The active stack of currently reading is a bit scattered about the house. (I figure over the last month about 2 dozen chapbooks and perhaps more than a dozen books have arrived here.)
My focus is deconstructing salient. By what mechanisms does my interest get dulled or more keen? What would ideal look like? What is this idea of poetry as transformative of reader or writer? I’m skeptical of it but maybe that’s a matter of terms and I call the process something else in another framework of words. Poetry that jolts the spine and nudges life path to pay attention to other things or pull back, is that a form of transformation?
What about poetry that snaps me shut at the keyword bingo of words that only poets use disproportionally, poetly words that dismay me: cerulean, scythe, shimmer, crepuscular, pain, moon and oh yes, any Greek god. Is closure a form of transformation? Is threat? Is being made scared a form of change? Or must transforming be towards the more all-embracing unity, clarity and calm?
I sit up straight at:
Nuclear by Juliana Spahr (1991), via Duration Press pdf.
sediment ponds where radioactive waters cool
contaminated clusters of buildings
there is an urgency to be respectful of this material
these are sacred sites
these are illustrations of necessities
There’s so much to write of other than self. A world of mentioning what consciousness has been raised about. The wider scope, the microscope. Not only the tilt of trees and salt of trunks. Yet as quickly as I engage, I fatigue quickly too.
It’s retelling history. There’s a passion, beauty, details and momentum but ultimately it’s lecturing that requires no audience. Action to respond to the actionable issues talked about requires people but the poetry is telling, isn’t a dialogue. There’s no room for an equal, only obedience or disagreement.
I’ve said before I’m a sucker for poems that turn against themselves, a pivot that is not drama plot-driven but a point of view undoing itself, reconsidering mid-stream. An unreliable narrator is more interesting than one sure of opinions and sure-footed unless there is so very fancy footwork indeed.
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Angela Leuck‘s Suddenly a Desire: Rose Tanka (Bondi Studios, 2010) p. 9,
you didn’t come
to admire the roses –
so chilly now
in the summer dress
I wore for you
Incredibly vulnerable poem. Much would depend on the intonation of the last line. Petulant? Bitter? Broken? Angry? It seems more delicate than there, a kind of soft, oh, disappointment and not yet back together enough to know what to do next.
Women and tanka have had a long history. Leuck gave a talk on haiku mentioning Masajo Susuki who spent a good portion of her 96-year lifetime writing poems of desire. Leuck has four previous books that pair flowers and love.
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rob mclennan’s grief notes (Blaze vox, 2012) p. 33
grief notes: miniature,
weather swims,
conversation-bare
& remorse, thought
I’d never,
Those pivots are lovely. Lines stand alone or continue on. So many poets need to unpack everything at length when really, when we can see where it’s going and it doesn’t veer off course, why continue? The writing is tight. Talk is about emotional life and despite the title of grief, it is not a sentimental wallow but clear-sighted with a similar kind frankness to self as Angela’s above.
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Anthony Rizcallah Ferris’ translation of Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran (Citadel Press, 1962), p. 14
Some souls are like sponges> You cannot squeeze anything out of them except for what they have sucked from you.
Lots of statements of judgements yet curious, some I hadn’t seen that way. Blunt and aphoristic, I’ll give a sort thru from time to time. Many find his writing striking. It drives me a tad towards batty when others can see pleasure and beauty where I can’t. I’ll see if I can glimpse.
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Joseph Massey’s At the Point (Shearsman, 2011).
A collected of his chapbooks, most, but not all of which, I have. I’m curious to see how it all rolls together and sits in new juxtapositions of other poems. He has such a keen attention to sound and minimalist cadence. It’ll take a couple afternoons of quiet rooms to take it in properly.
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an’ya’s set of chapbooks, seasonal.
I must admit I was pulled in by the sumptious paper with flowers and leaves embedded, inner pages with ink paintings and stamped and hand lettering. Won me over with the words, particularly in booklet 1
new year eaves
the icicle’s shape
exits itself
A shape exiting itself as a way to think of melting is so striking as a concept. A few reads later I see the play of eves/eaves.
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Rob Taylor‘s The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011).
I’ve been curious about his writing, seeing his chapbooks appear and go out of print. On first look thru looks like autobiographical storytelling, a book structured as best-of poems rather than related poems towards a general meta-level story of book. Still, a curious curve in them such as p. 32, “Creation Stories” starts,
She has her narratives, he has his,
and together they move through the world.
Their scripts are filled with the same set pieces, same characters,
yet they are blocked differently, recite different lines.
Ain’t that the truth? We have the same experiences yet rarely the same experiences. Each by where they’ve been catch onto different aspects, ignore other aspects. The variability of the experience even changes over time as memory drops some things, lumps together future events, conflating and debating what really occurred and deciding. Until we meet someone with the “shared experience”.
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Mayfly, Summer 2009 issue.
I’ve heard of this magazine but hadn’t laid eyes on a copy before. Curious about this U.S. haiku magazine. Not opened yet.
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Sean Howard’s Incitements (Gaspereau Press, 2011)
A gorgeous hand-feel of a book. The dust jacket and inner book cover show such attention to beauty. Sweet font. A publisher who knows how to balance text in a page. Even the page numbers have a loveliness to them.
The text goes thru other people’s texts and does cut ups. Sounds intriguing as an approach. It could go well or badly.
2/3 of short lines end in a hyphenated break in the word. It is either rigorously mathematically called for and cleverly considered and sensical or arbitrary styling that will work in some places and not in others. The books is effectively non-scannable as phrases and words are all broken to bits. Nearly the entire book held to tercets.
By title it aims to be an irritant/agitator, I presume. (When I’m not cranky-bent, I’ll have to cycle back to this.)
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Peter Hughes & Simon Marsh collaborated to make The Pistol Tree Poems (Shearsman, 2011).
The poems are driven by a mathematical structure. They start with this 53 line poem and go back and forth with each reply over 4 years, dropping the size of verbal canvas by 1 line until it is only 1 line each.
At times the exchange of conversation echoes in form; one does saw tooth, then the other. A solid block, for solid block. One inserts quotes, etc.
They have a renga-feel to them, for example, one mentioning shadows, (“tiles of/primary brightness/cast in/muntin shadow) the other replying the sunlight cast in a niche with a stuffed weasel in it. (Any poem is alright by me to be an autobiographical story if that story starts “I have dusted the stuffed weasel”.)
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John C. Goodman’s The Shepherd’s Elegy (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, UK, 2011)
Format-wise I may have to scan an except because html would not happily do some of this formating, but its not formatting for its own sake. Although at times I don’t “understand” what I’m reading, it is striking and absorbing. There is a play at work in some of the pieces that deconstructs words and ideas by letters. It mixes in another language and flows forward here and there. I have only got halfway but from early on it was flagged for re-reading and “hey – listen to this one” or “ooh, look at this!”
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Fay Aoyagi’s In Borrowed Shoes (Blue Willow Press, 2006), p 49
ants out of a hole –
when did I stop playing
the red toy piano?
Two bits of life colliding. Who knows the why of the when and yet it seems a good mirror of life. She keeps to the spectrum of haiku where there is a contrast, two elements in contrast or complementing in a fresh way. The poem unfolds in the mind, not unfolded for you by the poet. p. 82
withered grass –
footsteps of an assassin
become mine
Season is set, that late fall, after the ground freezes. Who hasn’t walked alone to think, by footsteps or shadows, they are being followed to realize self-consciously, that it is one’s own self one perceives. And then that turn outward to could self be in a withered season, a killer. It is a kind of compassion to conflate or equate capacity of the Other and that of the self.
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eclipse, fall 1997 issue
It features Gloria Escomel, Salvador Torres, Carmen Rodriguez and Jorge Etcheverry. Jorge is going to be one of the readers at an April reading I’m organizing with the good people of SLOWest Coffeehouse. (FB info) Haven’t cracked open yet but when life passes something relevant into your hands…
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Soundings, edited by Christopher Levenson and Brian Cameron (Buschek, 2005)
This anthology of some of the Ottawa poets I’d meant to get for some time. Former classmates and professor and people I’ve met since. I’m curious to go thru the selections.
I was curious what Brick Billing had done since last I’d seen of his writing but although it was 8 years between seeing that and the book being published, the poem was from 1996, so he’d still be in university student life rather than on the prof side of things.
By time poems get to an anthology, the poems are often ancient news for the poet who is a project or several past there. It’s a snapshot in time if nothing else.
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Peter F Yacht Club, versefest edition
Much to look forward to reading in here as it has a lot of people I know I enjoy the writing of and others I’m curious about their new work.
Paige Ackerson-Kiely has 3 poems in the issue, one entitled Kintsugi, a wonderful term meaning to fix broken pottery by filling the crack with resin and gold. It goes,
Expunged from the wont of them.
The firm feelings, like stacked plates
pushing toward the back
of the cabinet. Not to be used, nor eaten
from. There are a dozen ways to give
to your neighbour: the fence, cups of sugar,
removal of snow and what it portends.
You may have the air I sucked;
the whore I told things to.
Verisimilitude, complacent crack –
how damaged we became
to catch a break, to be touched, mended
was my belief in humanity.
What an interesting turn about within the poem. The practice of Kintsugi involved not only mending but claims that potters broke the pots on purpose just so they could have the decorative mending. It sort of takes wabi-sabi to the level of artifice, affectation. Transience and brokenness in vogue, rather evoking the confessional poet that when there’s no more things to confess just exaggerate pure imagination to keep the habit going, or look for trouble to perpetuate the art.
What’s the alternative to healing? We can pretend we move on, let the unresolved rot, shuck old selves. Like Pulitzer novelist Margaret Mitchell said, “I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken — and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.”
There’s some depth to this poem as it contemplates the interconnections between people, our relationships to our own cracked places. Interesting twist at the end that it “was my belief”. What is it now? Is the social contract greater or lesser or torn up? What is humanity for if not to connect with?
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Leslie Vryenhoek’s Gulf (Oolichan, 2011)
Gulf was something of a gulp. I read it all in 2 days, the first 70 pages in a bite. Not that it is light reading, but it is beautiful reading with little pings of insight thru it. “Coming back, again, again” may be the most effective poem I’ve read on the chemical state of depression.
The book as a whole seems a taking stock of life thus far, a recounting of coming of age at each decade with the clear vision of hindsight against the disorientation of moving. There’s a compassion for past self that is a hallmark of the poem. The common thread binds all the poems but the amount of change in relationship to moving and what is told makes it not a poem retelling one story too long.
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Secession by Chus Pato, translated by Erin Moure, I haven’t yet started.
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Economies of Scale: derek beaulieu interviews rob mclennan (above/ground, 2012), I haven’t started yet.
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in pdf, It‘s Alive She Says by Cole Swensen, p. 28
We remember so little
we may as well live
in windows. People in movies
are as kind as split seconds.
There’s something about Cole’s cadence that allows me to readily hear. in p. 29, “Please”
Please.
I’m going to ask you
one thing
don’t bring on
the future yet,
there is a moment
I need to return to
a moment that lives
in a valley between
our breath
and our breathing.
Is it just a matter of bias lining up so the ideas reinforce my point of view, elaborate in different words the things I’m already attracted to so it becomes not new information but a kind of yay-saying in a more complex form? Or do I expose myself to so much that I disagree with, break my head on what I don’t understand so a safe place of beautifully phrased contemplations on what I could agree with provides a service of comfort, overlap and extension?
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Nobody by Michael Laskey at Writer’s Almanac.
a snowball or two to fling
at the pine tree trunk, at least
find some reason to take you out
of yourself: scrape a patch of grass clear
for the birds maybe; prod at your shrubs
What a beautiful way to do a stanza break. The thought is complete and stands alone and then works to extend. A poem of kindness to self, to get out of the chair and into the world with your animal self to go snuffle about. While more of an instruction and lecture of exhortation than story or language play, it is writing that serves. And advice I’ll soon heed.
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What does it take for a poem to have the weight and hold of salience and significance? What makes me go from skim to stand still and pay attention?
If poetry is an extension of life, temperament, personality, class, worldview, comparable ratios and bents should yield a construction of ideas that appeal…ugh, almost had it.
I feel like I’m getting closer to understanding.
The easy plot arc, the writing poems as if they were a novel where conflict is built in to hook forward, even if done well, is a parlour game. That doesn’t prevent or ensure a good read.
At the same time it beats my brain the anecdote that Ray Souster wrote smooth poems and then beat them up to make them less pretty, to add hiccups. Sort of like washing hair then gelling them into super-hold just out of bed look.
A poem can be too finished or missing too many pieces for me, or be too elaborated. (Where is my sweet spot exactly?)
Infinite diversity, infinite beauty and yet some beauties don’t line up behind my fenceline of filter. Some I can get a better view of.
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Poetry talk is this new awesome poetry round up column Amanda Earl has started.