The Comstock Review has come. Only 2 issues a year but I haven’t got one in 3 years where I haven’t enjoyed quite a few of the poems. Each is set in like a renga, some subtle pivot connecting one poem to the next and yet each is distinct in style, tone, content, voice. It’s prevalently American poets although Barry Dempster was in this issue. Rosemary Royston’s poem Short Story is full of non sequiturs that lance directions and yet moves through the characters and length of a romantic relationship in just over 100 words. Jennifer Bullis in Basal Cell Carcinoma I don’t think can be excerpted accurately either but it impressed with its ring of truth about perceptual filters, bringing in all the senses and moving through scenes and moods while staying inside one tight frame at the same time. Kelley Jean White wrote a poem deepening that flashes forward phase by phrase thru her entire son’s life. It’s almost satire of worst case scenario of boy turning into a bad man and has a compelling punch to it. Judith H Montgomery’s Fireflies feels, in pared back simplicity, and pivots in natural images, like Neidecker. James Scruton who won a manuscript award from Finishing Line, has a lovely piece On Hearing He Apologize for Writing Short Poems. A lovely mouth feel to the poem.
Funny, 2/3 of the poems are by females (or people who choose she in the bio) and so far I mentioned a disproportionally few males. Not that a person of gender writes to or from either gender; I’m reminded of the African proverb – when the axe came into the forest, one tree said to the others, “Look, the handle is one of ours.”
But if gender makes no difference why are there twice as many males on my shelves than females? (This being an active demographic correction from it being upwards of 80% male a couple years ago.) Of those which are written by females, they get less often read, except those I find out are queer. Does sexuality and gender come thru the page that much? Is it subjects that are written about so males have appealed more? Or is it just an accidental pattern? Future will give more data. Anyhew,
In other reading, I finally finished Sandra Cisneros‘ Loose Woman and I didn’t really want to. With books I like I tend to exponentially slow down so it’s never over. It’s been on my wishlist for years ever since I read an excerpt somewhere. She’s got a lovely sense of play as can be gathered from the titles alone. For example, A Man in my Bed Like Cracker Crumbs or I am So Depressed I Feel like Jumping in the River Behind My House but Won’t Because I am Thirty-Eight and Not Eighteen., or I am So in Love I Grow a New Hymen.
Some of the sense of momentum comes in Something Like Rivers Ran
undid the knot the ribbons
the silk flags of motion
unravelled from under
the flesh of the wrists
the stone of the lungs
something like water
broke free the prayer
of the heart
the grief of the hands
crooned sweet when
you held me
dissolved knee into knee
belly into belly
an alphabet of limbs
ran urgently
nudged loose a pebble
a pearl
a noose undoing its greed
and we were Buddha
and we were Jesus
and we were Allah
at once
a Ganges absolving
language woman man
The ends of the poems also are apt to have a surprising reversal on expectation like a poem spent frantic on sorting out how to get to the airplane washroom to shave the underarm because in Mexico, legs can be hairy but not underarms. The ending being (spoiler warning) who she travels to see is not a lover but her dad’s family who she will greet, arm raised, to give a hug to and the arm hair is emblematic of “being the good /girl my father would have/them believe I am.”
Ciscernos writes with public exuberance taking life on a dance. She is crackling for a rumble against anyone who would say slow, wants no holds barred. She takes on the stereotypes of what it is to be Mexican and Latino and confronts with humor.
Just finished When the Earth Leaps Up by Anne Szumigalski (with her 1995 Voice next on the bill). Some of hers are chatty as well, but the engagement is quiet and private, with the cat, with the self. Szumigalski’s fantastic blurs the everyday with the implausible blurs even to the level of phrase, how in the city “icetowers/grow like ice fungus from the snowy ground“. Szumigalski has a grief and caution that is expressed delicately as in Statement: Reinventing Memory.
Another Story: Once I bore a daughter. I wrapped her in the blanket of my past. This child inherits all my memories. Have I invented her, my daughter? She remembers my childhood as her own, her grandmother’s childhood as though it might be a bedtime story. Is seeing backwards, seeing into the past, simply a memory? Do we invent the memories of our foremothers?
She asks a lot of questions and inquires around the edges of what we (think we) know, what it it that we miss. This is done lightly in A Catechism (Or Conversation) between Phon and Antiphon talking about reconstructing memories of God at creation. Was the creator a crocodile?
To step further step towards taking apart what we make literal and linear, I’m reading Pacem in Solstice by Sheila E Murphy. The central self sidesteps from the picture. It’s not lifetelling in the same way, more globally political rather than by anecdote. It’s a shuffling sounds and see if any meaning squeezes around the edges as in Snap Shot. p. 5, in part
“Chafing’s never de rigeur near slept momentum. Dowries learn to match. They ratchet up some porous look-alikes as spring resumes contentment. Then and now, we tilt our raving mutinies aside the curtained left. If I told you heel-to-toe, you would release me and my willow. Taste is its own bribe. The minute evidence contrives to melt, no feeling left in the left arm carries in any heft. She was a damn sight more condemned than her relinquished dozing. Now ample semblances retract her first impressions. Maybe there are dried informants who renege on useful tomes.[…] A viable retraction notes the faith one has to hold.”
A sarcastic call to action, frustration in penned in words. I’m hearing…close your eyes, continue to sleep, lovies. Blasé gaze has no power to feel changes or make changes. Do I give up on ya?
The writing also engages the question of who gets to tell the story and what are the limits and weaknesses of that point of view.* p. 14 in Absorption as Appropriation as Absorption
“Her faith was glued to repartee starring her(self) as Jeffrey planted squarely, fluently pronouncing what she thought he thought […] She liked to say things in the mode of Jeffrey, while feeling that she had absorbed directional authority.”
Love to see that content addressing the subject of female voice. Whatever “female” would mean unpacked.
*Limits come to light of having the pov of comparing women writers who incidentally are in my head all at once, are incidentally female so far as I didn’t set out to read then compare women writers. How are they comparable beyond gender? One is writing this year in Canada’s West coast in mid-career, one wrote a decade ago at the end of her life in mid-west Canada, one as a young woman, who was then (about 15 years ago) at the start of her career in the northern U.S.
And next up will be the sparse minimalism of Determined by Aperture by Shannon Tharp (fewer and further press, 2008). It comes from quiet into quiet with each word considered as where to place your mind and tongue best. For example in The whole scene comes before us, part 2
We point
to locate.
That is,
there is
responsibility
in vision.
Gorgeous the way each word has the sense of being a broken piece of pottery rocking to stillness between two enjambed surfaces, and yet comes together and remakes a vessel.
In other news, NGM’s interviews Melanie Little of Freehand Books. The first season titles launch in Ottawa on the 18th as part of the Writers Fest year round lineup.
Digital History of Canadian poetry follows some streams thru years. [ via Wordswrights Canada resource links] and Mahmoud Darwish has died
Random Acts of Poetry will be back Oct 1 to 5th.
Arc Reader Choice Awards are on all September. Click on the pdf link to see the choices and vote.
Funniest poetry thing I’ve read lately – Rob Mack’s response to the pulping of poems striking Carol Ann Duffy’s poem and others from the curriculum as a step against school violence.