so as to be able to solve translation problems on his own.” Ashbery is remarkably faithful to the original, staying close to its grammar and punctuation throughout and only straying from the French where absolutely necessary.

What seems most compelling about Ashbery’s translation is the balance between his own poetic voice and that of Rimbaud. Translators inevitably present their own sense and style in their renderings, but Ashbery does not so much infuse with his particular sound as use it to intensify and propel the original. He has not just translated the book into English, he has translated it into a freed-up American English, of which he is a master. It is clear from the first line of the first poem, “Après le deluge,” that Ashbery is our man: “no sooner had the notion of the flood regained its composure….” Revell’s and Fowlie’s translations begin with the phrase “as soon as,” and then part ways. Ashbery’s “no sooner,” rather than the slow off-the-tongue and well-oriented “as soon as,” catapults you into the flashing dreamscape and unrelenting rhythms that await. He does not attempt to locate you in time and space, but rightly submits to this world suspended between the external and the mind. Similar instances are found throughout. In “Being Beauteous,” Ashbery handles the first line, “Devant une neige un Etre de Beauté de haute taille,” with necessary force: “against snow, a tall Beautiful Being.” Other versions read “tall against the snow there stands the Incarnation of Beauty” or “standing tall before snow, a Being of Beauty”. The immediacy of “against snow,” and that the entire line stands without the direction of a verb, allows for a perfect freedom. There is simply the image itself, pure and free as a flake of snow, and suddenly everything is possible.