RED ACTIONS n. 1. The acts or processes of editing or revising writings; preparations for publication. 2. Edited works; new editions or revisions. 3. A journal of poetry and poetics that is published every nine months and that welcomes: poems; poetry book reviews; translations; manifestos; essays concerning poetry, poetics, poetry movements, or a specific poet or a group of poets; and anything dealing with poetry.
Sometimes when you don’t know the answer, it pays to ask smart people questions. Other times you might find your own way, if not to answers then to discovery, by reading poems. After guest-editing this issue, that’s how it seems to me. In the Poetics section, you’ll find a wide variety of smart people giving articulate responses to our questions about the lyric poem in America. In the Poetry section, you may discover, like I did, that the lyric poem often has something to do with birds. But never the same bird, or birdsong, or vision of birds, or feathers, and never the same arrangements of the sky. One other thing, and maybe not a completely stupid metaphor: It turns out that building an issue of a journal is a bit like (I’m imagining, of course) building a nest. You don’t select every stick, every piece of string and swatch of moss, just those right ones from among the many scattered. Then you arrange them into something both functional and aesthetic. And then the rest, dear reader – the launch out and flying part – is up to you. Rob Carney Guest Editor
CON IS SUE Editor’s Note ............................................................................................................................. 1 POETRY Maria Melendez: To Survive Inside the Wheel of Days ......................................................... 6 Sandy Longhorn: Voice Box ...................................................................................................... 7 Paisely Rexdal: Body of Stuffed Female Fox, Natural History Museum ................................ 8 Nightingale ....................................................................................................... 10 Guiseppe Getto: Anthropology ................................................................................................. 11 Karen Schubert: Bronze and Light ........................................................................................... 12 Christopher Buckley: Insufficiency ........................................................................................... 13 Eva Hooker: Posting from a Lunar World ............................................................................... 14 Christopher Kennedy: Rara Avis ............................................................................................... 15 James Grabill: Honeycomb ....................................................................................................... 16 Eric M. Morris: Between Here and There .............................................................................. 18 Nicelle C. Davis: Carbon Monoxide Poisoning ....................................................................... 19 Brittany Cavallaro: In My Letter There Are Many Letters .................................................... 20 Jay Pabarue: How a Body Reaches Its Potential ...................................................................... 21 Ruth Williams: Liminal, The Heart is Limited ....................................................................... 22 Rebecca Foust: Envy Sips a Cosmo with Vanity ....................................................................... 23 Jessica D. Hand: Jesus Mirror ................................................................................................. 24 Hope Maxwell-Snyder: Ingrid Betancourt After Her Release ................................................ 25
TENTS TWELVE TWELVE Alex Cigale: Heinrich Heine Revisits the Shtetl .......................................................................... 26 Noel Pabillo Mariano: The Price of Sweetness ............................................................................ 27 Angie Macri: Summer of Perfect Flowers .................................................................................. 28 Grace Cavalieri: Travelogue .......................................................................................................... 29 Laura Stott: Ganpati Guest House .............................................................................................. 30 Yes, Madam ............................................................................................................ 31 July 27, Glacier Station .......................................................................................... 32 Shannon Amidon: Letter to the Mainland .................................................................................. 34 Sara Bartlett: Saturday Morning .................................................................................................. 35 Kelli Russell Agodon: How to Sketch ........................................................................................ 38 Anne C. Coon: Mining Again .................................................................................................... 39 Robert Evory: Commemoration .................................................................................................. 40 Richard Garcia: Maria the Figurehead from La Maria Celeste ................................................ 41 Ronald Wallace: String Theory .................................................................................................... 42 Eenus! ................................................................................................................ 43 Bill Carpenter: Luke .................................................................................................................... 44 David Wagoner: Pig Dance .......................................................................................................... 46 Scott Poole: A Little Poem in Celebration of Nothing ................................................................ 47 You Would Be Surprised How Good It Feels to Die .............................................. 48 Why Do You Want to Work Here? .......................................................................... 50 Rob Carney: Sometimes It Isn’t the Same Old Story .................................................................. 51
& POETICS Meghan Weimer: At the Corner ............................................................................................... 53 Question of Aesthetics: Investigating the Lyric ........................................................................ 54 Marilyn Krysl: Spiritual Pilgrimage: On Karen Swenson’s A Pilgrim into Silence ................. 64 Donna Marbach: On Yu-Han Chao’s We Grow Old: Fifty-Three Chinese Love Poems ..... 66 On Rebecca Foust’s Mom’s Canoe ............................................................. 68 Abby Millager: Beside the Dumpsters, Furiously Sorting ....................................................... 70 Agatha Beins: What Bodies Become: Review of Self-Portrait with Crayon ............................ 72 Tom’s Celebrations .................................................................................................................... 74 Books Received .......................................................................................................................... 80 Contributors’ Notes ................................................................................................................... 83 Submissions and Ordering ........................................................................................................ 88 Cover Art Information .............................................................................................................. 89 Redactions Supporters ............................................................................................................... 89
POETRY
MARIA MELENDEZ TO SURVIVE INSIDE THE WHEEL OF DAYS “Crocodile mama, crank open those jaws, let twenty wriggling pipsqueaks out to swim,” we say to a human soul that’s lay too long in its swamp bottoms, to a spark of God suffocating in a muddy mind. If the soul’s chilled by a deadly bond to what should’ve been lost, we call, “Mountain wind, snap gold from the aspen nodes, cover the summer-dun fields with flutter and color.” In our bethel of remedies, we, the blue-striped lizard ladies, welcome all bedraggled spirits – those with hands that do nothing but pick at blisters, the whimperers, those with hair that’s forsaken its snake-power, all of its nerve – and we feed them the savory decay of a desert sheep baked on the boulders, horns and all. We keep the coyotes away so they, the human souls, can limp and dither their way to a meal, and when they’re sated, we bathe their hands in the salt-and-sagespiced blood of jack-rabbits and ask them to do what they came here for: “Scrape off those brittle old skins you slither around in,” which aren’t their bodies, but the doubts of their bodies, crusted and constricting. We cache away earthquakes, stone knives, burst clouds, flowers, cures for every form of heartache . . . but try to make a grab for us, we’ll break tail and run. Instead, step sideways into our sandstone home, light as a dusky breeze that’s come from the river. If you wait with the flooded senses and tensile crouch of a kangaroo mouse, we’ll find you varnished with shadows, your layered fears a carving surface for our primal glyphs: paw, talon, feather, scale, maw.
6
RE
SANDY LONGHORN VOICE BOX The sound of her third language hid. It dipped and coiled inside her windpipe, tasting of rust, maple leaves, and the chalk of limestone dust. Her name became exotic there, multisyllabic and metaphoric, branching into both sugar and thorn. Learning to speak in whispers, she felt the weight of words she knew to be beyond translation. She set herself apart and watched through rain-streaked windows. Within her throat a new species of bird began to form – its song a recantation.
DACTIONS
7
PAISLEY REKDAL BODY OF STUFFED FEMALE FOX, NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious, glass eye embedded in its slitted red, skin husked and sealed forever in a vacuum – the false gray sedge where no dog hunts and it’s lost its sleekness as it’s lost its sun. She ages terribly behind her glass. Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious, so why should we admire or hate her, husked and sealed forever in a vacuum, the frozen attitude of cunning strung over wire, the razor nails replaced and aging terribly behind glass? Imagine the raw, wet wounds in the body she could open up. Why admire or hate her for them, why not call her existence, simply, honest: an animal practicing its craft designed by nature? Now it’s strung over wire, the razor nails replaced with plastic as her forest was itself replaced by us, the raw, wet wounds we tear into its body. Years ago, signs across the neighborhood listing all the cats found mutilated declared a man was busy practicing his craft, nature redesigned by violence. We have to find the killer, they said, before the forested park fills with bodies, the cats turned into girls and the girls into women. Months later, the signs were torn down, the notices listing all the cats found mutilated declared a mistake. The culprit was a fox. But now, behind glass we’ve found the killer: the violence we think we cannot be or feel more than, the once-red body that fascinates us turned female, signs beside it torn, the notes on its habitat in disarray due to construction. The culprit is a fox. Behind the glass lighting flickers, throws down shadows so that
8
RE
Paisley Rekdal
we cannot see her. She raises up a paw and the once-red body that fascinates us freezes in its shabby immortality, stands disfigured in its habitat, in disarray due to our construction of a world that keeps her always different from us; in our imagination of ourselves, degraded. We cannot see her. She raises up a paw as if in supplication, cone nose tasting the air frozen in its shabby immortality, disfigured by the box we’ve locked it in, as we’ve locked in her, imagining how she’d slink from the forest to drink at a puddle of rain, the picture of herself degraded by a car’s sudden headlights that cut across the surface. She lifts her head, cone nose tasting the air as the wind lifts too, riffling the grasses, the trees, the fur at her throat; a movement which, as she stops to drink at her puddle of rain, could be herself or God or nothing: an absence in the headlights that cut across the surface. She looks into her puddle of rain but cannot imagine more, does not need to, like us, a wind riffling through grasses, a movement like rain running down a glass room. Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious. She could be herself or God or nothing. Instead, she’s husked, red. Sealed forever in a vacuum.
DACTIONS
9
Paisley Rekdal
NIGHTINGALE The boy sits at the kitchen table pointing at the dark outside his window. There is a bird that comes at night, he says, that makes the most beautiful music. Steam off the edges of the field, the gray and brown and green of it, and beyond this, the sea. I turn to look as if for an answer. What does he hear? I imagine it is a nightingale, but have never heard one. The look on the boy’s face as he speaks is the sound of a nightingale. It is the song of a man strapped to his mast, straining and tearing at the straps that bind him. A small breeze moves off the sea. It whistles over the shore, the dark seal-shapes rocking in and out of the shoals. It hums there where I saw one of them turn long-necked, broken and the clothes pull off like hair as the divers dragged the changed body out of the sea. The field is wet and full of stars. The boy cocks his head at the dark. I watch him moving back and forth inside the kitchen, his body pieces of eye and silk and arm and neck cord. In the story, the man binds himself so that he can listen. He wants to hear the music that will pull him down. He wants to put his head where the heart lives, that small, hard singing behind a ribcage. Night cuts down through the field. In spring, the mists will burn off, the sea return bright green. I have never seen such a live, dead thing before. I think it is a nightingale. I tell the boy the name, but he only smiles at me. And yet, how is it not a nightingale? Alone, the soft grunt of wings beating behind me. I can see its gold eye, the throat encrusted with glass. I can hear the water slapping the white sides of the shore. The boy stares out the kitchen window. It hangs in a little square of cold before him, a pane of shadow. The night outside this shadow is black. The sea is distant. The bird, however I imagine it, is singing. 10
RE
GUISEPPE GETTO ANTHROPOLOGY For Haju
Words fall short, the second teacher ends. Her raised platform is the color of salmon split open from gorging on red clay, her robe the color of overcast sky. Beneath her short-cropped salt and pepper hair, her black eyes burn across the distance from body to body, synapse to response. I shift in my cross-legged position, and the buckwheat imprisoned in my black cushion sifts like grain once whispered from the auger amid all that engine noise – too many years ago. The heavy pine door thumps twice each time it’s opened – a heart drum. I frown, what’s left? The wood falls from its carefully stacked position by the cast-iron stove, and from within a cinder rises in an arc toward the surface, kuh-chuk. I turn my head. Ten billion years. What do you notice? the teacher asks. I answer in my mind, though I’m not supposed to: concrete, snowfall, glint, bedrock, white, white. Outside the air sifts fine, winter slow as glacial shift.
DACTIONS
11
KAREN SCHUBERT BRONZE AND LIGHT For Robert Wick and James Turrell For 10,000 years the sculptor’s tall figures will stride or recline – it is their Bronze Age. The crooks of their arms and bellies cradle plants alive with humming birds and dragon flies, reflecting pools shimmer across mottled green patina. The sculptor tells me he has been influenced by the artist who works in light, whose pieces turn to empty rooms at the switch’s night click, the waves of reds and purples dissipating into atmosphere, or breath. The bronze sculptor’s house is lit with holes where the sky comes down, thick colored stucco holds up walls of windows, a womb of glass encircles the kitchen, overlooks the canyon laying round like the mountains’ lap. Archaeologists will find the bronze woman deep in her red desert clay, touch her open abdomen thick with compost, desiccated cactus leaves that captured light bouncing its way out of the art and into the dry canyon wind.
12
RE
CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY INSUFFICIENCY What you can see of the wind requires dust, an empty lot with the financial pages spun skyward, a lawn with leaves from a Chinese elm and liquid amber blowing loose . . . . Anyone knows how little this is but it turns out to be all you need – while most of the world goes on suffering – to focus your attention in spite of the fact that you’ll still arrive five blocks from anywhere you know. But here is the sky above the street, so many handfuls of air remaining – yet for all your gazing and abject dedication, you have not, over the last 60 years, moved one cloud, let alone a star. What is there finally to ask the vastness for more than the time, such dust as it takes to fully compensate the wind?
DACTIONS
13
EVA HOOKER POSTING FROM A LUNAR WORLD Here, where the orchard was, One old apple tree. No clouds are visible. Nothing is As it was. The robin swoops from branch To branch, a wildering Of call. Serene, Like the dream in which I sift the bramble For the perfect Skein of red wool – Then drift off to my old house, The one where I was happy, Where I understand diligence, And how the soul can question Its anatomies.
14
RE
CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY RARA AVIS My mother was born with wings on her ankles. She’s been cutting them off since she could hold a butcher knife. They grow back. She cuts them off. She can’t fly. The wings are useless. They reappear with the promise of flight, the false hope of escape. She tries to ignore them. They itch like scabs. She cuts them off. She dreads the day she loses her strength and lets them grow untamed. She fears she might be tricked by the arc of their shadows into believing in their power, the moon and the stars inviting her, the open window examining her faith.
DACTIONS
15
JAMES GRABILL HONEYCOMB A woman had discovered her body was made by impulses given to her, perhaps by a grandmother or powdered aunt, a distant father or friend from school. She’d sense someone moving with her, say her mother with an ability to slow down when giving someone parts of what might be appreciated, within range, or an aunt’s passion for spotting a backwoods cardinal loosening quick in heaves imperative shapes for use. So the woman was a person whose symbolism had reached autonomy, but still she performed for entrepreneurs. If she sensed them part of her activities, as at the hog bake with big pits, she sang though they inhaled it, as generations had done a few millennia back, when they sacrificed what they’d raised, having been promised at some point a goddess would appear. One did, it happened, but became jealous over the happiness of people, if someone enjoyed her life more than a mythical being enjoyed timelessness. In the place of a father of miracles, the woman had a loyal friend or two, and rather than a garden goddess riding in a military chariot, she saw feminine turns and branches spun from central unspiraled and spiraled space, the fractals made of sunlight and space fueling the next days, amber trees lit by orange moon over a bay receding inside her, after words expressing her compassion. Occurrences of this collected in a honeycomb that fueled her, as she worked to overcome burden by living as herself, not struggling over a life of obedience and anger. She let herself grieve parts of what she was unable to embrace in her culture. What she had given up left her running on a fuel of slow bees’ combs which fit alongside heavy forests. Each honeycomb dripped slowly a golden honey no one had expected would burn, but the torque this burning created was as if a fusion reactor made the forest engine burst with beauty, at the edge of an hour,
16
RE
James Grabill
the edge of personal solidity, where flowing was how her body reached what it was, giving her confidence, say, when talking with the hierarchy. So her private power was transmitted, her calls moving in unison, the way bees individually coordinate leaving the hive, having learned how to search through the open when mind is ready, to return before dusk or sleep back on the purple petal until the next day: in the bees’ case, flowers and the hive, and in hers, the depth of salt shaken by her father over the animal of this existence. She sometimes felt her work could not be completed and asked for assistance of the goddess, but she didn’t believe this necessarily part of cosmos: but part of the mind, an activation of the bodily insides of shape, the way animals are given remarkable knowledge, a turtle wading in from the sea across the beach to plant her leathery eggs beneath the stratosphere, as stopped time means riding waves that bury their breaking in honeycombed inhabited sands where breathing waves criss-cross before pulling back. The woman waited for the sky to fill the living flow of cells and leaves, the Mandlebrot fractal turnings along curves within spiraled unwheeling and wheeling, granting useful solidarity and complexity to her vision and stance.
DACTIONS
17
ERIC M. MORRIS BETWEEN HERE AND THERE Someone told me you were impossible in the mathematical sense. At least at birth. Then you started breathing backwards, synchronized your heart rhythm with a sundial at dusk. At that point I would have believed anything. We found different ways to draw the same conclusions. I dovetailed off history repeating itself. The probability of what was never going to happen. You drew straight from conspiracy theory. False negative. False positive. There was necessary room for error when hypotheses filled empty spaces like a gas leak. We were always waiting for something to explode: the sky into more manageable fragments. We believed in counting the endless: the long way home, the night’s weight when it floats off the bottom of day, the distance we could throw into riddles.
18
RE
NICELLE C. DAVIS CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING Causes: blue flame. faulty furnace. combustion. ___________ before she found her parents bodies stacked like lovers asphyxiated by carbon monoxide – before she chalked herself not like the dead, not with lime but speed and nights spent organizing the kitchen labeling spoons: spoons forks: forks until all things had a name, an absolute reason for being – she was my mother. ___________ Last Words: Lately I’ve been seeing ghosts. Never thought I’d be a believer. Even bought a Ouiji Board. Always the answer is yes. Constantly the sound of footsteps. I want to know where the dead are going. Always the answer is yes. How much easier death is knowing there’ll be company. Even now God is in my kitchen licking a wooden spoon clean. ___________ I hold a fork and spoon up to my son who is cautiously approaching language. I say spoon fork. He understands these are the answers without knowing the birds I am saying.
DACTIONS
19
BRITTANY CAVALLARO IN MY LETTER THERE ARE MANY LETTERS If you say the letters of this alphabet escape like pinned locusts, like cauterized butterflies, still vaguely burning – then you will be told to understand that the house was empty. The letters want you to swallow them in the correct order.
Understand that the carpet’s tongue was dry. Understand all these rivers. The puckered wallpaper. The dying dog in its own wasted bed. If you let them between your lips incorrectly, the letters will leave you completely.
You need to understand the thinness of lips. The letters have been shut up so long that they have developed appetites. They have learned to arrange themselves in ransom notes.
Understand the cold body, clad in a skirted apron. The letters have learned your name and they taste like salt, like sweat, they will coax you to moan it, Brittany, Brittany: diaphanous hooker, bluestocking, escape artist.
20
RE
JAY PABARUE HOW A BODY REACHES ITS POTENTIAL A body starts off the size of a period. A body then learns to accept: bread and wine,
rainwater,
its own stink,
A body becomes dark matter, an electromagnetic clot with poles that never switch. No particle is ever pushed
grief.
away.
A body attracts thumbtacks,playingcards,jacks,andpaperclips. A body swells. A body pulls birdsanddogs towards it. They shriek, they claw the floor. They stick. A body lures a daughtercloserandabsorbs her. Awife,abed,achestofdrawers. Nebulous, a body sits in an armchair and grows
as large as a star. Neighbors call
the authorities. A body is launched
DACTIONS
into space.
21
RUTH WILLIAMS LIMINAL, THE HEART IS LIMITED In a basket or in my hands, it’s a weighty, weighty prospect. And of course – you’re the prospector. You scan the horizon, little black eyes assessing from afar. Value is a current you feel in your toes, a brail-weight instinct. It bumps and bypasses the inner thigh, the heart, the head to escape from your lionized hair. Oh my gold rush drowser, you dromedary of my deserted prairie town! You slow plodder! You minute deliberator! Don’t you take your time raking it clean? To the inch, you’re a parser.
22
RE
REBECCA FOUST ENVY SIPS A COSMO WITH VANITY It’s not that I envy your kid getting into Harvard; we’re really quite pleased with Gonzales U. And it isn’t schadenfreude that courses like a slow wake of joy through my face when you say that your dot-com has finally gone bust. It’s just that it’s been over six months since my last Restylane injection, and when you’ve got no bottom lip, it gets damned hard to pout. Not like your pink pillowy mouth, your long sleek hair, those chic shoes and short skirts I can’t wear on account of these varicose veins. No, what makes me burn is how you get to be venial, have fun; your sin’s not deadly – just a quick dip in brimstone.
DACTIONS
23
JESSICA D. HAND JESUS MIRROR My seventh birthday – I opened the biggest box first. A giant fish mirror. To symbolize Jesus’ love, my mother beamed. I asked what symbolize meant. By eleven I realized I always looked fat in the Jesus mirror. I started throwing up in secret. It was the only view I trusted. That’s not entirely true. I never thought I was fat, and I never trusted, really. But when prayers couldn’t stop slaps, belts, screaming, when prayers couldn’t keep my sister home or stop my father at night, I pushed fingers down my throat, searching for peace. By fifteen my face was an old, deflating balloon. I buried buckets of vomit in the backyard while my mother pretended. I muttered Jesus Dear Jesus when she found the diet pills. The night my sister said I’m pregnant my mother shoved her across the room, shattered the Jesus mirror. I saw three broken women and I understood symbolize. I understood Jesus.
24
RE
HOPE MAXWELL-SSNYDER INGRID BETANCOURT AFTER HER RELEASE That is the hammock. Those are the poles it hung from. That is the net I kept over my head. That is the chain they wrapped around my ankle. The tree I was bound to. This is my Bible. Those are mangoes I ate when I was starving. That is my box. These are my children in the photograph, six years younger. These scars are scorpion bites. That naked man on the floor, blindfolded, was my captor. This is my rosary. I made it with buttons from the clothing of victims. My fingers count: for each button a victim, for each victim, a prayer.
DACTIONS
25
ALEX CIGALE HEINRICH HEINE REVISITS THE SHTETL Dirt-addled peddlers saddled with pushcarts spilling schmattes, a rank stream of feces and urine running from fetid cesspools in open sewers along the curbstones; no special liking for their company, it is not to worship I visit Jew street – secular covenant of my right hand: may it wither should I forget the ghetto. Carp in raisin sauce, steaming hot mutton, garlic and horseradish to revive the dead, the soup with dumplings – a nightingale’s song each Friday evening – and my soul melted; the Jewish kitchen loved more than the faith, eating together a form of prayer.
26
RE
NOEL PABILLO MARIANO THE PRICE OF SWEETNESS No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness. – Li Young Lee
The peaches on the counter have browned and bruised, tears in the skin have peeled back to expose flesh. This is the sugar reacting to air, this yellowed pulp turning gray, the sweetness eats it from the inside out. I roll my tongue over the hard candies of my teeth, pick at the crevasses and spaces between them trying to find the childhood of Hershey kisses and jawbreakers. Food was always the simplest reward to give because when you never had enough to eat, offering what you lack comes as second nature. It’s what you thought was right, McDonald’s after school for straight As, letting me dive through the paper bag for loose fries, the bag rustling like your hand shaking through my hair. Now, after all these years and doctor appointments, I’m baking a pie that we both can’t eat, tearing open peaches and smothering them in sugar before watching them brown in the heat encased in a shell that’s as fragile as we are.
DACTIONS
27
ANGIE MACRI SUMMER OF PERFECT FLOWERS The tomatoes leave themselves on my hands, from hair on stems and leaves, an alkyloid that burns of summer and perfect flowers. It thunders somewhere far away. Air expands and waves into rumble as rusted sounds of clouds colliding. I pray it will rain, an ample rain, to make amends to the ground already hard from heat. A benediction ends with three amens, of blessing, shining, peace. I sweep the stillness with the wide broom, moving tree shed of twigs and leaves so I can now walk barefoot in the afternoon’s pressure. Low and long, the storm, like tires on a gravel road in the distance, proceeds closer all along, the spread of dry earth rising behind.
28
RE
GRACE CAVALIERI TRAVELOGUE
Brushing Away Footprints To sleep before night. This is mine. Like walking into that part of you, the missing part of you with a face of stone, the fading side, the person in there. Searching my black bag. Where did it go? There is nothing outside that needs me here. This is the place I know best. Juliet’s Birthday Tea in Tirrenia. He admires her necklace. Later a brown hawk sits by the Arno. Then tea under a magnolia tree. Luminous green on the neck of pigeons. Night of the Equinox, warm wind out of Britain, hot days, cool nights, fallen pine cones, cheese, and grape leaves. Taking Out the Marks from Old Books Trees come behind the crown of his head, and flower the distance. He puts his elbow on the rail and leans in the direction of a young girl. A woman kisses a cross, a donkey jumps in celebration, a wrestler covers himself in wood ash, kneeling in honor of saints. Meltwaters freeze, dropping light on us – starfish catch urchins. After This, the London Countryside A full-throated day, a field of dry sunflowers. Sometimes what you want is not there. Near the walls of Pisa, sycamores turn brown, dropping bark. Steps of grass. A tunnel to Lucca. How long do you want to stay before you have to make your own happiness? Children Wait Outside, Playing on the Steps On the South Bank, the pale London sun leaves shadows. Walking backward, watch your childhood run ahead without looking back to see you. Extend your hand behind you, as if walking off stage. The last thing to hold light is the hand. The Tiger Bows Shadows become real. The grasses move in the distance. Three birds land on the statue. The ground is cracked and broken, but never mind. You, with the drapes pulled behind your eyes, can you hear me? DACTIONS
29
LAURA STOTT GANPATI GUEST HOUSE 1 Young man who wears a lime-green feather vest proudly, as he should, works the front desk. Most mornings he grabs a beebee gun and chases monkeys up the stairs where a large white cow is still standing all week at the corner, in a maze. It looks miserable. The young man, I imagine, is in love with the French woman. Men in orange, and some in white, Baba, or not, walk past and small boys peer at us from rooms above where we stand. Some children say this isn’t the way out. Balancing spices. Sweets. 2 Outside the guest house men lie out white sheets on bricks to dry in the sun, and dust, and ash. The man next door screams at the pigeons. We debate while we lie in bed if it is a man or a bird, and it turns out it is indeed a man screaming at the pigeons, it seems, to save himself from something. 3 The light is extraordinary when it rises over the Ganges. They march the dead as soon as they can, down the alleys all day, covered in tinsel. Chant the god’s name, but it is Krishna who is painted on the walls they pass. He plays his flute and are we all hypnotized? Beauty. Ladies man. A monkey gets away safely. A monkey may have stolen Robert’s book he borrowed from the German bakery about Krishna and Christ. We watch the kites. Another is cut down. Squint in the sun. Blow our noses. Now seeing a dead man. That’s unbelievable, he says. I nod. We wait. Order tea.
30
RE
Laura Stott
YES, MADAM No one follows us. It rains on the juice stands, shoe stands, bricks inscribed with Mother. There is less light and all day people hide in their colorful spaces. I imagine everyone has left Calcutta. I am leaving Calcutta. A woman and child under a tarp ask for money. Drivers are still, with plastic bags on their heads, Yes madam – rickshaw. Yes madam. Bangles. Silk. Evening moves like a slow dancer – this is not the Calcutta I’ve been to before. Taxi drivers start their lonely two-step, and the men who own souvenir shops clap their hands. Yes. A quiet chant. Prayer written on the walls. I am leaving and I refuse to dance. I sit in this café. Hot lemon, honey, ginger, maybe sweet lassi. Drink. Yes, madam.
DACTIONS
31
Laura Stott
JULY 27, GLACIER STATION 1 One morning in July. My friend and I, we start work laughing. In the helicopters, we are so unaware, wondering about the making of worlds, hours, minutes, the rest of our lives. 2 Meanwhile, there is a train and a river. Spaces that snake through the end of work and flight. One meadow and green-filled water. A mountain is voice and granite, forgiving of the ice that carved its beautiful edge. 3 After the helicopter crashed, my friend said dust from metal and glass that floated through the light – and amid blood and fear – was strangely beautiful. And there I was – safely landed in the other – watching a machine fall apart like a dream. 4 Fear is a strange thing. At the end, we step to the highway, eat our saved bread. We balance between two worlds of eat and pain. The Spruces in place – disaster or no disaster. Mountains stand up into the night, and between them, ice recedes. One road for miles and miles. So many travelers, waiting to be picked up and taken home or away from home. 32
RE
Laura Stott
5 Robert tells me about his dreams. Baby ravens attack his broken hand. Someone else needs a new face. We start to ask questions. We want to tell each other things we wouldn’t ever say. These valleys we move in. Black birds beating their feathers against our walls, wanting everything.
DACTIONS
33
SHANNON AMIDON LETTER TO THE MAINLAND For Phil
Dear maple Dear red vixen and pups in the low meadow Dear starlight after early frost Dear coyote circle under any sliver of moon Dear Columbia glittered with running salmon Dear blackberry stain at the corner of a loved mouth Dear cool lake water Dear spring fall winter Dear doe spotted fawn and antler-scraping buck Dear eyes full of old mountains hair full of colored leaves moss-filled hands But dear, if not for this island I could never say deeper than the Waipio Valley, darling, and brighter green I could never promise as wet as the Puna jungle and as joyful as spinner dolphins behind a wide wake Without Hawai`i I could not say You are my sturdy Ohi`a and I am your threadlike Lehua blossom that even Pele with her fire could not part Without Hamakua’s razored shoreline I could not promise as fierce as the endless Pacific, dearest, as she lifts her bright hem up black cliffs and as soft as the Hilo rain in her season
34
RE
SARA BARTLETT SATURDAY MORNING after Wallace Stevens
1 Opening slowly from a dream of sex, she spreads her hair across the wrinkled sheets and grips his headless pillow in a fist, watches noon shadows, like moon phases, saunter slowly across the bookcase. She hears the mower motor through the wall, as it etches straight lines across the lawn, trims each green blade down, almost to its root. The dream is nearly gone, but not the feel of pressing thighs against her own, her spine arched as if tightening against the end; she’s always tightening against the end of beautiful things cradled in night’s dark, like the strange uncurlings in the soil beneath the blades castrated this morning. 2 Why should she waste her day with boring chores? When did she first believe that happiness could be found in fresh fruit bowls and mopped floors? Can that elixir not be found in books, in the folds of a crumpled duvet, or whole bean coffee resting on the counter, waiting to be consumed calmly, unrushed? She has an odd craving to read some Joyce, and slips, naked, out of bed to take him from the shelf, then tiptoes to the kitchen to grind and brew, and smoke a cigarette out the backdoor screen, watch her exhaled air stream and hover over the neighbor’s yard where the dog is tied to a maple tree, biting at his hind legs furiously. 3 Venus, the offspring of heaven and sea, left men weak with afterlove while she lounged, eating grapes, perhaps watching the sun shift across their lethargic countenances, measuring her beauty in the weakness of their limbs, how long the sweat stayed wet upon their brow for centuries, until DACTIONS
35
Sara Bartlett
Eve, not innocent, stepped beyond her bounds and was fooled by a devilish serpent. Must we all now keep our gardens ordered? Or may we let them bloom and become wild? And can our hydrangeas and azaleas thrust their necks between the cracks in fences without the neighbors getting too jealous and asking that we trim them back a bit? 4 She says, “I am never content, even when I am alone, lying in the grass, because the shaved blades scratch against my back and the ants crawl in the crooks of my knees, and somewhere a lunch table must be set.” Not since childhood has she reposed so freely, watching the sun slink across the sky and counting phrases of mourning doves. There is no ancient ballad, no gospel sung in the choir loft by faithful women, no saxophone or piano notes played by any set of fingers that can match the pain of mourning doves at dawn’s first gray, or her desire for long grass doused in dew, tingling with the mourning dove’s sad moan. 5 She says, “But in my dreams I feel content because I do not know that I will wake.” Life is the curse of the dreaming sleeper, who feels the aching body’s buoyancy hoist it from its anesthetic slumber to the gasping surface of the morning’s tedium. It startles us with our choices: this lover, gone from bed to keep the grass, his scent still fresh on the pillowcase, while that other lover sinks further down into faceless mystery; or this house whose walls are straight and freshly papered, while a grandmother’s home whose walls are thick with baking bread and peppermint dissolves into a scentless, noiseless memory. 6 Why is there such short pleasure in the day? Must coffee grow bitter always? Should love not linger well into the afternoon, immediate, like the unruly lawn, 36
RE
Sara Bartlett
whose blades think only of stretching toward the heat, the origin of their small life, and not of any deeper devotion? Why shed the sheets to satisfy the false need to keep the house and yard in order? If she could only have his eyes focused on her legs and breasts the way he studies the tufts of grass and weeds ahead of him. Morning is the curse of the dreamer, who wakes to a nightmare of endless obligation to menial duty. 7 Lonely and anxious, women rest indoors, pour the last of the coffee into cups, ignore the dust and dishes in the sink, and settle on the sofa with a sigh to analyze the woes of Gabriel. Their men will enter musky and dirty, ripe with the scent of freshly shorn grass, the lawn half-mown, awkward and abandoned, their eyes wide with desire for something more fulfilling than smooth edges and straight lines. The neighborhood will be wild and unkempt, sidewalks overgrown with vines and crabgrass, gardens burgeoning with dandelions, and muddy footprints on white linoleum tracking from the back door to the bedroom. 8 She hears, breaking through her daydream, the sound of the motor cutting, the willing end of his perceived Saturday morning chore. We live in a neighborhood of dreams cut down, neatened, pruned, manicured, and washed, where women pushing baby carriages stop to chat with those crouching in gardens, and men mow early for afternoons free for baseball games on their plasma tvs. Here, the squirrels are flattened by the roadside and the possums hiss, cornered against a fence, and in the branches of the oaks and elms, in springtime, flocks of starlings settle to mate, their calls harsh and shrill, echoing off the whitewashed walls of empty houses.
DACTIONS
37
KELLI RUSSELL AGODON HOW TO SKETCH after a drawing by Stanislaus Gorski
Instead of her dress falling away, draw hollyhocks, pale as her skin, a ladder climbing her spine. As for him, think velvet, swarthy, the darkest lupine in the garden. And when he places his hand on her hip, sketch the stone on the fountain, the water rushing over the rocks. When she moves closer draw the butterfly bush, the longnecked flowers extending into the lawn. Draw what you can’t see, the dragonfly hovering over the pond, the bee in the center of the tulip with its roots reaching deep into earth.
38
RE
ANNE C. COON MINING AGAIN They’re mining again mining in Canadice mining in Hemlock mining in Hilton and Batavia mining the valleys between the lakes mining small towns with single traffic signs mining hard blue-marble eyes veins of lithe carnelian mining hip-stones of lime accordion pleats of ambered rib mining travertine skulls air fluting through sockets mining the youngest and strongest boys and brave girls excavating a bottomless lode of honor and sweet blind love of country mining trucks and tractors rust and sunshine mining the hills into chalcedony pits emptied of bliss carving out bouquets of coal spiked with mica mining for export mining for glory excavating eager heroes shoveling them out honed and cleaned and ready.
DACTIONS
39
ROBERT EVORY COMMEMORATION I will not be remembered as a stone, cold as heart ache, crushed or cut like garlic. I am a giver of another generation, but they will become, not a stone, but what I am, as they lie next to me; wife and child, a collection of stones. I will not be what I am now, nor will I be who I am when I die. I will be, for a short time, an accumulation in memory and heart, but I will not be the cold stone; I will be the sunken, the smooth, the delicate. Simple words from my made generation. I am the epitaph.
40
RE
RICHARD GARCIA MARIA THE FIGUREHEAD FROM LA MARIA CELESTE She held a bouquet of pilot fish each one for sale, a token for my lady if I had a lady. Being underwater she shed no tears that I could see, besides, no one cared since she was not the Virgin Mary. She was wrapped in seaweed which I Ionged to unravel from her body, her body mostly, well, all torso, but what a torso. Torso of the bronze Amazon. Torso of pallid Greek stone. We severed anchor at midnight, drifted out across the continental shelf. Lucky I wore my fisherman’s cap. Her hair billowed, reminding me of you. What you? How did you get in this poem? Perpetual you of memory, you, a glimpse in the turnstile of sunken subway, just below the buried concrete slabs where a stream that lost its name trickles under a rusty grate. Lucky me, the boys at the drowned public house raised their grog to us, fare-thee-well, me with the chaste torso leading me down into depths where even light would lose its way.
DACTIONS
41
RONALD WALLACE STRING THEORY I have to believe a Beethoven string quartet is not unlike the elliptical music of gossip: one violin excited to pass its small story along to the next violin and the next until, finally, come full circle, the whole conversation is changed. And I have to believe such music is at work at the deep heart of things, that under the protons and electrons, behind the bosons and quarks, with their bonds and strange attractors, these strings, these tiny vibrations, abuzz with their big ideas, are filling the universe with gossip, the unsung art of small talk that, not unlike busy-body Beethoven, keeps us forever together, even when everything’s flying apart.
42
RE
Ronald Wallace
EENUS! A baby boy is born, a star in someone’s firmament, a great white dwarf, a supernova in the all-but-wordless universe. And then, he has little or nothing to say for those long light-years of need except endlessly to complain or burble, until one day, naked in someone’s arms, on the high balcony of speech, Moon! he says, and Eenus! (pointing at the evening star), and Bird! and Boat! and People! And so it starts: the burden of language lightens, and, in fact, lifts him, and lifts us, up, the wide syllable of a smile adorning his papery face, his bright eyes italicized, two exclamation marks! And even when he’s got it wrong he’s somehow got it right, as wordstruck with excitement he counts out his small cosmology of Moon! and Bird! and People! And pointing to the tiny nubbin rising up between his legs in all its planetary wonder: Eenus!
DACTIONS
43
BILL CARPENTER LUKE I’m driving back to the McDowell Colony over the night roads of New Hampshire: Route Ten from Hanover to Newport, turn right at Goshen on route Thirty-one, my little Sube straining up Lovewell Mountain, lights puncturing fog and snow at the same time, road lost, yellow line faded because they don’t have taxes in New Hampshire: Live Free or Die. I crest a hill and there’s a dog, dead, big German Shepherd, snow on his fur, dog blood frozen on the road. I stop the car. A man comes out of his house through the snowy fog: he’s old, he’s in long underwear, he’s weeping, he says, “You killed him, mister, you take him away.” I tie a rope from my bumper to the dog’s neck. “Don’t drag him,” the man says. “His name was Luke.” I haul the carcass into the rear seat and drive, blood on my clothes, blood on my brand-new car, searching the radio but there’s nothing but NPR: Garrison Keillor reading from Robert Frost, He will not mind my stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow. Bullshit, I say to Luke. He will. He’ll call the New Hampshire State Police. What does Frost know? He is as dead as you are. I stop next to some snowy woods to throw Luke out, but I can’t do it. I am divorced. My kids are off at school. He’s all I’ve got. I turn south on 202 and reach McDowell but there’s no one up, a light in just one studio, somebody writing late. It’s snowing again. It’s cold. I open the rear door and pick Luke up, but he seems lighter, he feels warm, I open his chest up like a winter coat. I put it on, I pull his back over my shoulders, big Shepherd head over my own. I am amazed that the eyes work, the nose breathes, the mouth opens when I move my lips. I walk to the lighted window and look in. He’s in there with his Pepsi and his computer, trying to write a poem but he can’t get the last line, and he can’t sleep. I rub my nose against his window. I want to play, I want him out here, I want a stick thrown over the wet snow. I pull the fur tighter, I rub a paw over the pane, but he won’t hear. He lights up a cigar, what does he care, he’s got the photos of his ex-wife, his kids, why would he need a dog? It feels like time to get down on all fours and find some action, but the only light comes from the blind moon, 44
RE
Bill Carpenter
blind smell of snow, woodsmoke and porcupine, somewhere a distant horse, giving his harness bells a shake. Maybe the cooks have started breakfast: smell of brown sugar, strawberries, French toast, then something bitter, maybe one of the visual artists coming into heat, I’m not quite sure. It’s fun. I frisk my tail. I follow my nose and run.
DACTIONS
45
DAVID WAGONER PIG DANCE This pig would rather not even think about it, would rather just stand still four-square or flop down gradually on one side or the other and let whatever wants to happen happen to an old sow who has seen far better days go by, some slowly, and some much, much more slowly, who has never really supposed her hind trotters could put her up to this, though she was born believing in the power of firm hams and the even more surprising resiliency and unforeseeable twistiness of her tail whose subtly tufted end knows all about misdirection, and just look – her snout can be pointed up at the clear sky and be held there, kept held there while all the rest of her inimitable figure rises to the vertical and sways and swivels just long enough to wriggle around and prove she can do whatever she wants to for a sweet while, at least, can trot around and about and make music out of mud.
46
RE
SCOTT POOLE A LITTLE POEM IN CELEBRATION OF NOTHING Nothing traumatic happened today, nothing interesting either. I had some coffee. I looked at the leaves for awhile. Everyone was off working. My hands ran down the glass and made some streaks. I went and found the glass cleaner, spritzed down the windows and the glass was clean. Then I marked it up again. Then I spritzed it again and cleaned it again. Then I palmed it again. This went on for about an hour . . . A bird flew across the sky. Not that this is a unique occurrence. Not that I’m the only one who’s ever noticed this. Then I noticed there were two people fucking in the backyard. They were energetic in their motions, animals on the edges of time, performing the rituals from which they were born. There wasn’t anyone fucking in the backyard. I just made that up. There was some grass growing though. “How infinitely pleasing this is,” Whitman would say. Well, I’m not so sure. I’ll have to look that up. It’s getting dark now and it’s quiet. The calm is its own castle. Did Rilke say that? Maybe. I think I’m going to lie and say now +I made a braunschweiger sandwich, even though I hate braunschweiger.
DACTIONS
47
Scott Poole
YOU WOULD BE SURPRISED HOW GOOD IT FEELS TO DIE I was buried yesterday. Yes, maybe I should have been more careful. I was taking a stroll through the graveyard and this coffin was just nestled there in the ground and you know it was one of those sleepy fall days where the sun is soft and slants in from the right on a cool carpet of air. Maybe it’s those leaves, the shuffling through the graveyard, that whispering always turns me into a baby, says just take a nap here before dinner time. Hey, I can’t help it if somebody left the lid off. You can’t leave this fluffy softness just lying around in a muddy field of stone stumps. I’d been writing poems all day and trying to come up with new metaphors for clouds, so many metaphors that it felt like each cloud was sticking a thousand white asses at me. And you’d be surprised how comfy a coffin is. Some dead people really have it made. I imagined this is how lunchmeat feels, maybe something like a slice of smoked turkey, in between two pieces of soft white bread. I don’t know how long I was there but I woke up in the dark trying to roll over. I’m not that stupid. I had my cell phone. I knew where I was at. You’d be amazed what great reception the dead get. Hi honey, it’s me. Yes, I’m at Lone Fir. Oh not again, she always says.
48
RE
Scott Poole
Yep, I’m calling from the grave. It’s the fresh dirt by the big oak near the road. Call me back if you can’t find it. And then I wait and the best part is always the wait, snuggled inside the dark, listening for the shovel taps, knowing those that love you are on their way to bring you back.
DACTIONS
49
Scott Poole
WHY DO YOU WANT TO WORK HERE? Well, I was just up above, not thinking of much flying overhead in my puttering single-engine Piper Cub, enjoying a temporary airy existence of light, silence, and unlimited hope bound only by fluffy clouds, horizon, and the occasional magnificent mountain peak, when my engine suddenly burst into flames. That’s when I first became intrigued by the work of your company, well, more specifically the largely unobstructed orange color of your company’s roof. Despite dragging a tremendous column of black smoke I spiraled down from ten thousand feet in a somewhat controlled gyre before coming to the softest kiss of an emergency landing over a Fulfillment Department that you’ve ever seen. It was such a beautiful touchdown that I was able to walk down your backstairs, through receiving, past packing, and right into the velvety cubic walls of your human resources office without so much as a single protest. It’s that kind of welcoming attitude that I can really appreciate in a company that may or may not have fire insurance. May I put my scarf and goggles on your desk? Champagne?
50
RE
ROB CARNEY SOMETIMES IT ISN’T THE SAME OLD STORY You could understand him misunderstanding, digging such careful holes with his shovel, sifting in spoonfuls of birdseed – an honest mistake. You could half-understand how he stubbornly finished, how he aimed his back at everyone laughing and patted the dirt down gently with his hands. But to greet each day with his watering can, to go on as if he were a gardener, as if he believed . . . finally someone stomped all the green in his yard, and that should’ve been the end of that. Certainty feels like a flag when you fly it. It snaps in the wind and makes the sound of your own good name, of your own high opinion; it’s the opposite of birds. And it was birds that he was growing, after all – cardinals, robins, chickadees, starlings . . . his seedlings stood up again, unfurled their branches, all of them loaded not with blossoms but with song. That was the season people re-learned amazement, followed by the autumn when they re-learned amazement again: One morning he went ’round his yard on a ladder. He paid no attention to everyone clapping. Just picked each bird and released it into the sky.
DACTIONS
51
& POETICS
“At the Corner” by Meghan Wiemer
A Question of Aesthetics: Investigating the Lyric As part of continuing search into the aesthetics of poetry, Redactions Poetry & Poetics asked poets across America to respond to the following questions: “What happened to the lyrical poem in contemporary American poetry? Why is it disappearing? How has the lyric lost its prominence?” Below are the responses. *** Dear Tom, Not to answer off the cuff, but . . . I could give a different answer almost every day to your questions. This is today’s. And the first (and last) thing I’d do is question your questions – question their assumptions. I don’t think the lyric is, or can be, in any danger in contemporary American poetry or any other poetry. The lyric is the basic mode of poetic composition – it’s the one deepest in our culture and all cultures – it’s at the heart of poetic impulse. Let me give a term for it that sounds academic but is nevertheless effective because it puts the emphasis on the right places: The lyric is “affectiveexpressive” and is the basic form of poetry. The term “affective-expressive” is (as far as I know) coined by Earl Miner and used in his book Cross-Cultural Poetics. Miner is looking at certain cultures that have “foundational documents” that claim what the essence of poetry is (and sadly, Western culture doesn’t have such a founding and orienting document). He notes that both Chinese culture and Japanese culture have such documents – brief statements early in the historical game that say what the nature of poetry is, and which subsequent poets and critics refer constantly to, either in agreement or rebellion. In China and Japan both these documents stress the connection between individual feeling and the world that surrounds the self, how poetry is an expression of what builds up inside us, or is a human response (song) to the beauty and expression that the natural world manifests (frogs and birds and so forth). Both documents stress what is central to the lyric: interaction of subjective human feelings and the world of others and nature that surround the self. Whether the poem results from a build-up of emotion until it erupts as song or comes out of an emotional response to some event, person, or situation in the world doesn’t much matter. Fact is: people have feelings and emotions, and these have to be integrated into the project of creating meanings. Poems are the basic form of linguistic and imaginative meaning making, far more primal than philosophy or ideas and more intimate than religion’s efforts to make sense of it all. Plus, poem-making gives power and purpose to the individual (the poet) as he or she fashions language into meaning. As I say, we in the West don’t have such a foundational document. We have Plato’s great attack on poetry – he says it is “irrational” and dangerously promotes “pleasure and pain rather than reason.” And we have Aristotle’s defense of poetry/tragedy by way of mimesis or imitation. But imitation isn’t what the lyric is about: the lyric is about Expression of Feelings (affect) – and the project of shaping those feelings into meaning as they interact with the world. It seems to me it’s too damned bad we don’t have a foundational document for the lyric – closest we get (I think) is Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” (1799), which happens with the upsurge of lyric in Romanticism, but happens pretty late in the game as far as Western attitudes toward poetry are concerned. 54
RE
Investigating the Lyric
I don’t mean to be as abstract as the above sounds, but what I’m trying to say is that lyric poetry can’t vanish (after all, it always persists, in a diluted form, in popular song and “rock n’ roll,” which, as the song notes, is “here to stay / will never die”). What your questions imply is not that the lyric is “disappearing” but that it may be out of fashion for the moment. But with whom? With editors, young poets, readers? Could be. Bad news if this is so, but is it? I don’t know. People/poets waste a lot of time worrying about fashion. One thing about fashion – it’s going to change. And keep changing. And poets change, too, following fashions and trends and trying their best to be hip and relevant or whatever. But people’s basic issues and emotions don’t change. As the song from Casablanca says “A kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh / the fundamental things apply / as time goes by . . .”. No evidence that we’ve evolved away from our basic and universal emotions or from the need to integrate them into meanings. And what better method than the lyric poem? What more intimate and authentic testimony than from a lyric poet? What’s more persuasive than that voice talking to us, quietly or passionately, but from a distance proportional to the human: not needing to raise the voice and shout because quite close. All best, Greg Orr – GREGORY ORR is author of How Beautiful the Beloved (Copper Canyon P, 2009), which is a booklength lyric sequence that continues the arc of the book that preceded it, Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved (Copper Canyon P, 2005). *** Headline: Caged Poem Fed on Junk Food Karl Shapiro’s prose poem, “The Dirty Word,” is a cautionary tale of how the overuse of taboo words domesticates them and leaches their power: “The Dirty Word is dying of popcorn.” Something like that has befallen the lyric poem. Exquisite lyric poems appear in print every day, of course. Yet they keep bad company and thus accrue guilt by association. If you go to many poetry readings, you know the feeling of drifting away from an unvaried litany of lyric poems. How relieved you are when a dramatic monologue (a.k.a., “persona poem”) or a narrative poem breaks the monotony. And how fresh the next lyric poem sounds when it immediately follows such respite. A string of lyric poems seems especially tiresome if all are confessional poems. Confessional poems are like the little girl with the curl on her forehead: When they are good, they are very, very good; but when they are bad, they are horrid. Too much I, I, I leaves little room for us or them or the you who isn’t a thinly veiled I. Imagine an editor reading unvaried stacks of lyric poem submissions, too many of them sporting a self-absorbed I whose subtext seems to be, “See how sensitive I am to suffer so well myself or to vicariously suffer through others?” Or, “See how I can take still another object and turn it into a many-faceted mirror of my intelligence and learning?” Keep in mind that I am not speaking of all lyric poems. I’m warning of the mass effect of too, too many of them dominating a journal, book, or poetry reading. When we need DACTIONS
55
Investigating the Lyric
a break from a long parade of lyrical poems, we turn to those in which the I is absent or in which the persona is anything but the same ol’ lyrical I. The lyric poem might fade in prominence for a time, but it always comes back strong and refreshed. It has dominated verse since the Romantic movement. Once a subgenre of poetry, “dramatic poesy” became drama, leaving behind its shorter cousin, the dramatic monologue. The printing press allowed fiction to abandon verse (where form served as a mnemonic device) and grow longer and more independent. So it is no wonder that the lyric poem, with so long a history in Western culture, stepped forward and filled the empty seats. If you write predominantly lyric poems, keep at it. But consider reading Mary Kinzie’s The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose (U of Chicago P, 1993), especially the first chapters: “The Rhapsodic Fallacy” and “Three Essays on Confession.” If you find yourself smarting as you read, remember the corollary concept to “if the shoe fits”: if the shoe pinches, you’re certainly wearing it. Those chapters might get you to gather your gaggle of poems before you to figure out which are the wild, exquisite birds to send out and which are the overfed and ailing fowl indistinguishable from the rest of any flock. – CAROLYN MOORE’s three chapbooks pending publication in 2009 all won their respective competitions from The Refined Savage Press, Bread and Lightning (cowinner), and Southern Hum Press. *** I’ll look at the question from the perspective of an editor/publisher. The main reason that we don’t publish a lot of lyric poetry is because we don’t see a lot of lyric poetry submitted. What little lyric poetry that is submitted usually comes from either of two places: translations of long dead poets or translations of still living poets. In the upcoming issue of Burnside Review, of the four to five poems I’d consider to be lyric, two are translations of the dead Italian poet Camillo Sbabaro, and another is from a poet living in Brazil. (I’m saying that the lyric seems to be more alive outside the borders of this country.) We wish we saw more of it. We’ve been asking for it from the start of our journal five years ago. I suppose that American editors themselves are largely responsible for this. The trend became to publish more narrative/confessional poetry. Readers recognized this and, hoping to find their own work within the very same pages, wrote in a similar style to up their chances. Ultimately, habits become hard to break. – SID MILLER is the founding editor of the Portland-based literary journal Burnside Review. His own work has appeared widely. His first two full-length books, Nixon on the Piano (David Robert B, 2009) and Dot-to-Dot, Oregon (Ooligan Press, 2009). *** I do not find that the lyrical poem is disappearing in America. Instead I think that poetry as a whole is undergoing a transformation where genres are being broken. The narrative poem and the lyrical poem can come together where it is not necessarily one more than the other – but instead this new form of poetics. There are prose poems that can be 56
RE
Investigating the Lyric
broken down to lines which hold lyrical quality. There are language poems that play with sound so well that it evokes the same sense of musicality. No matter what the name or form, as long as poetry does the essentials, such as evoke emotion, give meaning, and most of all say something – then poetry in all forms will always remain lyrical. – NOEL PABILLO MARIANO is the nonfiction editor for Circumlocution Literary. *** Without Belief, There Is No Lyric One argues passionately, convincingly, if only one believes in something, someone fully. The lyric poem, as a record of that belief and desire, is no exception. Linda Gregerson says as much in her essay “Rhetorical Contract in the Lyric Poem”: [. . .] poetry, like public speaking, has a suasive agenda: the poem may affect the contours of solitary meditation or unfiltered mimesis, the recklessness of outburst or the abstraction of music, but it always also seeks to convince, or coerce, or seduce a reader; it is never disinterested, never pure; it has designs on the one who listens or reads. The idealist in me wants to rail against Gregerson’s seeming cynicism. Goes something like this: Lyrics are pure, unfiltered renderings of beauty and truth . . . so forth and so on. But the realist in me must acknowledge just how right Gregerson is. The lyric is an argument, a persuasive gesture. Viewed in this light, the lyric, not unlike the elegy, is all about me and what that me has in store for you. The question before us is why the lyric may be disappearing? But how about how it left, or how we forgot about it? If the lyric is indeed disappearing, perhaps we need to look toward realities outside the realms of poetry, literature, and aesthetics. Perhaps we need to look toward what has happened to our country politically, militarily, and economically over the past eight years. Certainly, George W. Bush’s administrations were not the first administrations to lie, invade sovereign nations, and catalyze economic decline on a grand scale. (At least Nixon resigned, thereby passively and only marginally restoring some faith in government.) But Bush’s administrations are the latest to be the worst in America’s History, and history may very well prove that claim to be true. Any organization that brazenly and arrogantly values the ends over the means will, of course, damage – perhaps irrevocably – one’s belief in that organization. We were a skeptical culture before September 11, 2001 (which was the true beginning of the first Bush Administration), but Colin Powell’s 2003 United Nations fiasco, the invasion of Iraq, the sudden “disappearance” of Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and the re-election of Bush in 2004 perhaps all coalesced behind our collective eyes; and so as a nation some (most?) of us sighed a collective sigh of disbelief, disappointment, and despair. DACTIONS
57
Investigating the Lyric
Such a breach of belief trickles its way down to our view and creation of poetry. Perhaps, now in 2009, with a new leader, a new tenor, new agendas – some of our belief and hope restored – the lyric may once again resume its appropriate and necessary presence. – ALEXANDER LONG’s first two books are Vigil (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2006) and Light Here, Light There (C & R Press, 2009). *** 180,000 Miles The lyric hasn’t completely disappeared – if what we mean by lyric is the impulse towards song. The poems Charles Wright chose for Best American Poems 2008 include any number, some obvious by the titles: Tom Andrews’s “Evening Song,” John Ashbery’s “Pavane pour Helen Twelvetress,” and Peter Everwine’s “Aubade in Autumn.” Then there are those not so evident by title: Brenda Hillman’s ode “Phone Booth,” Paul Muldoon’s pantoum “The Water Cooler,” Erica Dawson’s chant royal “Parallax,” James Galvin’s song of Hurricane Katrina, Cornelius Eady’s ode to “Handymen” and Frank Bidart’s sestina “If See No End In Is.” Others allude to lyrics and lyricists: Moria Egan’s “Millay Goes Down,” Bob Hicok’s “O my pa-pa,” Lee Upton’s “Thomas Hardy,” W. S. Merwin’s “A Letter to Su Tung P’o.” At least half of the poems, in one way or other, pay tribute to the lyrical impulse. Of course, one might argue that this particular volume of Best American Poems fell victim to Charles Wright’s ravenous taste for song, and he himself asks in his introduction, “Does anyone pay any attention to vehicle and tenor anymore?” But there the poems are poems with the lyrical impulse culled from the best-known American literary journals. Lyrics are still being published. If, though, we mean by lyric rhymed and metered verse, or even more or less rhymed and metered verse, then no. That has become the property of popular song – hip hop, country and western, rock and roll, rap, Goth metallic – and that may be one reason we don’t see that sort of lyric in more “literary” journals. In fact, I often tell my beginning creative writing students, “No rhyming!” because, as we all know, English is a rhymepoor language and most of the rhymes are trite. They bite. Few of my college students are up to the curious heroics of an Ogden Nash. It may be too, as one Romantic lyricist said, “The world is too much with us.” We don’t spend enough time in the natural world to remove ourselves from that “getting and spending” that lay waste our lyric powers. Not many poets can, as Coleridge reports Wordsworth did, walk 180,000 miles in our lives, footing out our iambs. A treadmill keeps the weight off, but it doesn’t lead us to exclaim about the skylark singing earth’s diurnal course. Now that I have retired from my 60-70 hour week of teaching high school English with its 54 mile commute, I walk more – four miles a day – and I write more lyrics – 58
RE
Investigating the Lyric
traditional and otherwise. Perhaps we have to live outdoors, lyric’s little cottage. Perhaps, it’s kinetic. We have to walk the rhythms. Perhaps most of us work so hard to feed our poetry addictions we have little leisure left for song. We are so tired we can’t pick up our feet or our pipes. – LOIS MARIE HARROD’s book of lyric poems, Firmament (Finishing Line P), was released in 2008. Her ninth book, Furniture, won the 2008 Grayson Poetry Award. *** I have always been a fan of the lyric poem and hope that it is not disappearing but is rather hiding in private journals and shoe boxes, waiting for a time when it is again appreciated for its music and vulnerability. – NICELLE CHRISTINE DAVIS teaches composition at Antelope Valley College. *** How about nothing; the lyric is alive and well and living in poetry magazines, such as Tiferet, Poetry International, Christianity & Literature, Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review, The Paterson Poetry Review, Windhover; anthologies, such as Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes (C&R Press), Beloved on the Earth (Holy Cow! P), Eating the Pure Light (Backwaters P); and various internet journals, and all of this is just off the top of my head, in places where I’ve recently published. The lyric has only lost its prominence if you rule out poems about the heart, love and death, love songs, and elegies. But that is the heart of poetry. Sure, I know that Gerald Stern has called the lyric “a small poem where nothing happens” (while he continues to write and publish wonderful ones), but I think what we’re seeing right now is the lyric used in new ways, such as the lyric-narrative (lyric poems that act in a storytelling fashion) in books or chapbooks (I have one, The White Poems, from Barnwood). Or the lyric that’s evolved and become a new hybrid: the political lyric, the eco-lyric, the spiritual lyric. Maybe ours is a more narrative age, or maybe the lyric is like a bird that seems to be on the edge of extinction, but really is there, in the brambles and thickets and hedgerows; you just have to know where to look. – BARBARA CROOKER has published eleven chapbooks and two full-length books: Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize, and Line Dance, also from Word Press. ***
DACTIONS
59
Investigating the Lyric
The lyric is hard to identify these days and like types of music, cross-overs in art, it seems alienated by the anonymous strength of language experiments where poetry presents itself as a self-averting genre of indirection. But styles come and go like Eliot’s women, like Shakespeare’s men and women in “The Seven Ages of Man”: They have their exits and entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts. The “one man” is like Kafka’s idea of truth, alive and “therefore has a lively changing face,” even if that face feels like it is disappearing. Nothing in culture ever really disappears, certainly not our primitive attraction to language that woos us with its music, its everlasting present-tense longing, even its elegiac “mortal metric” (McHugh). Language begins in the body, is Eros, a part of desire, and always changing, still concocts an alchemical range of surprise. It resides in the mouth, the ribcage, groin, and nests in the back of the neck, carries the pirate ship of the intellect out to sea. It goes pearling in the muddy oyster darkness of who we are. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas are still ghosting their lyric influence in the far regions of contemporary poetry, whether they are acknowledged or not. Because of the emotive effect of the lyric poem, the lyric seems to have a far more lasting effect on us than the consciousness-wrangle welts left on our experience of, say, more intellectonly-motivated, language-based poetry. That’s why it’s hard to imagine it disappearing altogether. I’m all for whatever happens as styles collide, because the generative force of change also has a way of resurrecting what doesn’t change. A good example of this resides in the use of popular expressions. Shakespeare’s “foot-loose and fancy-free” still exists alongside the hip-hop inspired “I’m down with that.” What does it all do, then? It helps us see better, yes, in that darkness of who we are, so language is also an act of seeing, whether headlong or averted. Heidegger says it well: “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of the man.” And there we kneel on the deck of splinters and loose nails, Captain O Captain! – ELENA KARINA BYRNE’s forthcoming books include This Fable Language (poetry), Voyeur Hour (art/poetry), and Beautiful Insignificance (essays). *** Generally, I disagree with the premise of the question, namely that the lyrical poem is disappearing in American Poetry. I read a good deal of literary journals, and the lyric still seems to be the dominant mode as it has been for many, many years. And that includes a lot of the prose poems and prose poem journals. I think of one of the preeminent prose poets in the U.S., Gary Young, and all of his work is lyric, though occasionally mixed with a bit of narrative as many lyrics are and have always been – especially No Other Life, which won the William Carlos Williams Award from the PSA, and his newest book Pleasure. Light Here, Light There, a book of unique prose poems by Alexander Long (C&R Press, 2009) is intensely lyrical, just out from a new press run by young poets. My most recent book – Modern History: Prose Poems 19872007 – is a sustained lyric movement (he said modestly). But of course the prose poem 60
RE
Investigating the Lyric
is commodious and admits many strategies. To me, the lyric seems alive and well in prose poems as well as in lined poetry. In Chicano/Latino(a) poetry, the lyric is still the main mode. Juan Felipe Herrera and I are putting together a New Selected Poems of our friend Luis Omar Salinas who died in late 2008, and from his first in the late 1960s to his last Elegy for Desire in 2005, Salinas, senior Chicano poet, was a lyric poet. And I pick up a first book just out from Bi Lingual Review Press, The Date Fruit Elegies, by John Olivares Espinoza, and find a marvelous collection of lyric poems. And an anthology just out, Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes, is lyric start to finish. If there is a problem perceived with the traditional dominance of the lyric poem, I see it having a political base. The ranks of the theory-driven poets, believing they have discovered new territory, are pushing hard to find space for their efforts. One way to recognition is to oppose what precedes you. There was a movement a while back against “closure” in poems, and then of course the theory that there is no meaning anyway. It seems to me that theory says, “It is all sound and fury; however, I will explain it to you, along with the tangential and motivating theories.” Some inward, arbitrary, and inaccessible work is taking up a little more space in journals, and then there are magazines devoted entirely to language poetry in which you cannot locate anything as out-dated as a complete sentence. Let them have all they can find under the sun, as a better poet than I once said. The sincere, fresh, accessible, and well-made poem of a poet’s emotion will always anchor poetry, in my view. Epic, elegy, narrative, et al, all will come and go, make their mark, but finally most are interested in what a poet’s experience earns him/her responding to the rush of time, and that certainly goes far beyond the opaque surfaces of a poem. This is your life, to make sense of, or not – what the most skillful poets have to say in responding to suffering, compassion, mortality, and our short stay on the planet before the question of metaphysics is answered one way or the other for each and every one of us is the lyric point. – CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently, Modern History: Prose Poems 1987-2007 (Tupelo P, 2008). *** – What happened to the lyrical poem in contemporary American poetry? The lyric poem is an evolving thing. It always has been an evolving thing – from its earliest beginnings in tribal ritual (as I imagine) to the present with its vital, wild variety. Your question suggests that something is wrong or in fact that the lyric has passed its expiration date. I don’t see it that way. Nor do I necessarily wish that the lyric (is it singular?) be for everybody, only that it is able to be about everybody. That is, I don’t imagine or want the audience for lyric poetry to be all-inclusive. Neither is ballet’s, not even PBS’s. I do hope lyric poetry is capable of representing very many kinds of experience and people – not merely the self-representing impulses of the poet, but also of people not interested in or in the position of writing themselves. DACTIONS
61
Investigating the Lyric
I do agree, with this question, that things have “happened” to affect the lyric. Look at the radical change from the Greek lyric to the Roman – from the heightened, highly impersonal Pindaric ode to the relatively intimate and daily ode of Horace. Something surely happened then. What else? The downfall of the Roman Empire changed the lyric – as did the Dark Ages, the printing press, Petrarch and Shakespeare and every other great and good poet. The lyric poem is a living, fluid thing, shifting through time with us, changing as we change. What have been some recent causes for the change in the lyric? TV and the popular media, post-structuralism and the supposed erasure of genre, the dimwittedness and petty self-importance of university politics, capitalism and socialism and every other political -ism, war war war, the novel, the newspaper, country music and hip-hop, and a million more things have happened, and in turn, as we might hope, the lyric has evolved, as it has always evolved, as every single construction and artifice and faith of the human being has evolved and will evolve. The lyric at the present provides a representation of our culture with its diversities and coherences, its rage for song and its hunger for exploration. Today’s lyric looks like us. Like us, the lyric does not exist in a vacuum outside the cultural mêlée. – Why is it disappearing? I did not get this memo. The lyric is not disappearing. Or maybe more accurately, it is disappearing only as slowly and just as quickly as we are disappearing. If you mean, why is the old-fashioned lyric disappearing, then the answer is simple: The old-fashioned lyric is disappearing just like hoop skirts and human sacrifice. The lyric is a dynamic human creation, changing with us through time, adapting to new media and technologies, and retaining the necessary interiority of our sense of selves. And our sense of selves changes, too. – How has the lyric lost its prominence? This is an interesting question. Was it prominent? For whom? Well-educated leisureclass males? Or are you referring to its prominence among literary genres? Certainly our era favors prose and narrative, genres that typically rise during conservative and/or rationalist times. Yet even saying this, I find much more actual experiment and growth in the lyric, even now, than I do in the novel or the story. Alas, the subgenres of prose and narrative that currently find prominence are such dreary things as the memoir, literature’s version of the talk show. But another answer. Simply, we have available so many more types of linguistic and artistic expression – not merely the epic, the play, the poem-song, the oration. The genres divide and subdivide: the epic to the tale to the romance to the novel to the short story to the minimalist narrative to flash-fiction – and this is only one branching-off of one limb into one twig. Each further division results in a form that provides a more specialized function for a more demanding audience. But we continue to need the urgency and patience, the interiority and social inherence, the intensity and formal invention of the lyric poem. 62
RE
Investigating the Lyric
Ultimately we will measure a poem’s importance not by its day-by-day popularity but by its year-into-decade staying power. How that poem will “stay” will also change: from pen to magazine to book to internet to – what? Yet the lyric is capable of capturing and creating types of human experience and expression that no other type of language can accomplish. Here are just a few of the many very new studies of these issues. These books do not suggest that the lyric is dead. History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture by Ira Sadoff. The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry by Adam Kirsch. Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry by Rosanna Warren. One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America by Dan Chiasson. Why Poetry Matters by Jay Parini. Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems by John Felstiner. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words by Mutlu Blasing. These are a small sampling of critical books on the lyric, all to have appeared in the past year or so. – DAVID BAKER’s latest books are Never-Ending Birds (poems, W. W. Norton, 2009) and Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (edited with Ann Townsend, Graywolf, 2007). ***
DACTIONS
63
MARILYN KRYSL SPIRITUAL PILGRIMAGE: ON KAREN SWENSON’S A PILGRIM INTO SILENCE The act of pilgrimage arises from spiritual awe, and it may also arise from the longing to experience awe. In either case the attitude of the pilgrim is one of humility, a quality associated with maturity. Humility is earned over time, and it is, I would argue, the stance of the wise and seasoned among us. “In a youth-addicted culture,” Alicia Ostriker has written, “it is a pleasure to read the work of grown women,” and Swenson is one of these women who have bathed in earned humility’s waters. Poem after poem in this collection showcases portraits of such grown women, including Swenson’s mother, close friends both here and abroad, and her own courageously revealing self-portraits. The first section focuses on Swenson’s life “pilgrimages” in her native country. In several poems she describes herself at an earlier stage, and re-inhabits the pain of that instance with compassionate insight. In “Thanksgiving,” her son knew her not as slaps and yells, but the mother, muffled in a stale swaddle of beer, who appearing present, was untouchable, a figment of the bottle’s imagination. Swenson is expert at the quick, telling strokes of the thumbnail sketch. In another poem experience primes her to recognize a woman at the opera as “an unaccompanied decomposition / conducted by gin through scene after scene.” Swenson is the author of five previous collections, including A Daughter’s Latitude: New and Selected Poems, in which pilgrimage away from America into Asia mirrors a similar pilgrimage from her past into a mature woman’s wisdom. Her talent for the succinct, summary epigram also appears in the subsequent three sections of the book (“At Mother Teresa’s in Calcutta,” “Tibet,” and “Home”), which treat Swenson’s annual pilgrimages abroad. The book’s longest poem, “Tashi, 1936-2002,” is one of the most moving I’ve read about China’s Cultural Revolution and its takeover of Tibet. The poem describes their long friendship. “The cadre yanks the pearls from her neck, smiles” is the first line. Later Tashi is imprisoned in a knitting factory, ten women shut in a room, their wailing children, shut out, eat gutter scraps . . . and her husband is sentenced to starvation and hoeing “potatoes, eyes sharp for / a gulp of worm, a lizard feast.” The husband is beaten for eating the lizard. Friendships across national borders which continue through a lifetime are noteworthy because they suggest the power of respectful, loving cooperation in spite of political, social, and cultural differences. Such friendships feed the soul, and so does the example of another’s courage. So it’s no surprise that at Mother Teresa’s hospice for the destitute and dying 64
RE
Marilyn Krysl
in Calcutta, Swenson feels less pity for suffering beings than admiration of their persevering against formidable odds. Another of Swenson’s sharp images conveys her respect for the sheer willfulness of life – a blind and cornered cat slashing at Death’s dogs. Swenson also articulates the ambivalent tradeoff between the nuns at the hospice, which gives free care to the destitute and dying, and the Catholic establishment. The nuns’ ministering benefits the suffering, but the nuns themselves are repaid, as it were, by the Catholic church’s support. Noting this sort of paradox is another of Swenson’s trademarks, as in “Street Scene” set on 54th Street in New York where a young woman walking past the narrator of the poem (think pilgrimage) suddenly begins to weep: Eyes averted, I pass, see beyond her his straight back, a furled umbrella cased in a suit without a sigh. But I must not judge. Perhaps he’s had an escape from need or greed or a mind sweet and silly as Jell-O. It was just the collapse, the suddenness of her sorrow. This is a sonnet, a form Swenson favors, one that fits her talent for the summary observation in a final, witty couplet. In another poem she observes teenagers at a Food Court in Tehran, and concludes: The essence of adolescence is invariably heathen And totally in opposition to religion and reason. She’s perceived a universal characteristic of the human race, and pronounced upon it with confident urbanity. How I like the assonance and consonance in those two lines – and the pentameter rhythm, and the end line rhyme. And Swenson’s aplomb – an aplomb tempered by earned humility. To enact humility by going on pilgrimage is to experience that humility in the material world of one’s own body. “Always I’ve thought it would / be like this,” Swenson writes in the title poem, “naked rock sharp under sun, / wind singing, sprung steel of a rapier / in my ears.” A Pilgrim Into Silence renders the life of a grown woman at ease with her singleness, whose earned confidence richly blesses her solitary wandering through our sometimes generous world.
Swenson, Karen. A Pilgrim into Silence. Rochester, NY: Tiger Bark P, 2008.
DACTIONS
65
DONNA MARBACH ON YU-HAN CHAO’S WE GROW OLD: FIFTY-THREE CHINESE LOVE POEMS
We Grow Old, by Yu-Han Chao, is a collection of prose poems, and I am not a fan of prose poetry. I tend to view it as a literary oxymoron – more prose than poetry, more talk than song. For the most part, its writers seem to have abandoned not merely poetry’s line but all its other conventions as well. I opened Chao’s book with my feet planted and my red pencil drawn. Three pages later, I was completely disarmed. While expecting the literary equivalent of Jackson Pollack, I found instead work that is more reminiscent of the delicate brush paintings of Wang Shenyong. Chao’s poems are lyrical, delicate, and packed with striking images, such as those in her poem “There’s a Myth”: There’s a myth that if you plant a tree from seed and leap over it every single day, in ten years, when your tree is as tall as you are or taller, you will still be able to jump over it. That’s levitation. In some ways, I believe that. One can sometimes transcend the supposed constraints of the human body, the fictional limit of age. Just like a dead man’s beard can continue growing and a doll’s hair, taken from a dead woman’s head, defies the rule that disembodied hair should not continue to grow. This small piece combines Chinese myth with what appears to be modern scientific fact. But hair and fingernails do not grow after death; they merely appear to grow, due to shrinkage of surrounding skin tissue. Thus, the poem is really one of magical thinking, thinking that juxtaposes an ancient Chinese myth and a modern urban legend to produce a kind of spiritual transcendence that disavows the negatives of time, aging, and death. It is a rich, layered poem that opens something new each time it is read. Note, too, the musical devices this “unlined” poem uses: the assonance of tree, seed, leap, the alliteration of ten, tree, tall, taller, and even the internal rhymes/half-rhymes of beard, dead, head or will, still, tall, doll. This is not a scribbled paragraph lifted from a writer’s notebook, but a highly crafted poem by someone who understands the nuances of language and who uses many of conventional poetry’s devices, including connotation, echo, and wordplay. Chao misleadingly subtitles her book Fifty-Three Chinese Love Poems. This is somewhat unfortunate because her work is so much broader and richer than the heartsand-flowers description implies. The poet’s Taiwanese and Chinese heritage is frequently invoked in her work, and the theme of “love” – in its widest and most varied definitions – recurs throughout. Nonetheless, Chao’s poetry focuses more on time, memories, living, aging, and dying than on romantic or sexual love. Its subject matter touches on such diverse things as the Chinese tradition of son zong (never giving clocks as gifts), a cow her father milked in high school, the experience of 66
RE
Donna Marbach
seeing a chicken killed at the market, a lantern festival, and an aborted suicide attempt. In plain, accessible language, she explores common everyday things (“The Rawness of Eggs”), often using them to introduce us to a rich cultural heritage or expanding the ordinary into philosophic or mystical speculations, such as that in “Threadbare Time”: Teeth come and go, hair comes and goes, words come and go. The journey is not a circle, but a line, perhaps an outward spiraling line, perhaps a squiggle. One thing is certain: the alpha is never the omega. Although her poetry can be both deep and thoughtful, it is by no means stodgy or dull. Chao is a witty poet who often uses humor or an unexpected twist to make a point, as in “Better than Sex”: I watch you smoke your two cigarettes a day. Your eyes lose focus in enjoyment, and by the time I smell the smoke you are already half through savoring the little tobacco tube. I contemplate taking up smoking too, so that I will not outlive you by too many years. We can share a match, a lighter, a cloud of smoke, a cigarette passed back and forth. I also contemplate taking up smoking because you say that it is better than anything in the world, better than sex. She is also unafraid to diverge from her usual quiet, delicate voice to expose a grittiermodern-down-to-earth side, as in “A Promise,” where she spits out: I’m not a good or thorough dishwasher, or a great cleaner-upper, but I will fix your cat’s fucking cat toys. I will sew the tails back on the mice and sew the fuzzy things back onto their sticks. Yu-Han Chao has many things to say, making We Grow Old a remarkable first book. And while this young poet may not have completely eliminated my anti-prose-poem bias, she has convinced me that, in her hands at least, the prose poem can legitimately stand beside sonnets, villanelles, and lines of free verse in the genre called poetry.
Chao, Yu-Han. We Grow Old: Fifty-Three Chinese Love Poems. Omaha, NE: Backwaters P, 2008.
DACTIONS
67
Donna Marbach
ON REBECCA FOUST’S MOM’S CANOE
Mom’s Canoe is Foust’s second book and her second by Texas Review Press. Although jacket reviews seem to emphasize the book as a collection about place – the Allegheny Mountain region – the strongest pieces in the collection are really more about family. Her poem “Backwoods,” situated about a third of the way into the book, is the kind of poem that grabs you by the collar and insists that you take notice. It is a poem about domestic violence and the cycle of abuse that victims often fall into. Foust opens her poem with a couple of questions: You’d go back to him, then, your swaggering full-bird second husband, fragged in Korea and now hunkered down here in this backwater? How could you, after he blackened your eye, dumb-bitched you and wrecked your canoe? In succinct, plain language, she immediately establishes the second husband as a person of violence by allusions to the military (full-bird – as in “full-bird” colonel, whose rank insignia is an eagle, a term originating in the Marines) and war (“fragged in Korea”). Foust then selects specific and understated images and metaphors to make the violence all the more horrific. She ends the piece beautifully with the following: where your beloved canoe still lies on its side split like your lip where he kicked it, the night you ran home to us in your nightgown and only one shoe. At her best, Foust performs magic with her words. The poem “Fear,” about an abortion, uses 12 simple lines (four tercets) to place the action in a complicated and emotional political, spiritual, and personal context. Again, her ending is amazingly powerful: “then I felt the cold speculum spoons / in the deep place, / felt the unfolding of stainless steel wings.” Foust has a gift of finding the perfect metaphor to deepen and expand her descriptions of personal memories and family events. The poem “Family Story” substitutes ultrasounds for photographs and describes a life summed up in “tears that dripped and bloomed” and a woman who, even indoors, looked up, “expecting rain.” And the poem “The Bees are Inside” uses the images of those insects as a poignant and startling image of mental illness and suicide. However, Foust’s work in this book is uneven and not well organized. For instance, one would expect the opening and closing poems of the book to be among her strongest 68
RE
Donna Marbach
pieces. Yet both her opening poem, “Allegheny Mountain Bowl,” and her closing poem, “November,” are rather unremarkable nature poems. Both are competent, well-written pieces but lack the depth, originality, and pizzazz of some of her other work. They would not be the poems I would choose to grab the reader’s attention or to leave good thoughts as the book is closed. Despite its flaws, Mom’s Canoe is worth reading. Foust’s work is a comfortable, easy read, and at its best, it is exceptional – like she says in one of her poems, “The whole falls apart, but still the shards / glitter, brown diamonds on water.”
Foust, Rebecca. Mom’s Canoe. Huntsville, TX: Texas Review P, 2008.
DACTIONS
69
ABBY MILLAGER BESIDE THE DUMPSTERS, FURIOUSLY SORTING I always feel bereft when I read translations. The nature of the original language, the music, double meanings, whoever the translator, are necessarily unlisted – unknowable, ripped – as if the poetry has been flayed. So I find it hard sometimes to allow myself to respond to translated work in the same way I sink into native language. However, either because of Laima Vince’s skill or the nature of the original material, it’s easy to forget this book is translated. Once Martinaitis straps you in, you ride until the wooden doors bang open. This sequence of persona poems chronicles post-Soviet Lithuanian Everyman K.B. as he drifts from scene to disquieting scene and reports on his own thinking. In a tone simultaneously desperate and ironic, with the hyperawareness of the sleep-deprived, Martinaitis guides us through a shadowy I Spy world packed with vaguely menacing, sometimes surreally incongruous objects. K.B.’s problem is this: How can he resurrect himself from a lifetime of repression? For as long as he can remember, K.B.’s main goal has been to avoid calling attention to himself in any way, so as to avoid being subject to police action or abuse. Over time, he has scrubbed away his very identity: I could watch how I was disappearing: an infant, a teenager, a young man, a soldier in uniform, a lover in a car huddled against a woman, walking a dog, surrounded by well-wishers, and almost the way I am now, like the day before yesterday – none of it coherent, an endless chain of losing myself. (“About the Hidden Mirror”) Years of adaptive paranoia – about police investigations, interrogations, beatings, buggings, torture, and random acts of violence – have left him with only a single, hypertrophied emotion: fear. If K.B.’s situation seems alien to our own experience at first glance, it’s really not. We see this sort of emotional bankruptcy in our own lives. Martinaitis’ words constitute a wake-up call; K.B.’s heightened vigilance proves communicable. And if being stifled in this life doesn’t pose enough of a challenge, K.B. suffers also from its corollary – a problematically elaborate fantasy of how things must be in a different sort of life. The mysterious Margarita seems to represent this ideal world, along with art, mirrors, and fine, old interiors. This world, “not of this time and not of this place” (“K.B.’s Dream About Closeness”), is the only actuality, he believes, where passion might occur. But there’s a catch. 70
RE
Abby Millager
For Martinaitis, “art” (a static fait accompli) is the dead version of “creative work” (that which is still in progress). Similarly, K.B.’s idealized world, in contrast with the real world, is sterile. “K.B. to Margarita about Virtual Reality”: We experienced incredible lightness. We could pass through each other, merge into one. Only when we did, we were suddenly shut down. We are all guilty, at times, of living for some future which may never arrive. And even though we know there is no such thing as perfection, that the world is messy, and that nothing ever turns out exactly as expected, we are all subject to disillusionment. In K.B., we recognize ourselves. We live in a world not governed by order but rather by the likes of “trash angels”: As though they were the final judgment, angels from the shadow world – beside the dumpsters, furiously sorting – they complete history. (“K.B. and the Trash Angels”) Life, as Martinaitis shows it, is so poignantly absurd that perhaps the best we can hope for is some sort of salvage operation. This may seem pathetic, but at least it’s something. And it is entertaining.
Martinaitis, Marcelijus. K. B. The Suspect. Trans. Laima Vince. Buffalo, NY: White Pines P, 2009.
DACTIONS
71
AGATHA BEINS WHAT BODIES BECOME: REVIEW OF SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CRAYON Mirrors reflect our bodies, paintings and photographs capture our bodies, through windows we see others’ bodies. On the one hand, these bodies are always incomplete, potentially fragmented by a frame, “like the puzzle of a mirror – pieces scattered on the kitchen table” that “might take hours to put together” (41). On the other hand, the image within a frame can also be timeless, as if a frame could provide proof of existence, an effect suggested through one speaker’s declaration that “A woman who watches a girl lift her arms is two dimensional. There is a picture so that I know” (52). The prose poems in Self-Portrait with Crayon, then, reveal and push against the ways that bodies turn away and leave, live hazily through memory, and are rent into pieces. This splintering is reflected by White’s use of language, through which mundane and familiar objects are skewed, estranged, and dissected: The sway, for instance, of a long cornsilk mane. Which was not real. As in the thumb which replaces the nipple when the self becomes a circle. As in the mouth of a horse in the shape of a thimble. I could place my thumb inside my mouth to end the sound. But God is endless. Like fingers curling over inconsolable stones. Or a hand, finally, closing around the neck of a horse. (38) Here a scene emerges and deepens, albeit slowly and partially, grounded in and exceeding the body of a horse, a body that becomes intertwined with the speaker’s. “As in” and “or” begin sentences whose grammatical simplicity belies their cracks and aches. As a result, readers find a world that is disorienting, produced in a cubist fashion: Things and bodies are fractured into their anatomical and emotional facets and then reassembled in a way that collapses objects into each other and different points in time into a single scene. Consider the woman’s hands in “Seated Woman Donning Her Hat”: “hands held above her head briefly in the air crown the shape of what is no longer there” (46), allowing the present emptiness and a past presence to coincide. Existing in tension with language’s unbalancing effects are the declarative, axiomatic statements that both explain and provide rules for understanding the world White creates. Sentences such as “There are at least seven kinds of loneliness” (14) and “Of course one shoe has no purpose without the other” (32) offer comfort in the way they purport to make reality knowable and sensible. So do the sharp lines and right angles that separate poem from white space on the page; they make the content feel more manageable. The form serves as a frame, containing the ephemerality of a world that is always just out of our control, “just as when one mirror is held up to another, the reflection cannot stop and burrows a tunnel of reflections” (17).
72
RE
Agatha Beins
Balancing the pull of these different forces, White’s poems are taut but do not inhabit only a surface. Rather, each piece hints at a layered and fissured story, as much by what it contains as by what it suggests may be found outside the frame.
White, Allison Benis. Self-Portrait with Crayon. Cleveland: Cleveland State Univeristy Poetry Center, 2009.
DACTIONS
73
TOM’S CELEBRATIONS Shinder, Jason. Stupid Hope. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf P, 2009. Two reviews. Review one: written in a coffee shop. Jason Shinder has passed away and so has the hope of more beautiful poems like the ones in Stupid Hope. Yes, these poems are beautiful, like Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Both have extraordinary melancholy and despair amidst layers of pleasure, and this is what happens with strong poems.
Stupid Hope is two stories of sickness unto death. One story is about the author’s mother, and the second is about the author. Both have brutal honesties, such as in “The Good Son”: If God had come to me and said, if you are willing to forget your self you will find the cure for heart attacks and compose the greatest symphonies, I wouldn’t have been sure of my answer. Because there wouldn’t have beeb enough attention to my suffering. And that’s unforgivable Later in the poem the mother dies after months in a hospital room full of silence that lodged itself like a stone in her throat And she thought I was wonderful and would do anything for her. The author is not heartless, as you will see when you read this book. He is just bluntly honest. (Also notice the craft of the last two lines. Prior to this, the poem was in couplets. Then in the last two lines the couplets break to emphasize the distance.) Also, at times, Shinder makes images that parallel the disturbing feeling of joy in your own suffering: wanting to be worth the horror he lavishes wanting to be good enough 74
RE
Tom’s Celebrations
to join his suffering with a little of my own. Review two: from my post on Graywolf ’s Facebook page. [. . .] And for you poets, it seems to be written under the emotional, empathetic, and sentimental shadow of Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” and “To Aunt Rose.” The poetry is not like Ginsberg’s, but it is sincere like those two poems and like Ginsberg . . . and then some. *** Moody, David A. Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man & His Work: Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920. NY: Oxford UP, 2007. A long title for a book about the early years of Ezra Pound’s life, but it’s fantastic and has so much detail. This might be my favorite Pound bio yet, though Humphrey Carpenter’s is wonderful, too. Halfway through Moody’s book, I was thinking, “I can’t wait for volume II.” If you want to know more about a young Pound, read Moody’s biography. *** Mesa, Helena. Horse Dance Underwater. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State U P, 2009. Here’s a collection of poems that fulfills one of Whalen’s and my requirements for poetry – it’s a graph of the mind moving. I know I keep returing to that idea, but it’s a good one. It’s an idea that doesn’t waver and continually proves itself. So with that requirement, Mesa’s poetry proves itself, too. But with Mesa, when she’s moving full force, there’s more. The sound is moving, as well. Specifically, the harmonies. It’s the opposite of Linda Bierds but just as strong. With Bierds, the sounds lead the images and ideas, but with Mesa, the sounds keeps up with the images in motion. For example, [. . .] Soon, morning hours scar our postures with thoughts of how we’re still awake, how raw words could change a war. Our chants hoarsen and against a ceiba some stretch, their candles cupped close to their chests. (p 12-13) I think this is Mesa’s first book. Whether it is or not, it’s a damned fine book. The language is hard and strong, and the poems create meanings. What else could you want? *** DACTIONS
75
Tom’s Celebrations
Kercheval, Jesse Lee. Cinema Muto. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U P, 2009. God is so silent up there. I wonder if God can hear me down here? I wonder what God thinks and sees. Kercheval has these questions, too, in Cinema Muto. The poems in this collection are about silent movies, of course, but really they are a way for Kercheval to push her imagination to understand God and Life and even reincarnation. Yes, “The Acting Career of Charles H. West Considered as Bad Karma” (p 67) is the best (if such a thing exists) reincarnation poem I have ever read, even if it is a prose poem. This poem is concrete in reality, it’s as if Kercheval were the God in charge of reincarnation. The metaphor is ridiculously brilliant – why hasn’t anyone written this poem or had this idea before? An actor, as he is used in the poem, is the perfect metaphor for reincarnation, because the actor is continually reincarnated in each new role and movie. After reading this poem you will intellectually and within your bones understand and feel the what and how of reincarnation. Here’s the first section of the prose poem:
where is it where is it where is it written that reincarnation is a good thing? what if what it what if reincarnation is like the film career of the actor Charlie West? the failure or the weakling in nearly three dozen Griffith films /19091912/ each film a new incarnation at the rate of three a month O the cruelty of casting! to be born the jealous miner who almost shoots his brother in His Mother’s Scarf only to die & be reborn the “evil companion” in The Crooked Road who persuades the young husband to choose a life of crime – never never never once a rebirth as the hero who save Blanche Sweet/ Lillian Gish from the brustish invading Yankees in the nick of time Cinema Muto also has fears of death, which not only come across in the poems but in how the book ends. The book is like a good piece of classical music that doesn’t want to end because it wants to keep living and exploring. So each of the last six poems of Cinema Muto are attempts at ending, or closing, the book. After each of those poems, I felt the book could be at its end, but luckily there were more poems. Kercheval could not fail to find the right poem to end the book, except for the silence that fell after the last line of Cinema Muto. *** Heyen, William. A Poetics of Hiroshima. Wilkes-Barre, PA: Etruscan P, 2008. I know Heyen, so you might think I might be biased in this review. However, I am well versed in Heyen. I’ve about three feet of Heyen’s books. Of those three feet, this book is his strongest book, yet. Enough said. ***
76
RE
Tom’s Celebrations
Graziano, Nathan. After the Honeymoon. Buffalo, NY: Sunnyoutside, 2009. Who doesn’t like Nathan Graziano? Raise your hand. You! You who raised your hand go read After the Honeymoon. He’ll swoon you like you’re in Niagara Falls. Graziano writes in the language of today, even though he has no cell phone or a Facebook account. His tone is contemporary, too, with a seriousness of actuality mixed with ironies he “never intended” (p 35). This is certainly true in the alcoholism poem, “Cracker and Me,” where he gets into the depths of their aging through drinking. He witnesses the shift from wild writers to suburban parents. And at the end, after the sudden realization of the alcoholism sickness merging with the old-age sickness that he writes: [...] the only thing we have to say is: Can someone pour me a drink? (p 38-9) You would think those closing four lines would undermine everything that was written before, right? In this case, no. This is the seriousness mixed with ironies. This is the unintended irony when he utters the phrase of a young binge drinker, as if the older person is saying, “I can still do this.” But look at spacing and pacing of the line. They are short and slow. It creates an inner desperation he needs to connect to youth, to connect to writing, even though it is really complacency (another contemporary emotion) of what he is and where he is headed. Yes, the title of the book is appropriate, as it is well After the Honeymoon, but for the reader it is an enduring experience through, poetry, prose poems, and emotions. *** Day, Lucille Lang. The Curvature of Blue. West Somerville, MA: Cervena Barva P, 2009. The following interview may or may not have occurred with Lucille Lang Day on Tuesday, May 12. I was inspired to interview her after reading her most recent collection of poems, The Curvature of Blue. I was especially drawn to her book because of the cosmological poems. They are some of the finest ones written. And if you enjoy science, cosmology, physics, color, love, death, and poetry, you’ll enjoy this book.
Tom Holmes: I’m here with Lucille Lang Day, a poet I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Since I and others may be new to you, I first want to know if you could briefly describe yourself to me and the readers? DACTIONS
77
Tom’s Celebrations
Lucille Lang Day: I will defer to the book and let it speak for itself. TH: Okay. So, The Curvature of Blue, could you describe yourself? The Curvature of Blue: “There’s no one quite / like me” (p 13). TH: I’m sure that is true, but could you be a bit more specific, please? TCOB: “I am one / with bees and ants creating // their chambers” (p 24). TH: Okay, and what can the reader expect from you? TCOB: The reader will “hear cinnabar / olive, raw umber, magenta, / violet and chartreuse / mingling in counterpoint” (p 19). TH: That’s fine. I noticed the patience of your poems. They seem at ease. Would you agree? How would describe the momentum? TCOB: Yes. It’s like when “Rain sifts down like fine flour” (p 8). TH: I also noticed an evolution as the book moved forward. It’s almost sequential . . . TCOB: Oh, I couldn’t disagree more. “Moments are shuffled and reshuffled to give the illusion of time and history. Everything happens at once and forever” (p 34). TH: So, you are atemporal. That’s a very interesting way to create. Could you describe your creative process? TCOB: Well, it’s a bit like “The one sperm that enters, cells cleaving to form a hollow ball, bouncing down the oviduct, the infolding and implanting in the muscular wall of my uterus, the welldeveloped tail, pharyngeal gills just like those of a fish forming before finger buds, heart and brain, the long months of turning and turning like a vase on a potter’s wheel, the finished child sliding, wet and shining, into her father’s palms.” (p 14) 78
RE
Tom’s Celebrations
TH: Awesome. Now, is that what it’s like when you actually write the poem, too? TCOB: No, when I write, it’s more like there is something “stirring inside me, walking the long corridors of my brain, searching for something irretrievable, precious, still there.” (p 38)
TH: So, why do you write? TCOB: “To waken the angels” (p 54). TH: That reminds me, death seems important to you. How would you describe death? TCOB: “When the end draws near, light descends, thunder roars, and all of heaven enters the body through a slender glass column. The brain lights up as galaxies spin, planets of every imaginable color turn in their orbits, and billions of moons, stony or gaseous, glow inside the cerebrum. In that instant you finally know the meaning of it all. Then one by one the stars blink out, constellations disappear, and you are a barren cave.” (p 55) TH: I like that. It seems we only have time for two more questions. The penultimate question, what caused the curvature of blue? TCOB: “[. . .] the moon circling earth, dragging the oceans like flowing blue gowns; the human heart pumping blood through a network of rivers” (p 68). TH: Nice. And one last question. Do you have any advice for the young writers? TCOB: “To be an artist, you must be crazy” (p 28). *** DACTIONS
79
Books Received Young, Kevin. Dear Darkness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Wilson, Emily. Micrographia. Iowa City: U Iowa UP, 2009. White, Allison Benis. Self-Portrait with Crayon. Cleveland: Cleveland State Univeristy Poetry Center, 2009. Waldner, Liz. Trust. Cleveland: Cleveland State Univeristy Poetry Center, 2009. Thirkield, Jonathan. The Waker’s Corridor. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisana State UP, 2009. Taylor, William, Jr. The Hunger Season. Buffalo, NY: sunnyoutside, 2009. Sze, Arthur. The Ginko Light. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2009. Stroud, Joseph. Of this World: New and Selected Poems. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2009. Skoog, Ed. Mister Skylight. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2009. Shinder, Jason. Stupid Hope. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf P, 2009 Schumejda, Rebecca. Falling Forward. Buffalo, NY: sunnyoutside, 2008. Savich, Zach. Full Catastrophe Living. Iowa City: U Iowa UP, 2009. Ryokan. Between the Floating Mist: Poems of Ryokan. Trans. Dennis Maloney and Hide Oshiro. Buffalo, NY: White Pine P, 2009. Roberts, Andrew Michael. Something Has to Happen Next. Iowa City: U Iowa UP, 2009. Ra, Heeduk. Scale & Stairs: Selected Poems of Heeduk Ra. Trans. Won-Chung Kim and Christopher Merrill. Buffalo, NY: White Pine P, 2009. Prevost, Chad. A Walking Cliché Coins a Phrase: Prose Poems, Letters, and Microfictions. Austin, TX: Plain View P, 2008. Phillips, Robert. Now & Then: New & Selected Poems. Ashland, OH: Ashland Poetry P, 2009. Perillo, Lucia. Inseminating the Elephant. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2009.
80
RE
Books Received
Neruda, Pablo. World’s End. Trans. William O’Daly. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2009. Mesa, Helena. Horse Dance Underwater. Cleveland: Cleveland State Univeristy Poetry Center, 2009. McHugh, Heather. Upgraded to Serious. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2009. McCreesh, Hosho. For All These Wretched, Beautiful, & Insignificant Things So Uselessly & Carelessly Destroyed . . . . Buffalo, NY: sunnyoutside, 2008. Martinaitis, Marcelijus. K. B. The Suspect. Trans. Laima Vince. Buffalo, NY: White Pine P, 2009. Lunde, David. Breaking the Willow: Poems of Parting, Exile, Separation, & Reunion. Buffalo, NY: White Pine P, 2008. Ling, Micah. Three Islands. Buffalo, NY: sunnyoutside, 2009. Lamoureux, Mark. Astrometry Orgonon. Buffalo, NY: BlazeVOX Books, 2008. Krech, Richard. Rumors of Electricity. Buffalo, NY: sunnyoutside, 2008. Huerta, David. Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poems. Trans. Mark Schafer. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2009. Hogan, Paul. Point of Departure. Buffalo, NY: White Pine P, 2008. Heyen, William. The Cabin: Journal 1964 – 1985. DuBois, PA: MAMMOTH Books, 2009. ---. A Poetics of Hiroshima. Wilkes-Barre, PA: Etruscan P, 2009. Harrison, Jim. In Search of Small Gods. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2009. Graziano, Nathan. After the Honeymoon. Buffalo, NY: sunnyoutside, 2009. Galvin, James. As Is. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2009. French, Stephen. The Dark Villages of Childhood. Davenport, IA: Midwest Writing Center, 2009. Foust, Rebecca. Mom’s Canoe. Huntsville, TX: Texas Review P, 2008. Dickman, Michael. The End of the West. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2009. Compher, Vic. Lebensstrom / Lifestrem. Goldebek, Germany: Mohland, 2009. DACTIONS
81
Books Received
Chapman, Elizabeth Biller. Light Thickens. Ashland, OH: Ashland Poetry P, 2009. Brown, Stacy Lynn. Cradle Song: A Poem. Chattanooga, TN: C & R P, 2009. Bly, Robert. Reaching Out to the World: New & Selected Poems. Buffalo, NY: White Pine P, 2009. Blumenthal, Michael. And. Rochester, NY: BOA, 2009. Bitting, Michelle. Good Friday Kiss. Chattanooga, TN: C & R P, 2008. Barone, Dennis and James Finnegan, eds. Visting Wallace: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens. Iowa City, IA: U of Iowa P, 2009.
82
RE
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES RUTH WILLIAMS has had work published in jubilat, Barrelhouse, 42 Opus, Lake Effect, Hubbub, and New Delta Review. She completed her MFA at Eastern Washington University in 2006 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati. MEGHAN WIEMER is a student at Utah Valley University majoring in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. Her poetry has been published in multiple issues of Touchstones. RONALD WALLACE’s twelve books of poetry, fiction, and criticism include For a Limited Time Only and Long for This World: New and Selected Poems, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is co-director of the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin and is the poetry editor for the University of Wisconsin Press. Married with two grown children and three grandchildren, he divides his time between Madison and a 40-acre farm in Bear Valley, Wisconsin. DAVID WAGONER has published 18 books of poems, most recently A Map of the Night (U of Illinois P, 2008) and ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Lilly Prize in 1991 and has won six yearly prizes from Poetry (Chicago). He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for 23 years. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and twice for the National Book Award. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to its end in 2002. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington. LAURA STOTT received her MFA from Eastern Washington University. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including Hayden’s Ferry Review and Weber: The Contemporary West. Laura teaches freshman English, occasionally delivers flowers, and takes tourists for hikes in Skagway, Alaska. She loves lichens, bicycles, and stealing hummingbird feeders. KAREN SCHUBERT is the author of The Geography of Lost Houses (Pudding House, 2008). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies and journals, including Water~Stone Review, Poetry Midwest, Versal, DMQ Review, and diode poetry journal. In 2008, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. She is a recent editor of Whiskey Island Magazine and a current visiting writer at Texas A&M Commerce. PAISLEY REKDAL is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, and three books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope. SCOTT POOLE is the author of two books of poetry, Hiding from Salesmen and The Cheap Seats. He is the “House Poet” for Live Wire!, a weekly radio variety show on Oregon Public Broadcasting. He also was the founding director of Get Lit!, the Spokane, Washington, book festival and Wordstock, the Portland, Oregon, book festival. He is a software developer in Portland, Oregon. DACTIONS
83
Contributors’ Notes
JAY PABARUE is a high school senior from Philadelphia. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Philadelphia Stories, and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in 322 Review, Word Riot, and Gloom Cupboard. ERIC M. MORRIS writes and teaches in Akron, Ohio, and also serves as a poetry editor for Barn Owl Review. ABBY MILLAGER lives and writes amid mushroom farms in the northern hills of humble Delaware. She was a founding editor of Diner. At one time, briefly, she was a doctor. Her poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in 5am, Barrow Street, Fourteen Hills, Prairie Schooner, Redactions, Terminus, Verse, Worcester Review, and others. MARIA MELENDEZ, the new editor/publisher for Pilgrimage magazine, lives in Pueblo, Colorado. Her poetry collection How Long She’ll Last in This World (U of Arizona P, 2006), received Honorable Mention at the 2007 International Latino Book Awards and was named a finalist for the 2007 PEN Center USA Literary Awards. Flexible Bones, her third collection of poetry, is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in 2010. HOPE MAXWELL-SNYDER, a native of Colombia, South America, received an MA in Spanish literature from George Washington University, another MA in Spanish and Latin American literature from Johns Hopkins, and a PhD in Spanish Medieval Literature from the University of Manchester in England. Her work has appeared in Archivio storico italiano, ALDEEU Atalaya, International Poetry Review, OCHO, and The Gettysburg Review. Hope is the founder and director of The Sotto Voce Poetry Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. NOEL PABILLO MARIANO splits his time between Riverside and Los Angeles, California. He is a currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside where he helped edit and produce the first national “Coming Out Monologues.” Noel currently serves as the nonfiction editor for Circumlocution Literary, an online literary magazine focused on young writers. In addition, he was just awarded a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship. For additional information and to read more about other arts-activism projects, visit: noelmariano.com. Both a visual artist and a poet, DONNA M. MARBACH has published non-fiction, fiction, and poetry in a variety of anthologies and periodicals, including Blueline, Hazmat Review, Homestead Review, Quercus Review, Sea Stories, The MacGuffin, The Red WheelBarrow, Silk Road, The Tipton Poetry Review, Limestone, Willow Swept Review, Halfway Down The Stairs, Breadcrub scabs, Waterways, and Pearl. Most recently, she has been the poetry editor of the national writers’ magazine, Byline, and has previously edited for FootHills Press. She is co-founder and past president of Just Poets Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to the celebration of poetry and poets.
84
RE
Contributors’ Notes
ANGIE MACRI is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Fugue, New Orleans Review, Southern Indiana Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Tar River Poetry. She was also featured in The Spoon River Poetry Review. Her manuscript Enough for This Star was recently awarded an individual artist fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council. SANDY LONGHORN is the author of Blood Almanac (Anhinga, 2006), winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Indiana Review, New South, Quarterly West, West Branch, and elsewhere. She has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council as well. MARILYN KRYSL’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation The New Republic, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Short Stories 2000, O. Henry Prize Stories, Sudden Fiction, and Sudden Stories. Dinner with Osama (stories) won the Richard Sullivan Prize. She is the recipient of two NEA fellowships and is former Director of the Creative Writing Program at University of Colorado, Boulder. CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY is the author of three collections of poetry, Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award in 2007, Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity P), and Nietzsche’s Horse (Mitki/Mitki P). His work has appeared in numerous print and on-line journals, including Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Slope, Mississippi Review, and Double Room. One of the founding editors of the literary journal, 3rd Bed, he is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing. EVA HOOKER is Professor of English and Writer in Residence at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. The Winter Keeper, a hand-bound chapbook (Chapiteau P, 2000), was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in poetry in 2001. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Harvard Review, Salmagundi, Water~Stone, Orion, Agni, Memorius 9, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Third Coast, Drunken Boat, The Notre Dame Review, and Best New Poets 2008. JESSICA D. HAND loves poetry, fire-hooping, and nudity. She sometimes manages to combine all three. Jess earned a Creative Writing BA from Carnegie Mellon University and is now MFAing at Georgia State. “Jesus Mirror” won the 2008 Agnes Scott Literary Festival Poetry Competition, judged by Martín Espada, and Jess was a finalist for the same competition in 2007, judged by Yusef Komunyakaa. She was also a finalist in the River Styx 2008 International Poetry competition. JAMES GRABILL’s poems have appeared in numerous periodicals, such as Willow Springs, kayak, Caliban, South Dakota Review, New York Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, New Letters, Ur Vox, Redactions, The Bitter Oleander, East West Journal, and The Common Review. His recent books of poems are October Wind (Sage Hill P, 2006) and An Indigo Scent after the Rain (Lynx House P, 2003). He is not the author of Delusions. He lives in Oregon, where he teaches writing and sustainability. DACTIONS
85
Contributors’ Notes
GUISEPPE GETTO completed these poems over the last several years while working on two master’s degrees in Fresno, CA, one in creative writing (MFA) and one in composition. He’s now at Michigan State University, working on a PhD in composition. RICHARD GARCIA is author of The Flying Garcias (U of Pittsburgh P, 1991), Rancho Notorious (BOA, 2001), and The Persistence of Objects (BOA, 2006). His awards include the Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. For twelve years, he was the poet-in-residence at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where he conducted workshops in art and poetry for hospitalized children. Richard teaches creative writing in the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA program and the Idyllwild Summer Poetry Festival. REBECCA FOUST’s books Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prizes in 2007 and 2008. Nominated for two 2008 Pushcart awards, Foust’s poetry appears in 2008-09 issues of Atlanta Review, Margie, Hudson Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. ROBERT EVORY holds degrees in Music and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. He is a freelance booking agent in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and plays in Good Question, a local touring progressive rock band (www.myspace.com /goodquestiontrio). Currently, he has undertaken the endeavor to fuse poetry and music in live performance and recording. NICELLE CHRISTINE DAVIS was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. She currently lives in Lancaster, California, with her husband and son. She teaches composition at Antelope Valley College. ANNE C. COON’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Provincetown Arts, Nimrod, The Baltimore Review, Earth’s Daughters, Women’s Studies, The Lyric, Proteus, Northeast Corridor, and the McGraw-Hill anthology Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay. Her books include Henry James Sat Here (The Old School P), Via del Paradiso (FootHills P), Daedalus’ Daughter (FootHills P), and Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry, co-authored with Marcia Birken (Editions Rodopi). ALEX CIGALE’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Global City Review, Green Mountains Review, Drunken Boat, Hanging Loose, Zoland Poetry, Eleven Eleven, Gargoyle, Many Mountains Moving, North American Review, Tar River Poetry Review, and 32 Poems. He was born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine, and lives in New York City. His translations of contemporary Russian poetry can be found in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry, The Manhattan Review, and St. Ann’s Review. BRITTANY CAVALLARO was a 2008 Bucknell fellow in the Seminar for Younger Poets and has had her poems published in the Comstock Review.
86
RE
Contributors’ Notes
GRACE CAVALIERI is the author of several books of poetry and 21 produced plays. She also founded and still produces/hosts public radio’s “The Poet and the Poem,” now in its 32nd year, now from the Library of Congress. Her new book is Anna Nicole: Poems (Goss183: Casa Menendez, 2008). She is book review editor for The Montserrat Review and a poetry columnist for MiPOradio. Her play in progress, on Anna Nicole, is in development in NYC. BILL CARPENTER has published three books of poetry and two novels, the most recent being The Wooden Nickel (Little-Brown, 2002). He has won the Associated Writing Programs Award, the Samuel French Morse Prize, and an NEA. He teaches at The College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, Maine. ROB CARNEY is the author of two books – Weather Report (Somondoco P, 2006) and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts (Pinyon P, 2003), winner of the Pinyon Press National Poetry Book Award – and two chapbooks, New Fables, Old Songs (Dream Horse P, 2003) and This Is One Sexy Planet (Frank Cat P, 2005). His work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Quarterly West, and dozens of other journals, as well as Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton, 2006). He lives in Salt Lake City. CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Modern History: Prose Poems 1987-2007 (Tupelo P, 2008). He is also the editor of many anthologies of contemporary poetry, most recently Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems & Poetics from California (2008). He was a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry for 2007-2008 and received the James Dickey Prize from Five Points for 2008. He teaches in the creative writing department at the University of California Riverside. AGATHA BEINS received her MFA from Eastern Washington University and is currently a PhD student at Rutgers University. SARA BARTLETT earned her MFA from Georgia State University in 2008, where she taught creative writing, literature, and composition, first as a teaching assistant and then as a visiting instructor. She has been invited to read her poetry at various venues in both Georgia and Massachusetts, where she is from, was nominated for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2006, and was a finalist in the 2008 Agnes Scott Writer’s Festival Contest. Her poetry appears in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of New South, and she is currently working on a manuscript for her first book of poetry. SHANNON AMIDON’s poems have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Poet Lore, 42opus, Copper Nickel, Dogwood, and elsewhere. Her manuscript, The Garden After, has been a finalist for the Perugia Press Prize. A member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, she lives in Hilo, Hawai`i (on the Big Island) with her husband and toddler son. KELLI RUSSELL AGODON has recently appeared in the Atlanta Monthly, Meridian, Sojourn, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, and Bellevue Literary Journal. She is the author of two books of poems: Small Knots and Geography, winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook prize. Currently, she lives in Washington State and is one of the editors of Crab Creek Review. DACTIONS
87
Redactions: Poetry & Poetics Submissions & Ordering To order an issue or a subscription, please make a check out to: “Tom Holmes” & send to: Redactions, 58 South Main Street, Third Floor, Brockport, NY 14420. Subscriptions are $15 for two issues. Individual issues are $8. Please indicate issue number(s). To submit work(s) to Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, please email us at redactionspoetry@yahoo.com and attach submission(s) into one Word, Wordpad, or Notepad document (or something we can open) or place the submission in the body of the email. (We accept simultaneous submissions, but we do not accept previously published work.) If a work of art, please submit as low-resolution JPEG or TIFF. If accepted, we will ask for a higher resolution image. Please include a brief bio & your snail mail address. We only accept submissions through email. We try to read submissions throughout the whole year, & we generally respond in about two months (a bit longer in the summer). All rights to published work(s) revert back to the author. (Please mention first publication in Redactions: Poetry & Poetics if the work is reprinted.) Also, please visit our Web site, www.redactions.com.
Get a “Support Poetry” magnetic car ribbon. “Redactions: Poetry & Poetics” on top. Black ribbon with red lettering. 8" x 3 7/8" Send a $5 check made out to “Tom Holmes” plus two stamps to the above address to get yours. Editor: Tom Holmes Guest Editor: Rob Carney Layout & Design: Tom Holmes Copy Editor: Melissa Gioia For every poetic action there is . . . Redactions. 88
RE
FRONT COVER “Lyre-shaped Gravestone” by Adam Alonzo
OUR GRACIOUS SUPPORTERS
Active Supporters Mike Steele Delisa Mulkey Jessica Lindberg Adrienne & Wayne Cayea Tricia Asklar
* – Continuing Supporters Bold – New Supporters
RedActive Supporters: Chris Winslow Stan Rubin Liz & Donald Robbins Donna Marbach Paul Holmes & Margaret Jennings* Roy & Pat Holmes* William Heyen Lea Cox Stan Coe Rob Carney Maan R Al-Ubaidi (RIP)
Redactions’ Web site (www.redactions.com) developed by www.rareedge.com. DACTIONS
89
90
RE
DACTIONS
91
92
RE
DACTIONS
93
94