From December to January Sparh raced up the bestseller list, Bok entered it and Kate Greenstreet fell off of Small Press Distribution top 30 list. Tao Lin and Amiri Baraka are close to the top month after month.

[via ren powell]
On January 22, 2008, the Burmese poet Saw Wei was arrested for publishing an eight-line poem entitled “February Fourteenth” in the weekly publication Love Journal.
The acrostic poem spells out “General Than Shwe is crazy with power”.
Saw Wei, a popular poet and performance artist, has headed up the poetry recital group, White Rainbow, fundraisers for AIDS orphans. He participated in the 1988 uprising, and has been an active proponent of human rights. Saw Wei is now in prison, held incommunicado. No information regarding charges has been released to the public.
Babel Fruit would like to call for contributions for a special supplemental: a selection of acrostic poems to be published on February 14th. The poems may spell out any word you feel is appropriate.
We encourage readers and contributors to print out Babel Fruit Literary Journal
Fruit Literary Journal‘s PDF collection (including Saw Wei’s poem) and mail it to their diplomatic representative in Myanmar.
Let’s make this happen! There are only five days left until the deadline, but we can do it. Don’t revise and revise this time. Rage!
I am hoping there will be so many poems I will be totally overwhelmed and will need many, many people to help compile the poems.
Send poems to editors [at] babelfruit.org and put “Wei” in the subject line.
We also encourage other direct initiatives to help Saw Wei. Send individual or group responses to your diplomatic representatives to draw attention to this cause.
P.S. The end product anti-poetry issue

For comparison a different review of the same movie, Cloverfield. It is also taking about half the length, taken from the center. This length is shorter for this reason.

I think we can see the difference in the point of view expressed, how each of the writers positions himself to the movie.

The length of phrase and clause is longer here. The casual string of hyphenated phrases is gone. From these alone and by the missing all caps, can we see a more controlled tone?

The punctuation has some overlaps from the other review, but the communicative purpose is different. Italics are like homophones of each other. In both we see italics but what didn’t cross over in the translation to punctuation is how all but one italics here are for titles, not emotive emphasis. The apostrophes here are predominately possessive about characters or director or actor rather than contractions. Quotes here are dialogue, rather than sarcastic “so-called”.

Taking a page from Elizabeth S Clarke’s book, in the figurative sense, an excerpt of what I got out of a movie review: Non-punctilious Cloverfield.

(What remains is still emotive. Is coherancy, greater or lesser? How much of the content and writer identity successfully carried when “stripped of content”? Even now it still seems like a negative review; speaking of reviews.)

I was all set to buy Li-Young Lee’s latest. I went to the store and found a copy, was toddling about the store carrying it, anticipating playing the CD but then, what’s this, Erratic. Love that word. A thin volume by Donna Kane from Hagios, 2007.

Random opening to a page lands in Summer Solstice p. 61

your head full of chlorophyll,
heart shucking winter like a clayload of guilt, like pollen
with its no-aim strategy, touching everything
to compensate loss. You exceed yourself.

Eyes wide, south dry, open a wow. The palette and shifts of image, the knowledge of biology tied to emotional life, the precision and momentum grab me. That the heart should have simultaneously opposite weights is exactly right. The poem has a flow that stops and goes and can’t be predicted and yet fits as much as water fits the trough it makes in land.

p. 25, Facts, at risk of quoting in entirety.

It’s not that facts lack wonder,
it’s that they allow so little drama
the maudlin heart asphyxiates.

The facts arrive in the past tense, grow brilliant,
frail as leaves skidding along the curb.

Maybe you’re late.

Show me one wonder
free of irony.

I hear the cash register calling insistently now.

Here’s a brain that sits on the balance of absorbing beauty and keeps cynicism. It has no excess. It checks itself from going on too long in any direction yet has emotional power. Every phrase turned out, pivoting, thoughtful and restrained and yet needing restraining from the intensity of loss. There’s not an excess word. Ideas are clipped back and yet have a poetic smoothness to them.

I felt my original planned purchase sinkholing. I’m pretty sure I can’t leave this book here where someone else might buy it before I come back, greed winning over charity to fellow man.

Yes I caved. The poems are a pleasure to tongue to read aloud. The Garter Snake (p. 46) poem sits on the painful place of trying to emphatize with a dying snake that one is helpless to aid and reconcile death and continuity. Early Summer (p. 42) also does a lacing together of different frames of time and tries to make different years and points in life in the same physical space reconcile. Instead of it being what it could easily be, a wanton indulgence in pity as romantic, she pulls out of the wistful and happy memories, the past that can’t be fully reached.

The lilacs are done.
Bees and hummingbird-moths have sucked
the blossoms dry,
gorged themselves into a chronic nostalgia.
Let’s go. I’m as homesick here as anywhere.

The line breaks add to the power. Love that displacement of the moths, they are the ones who are addled by memories, not me. The final note of there being no home adds another layer of depth to what is universal. But that harder note is not the choice I see made often. The turning away may be presumed to have happened outside the poem but more often I see the tone kept in happy zone then ach-me-nostalgia-twas-good is the end note not the full progression out of the frame.

Perhaps I’m more moved by the sadder range of poems but there are also ones like one spun off from a Ronnie Hawkins quote Once I ate a Moose Turd that is more conversational without losing compression. Its turns are more comic “So this is me. Unafraid/ of success but striking off in the wrong direction./

Love Poem for Two Hands has a more festive tone too. It, naturally enough, has a light deft touch, a playfulness in buttercup /yellow bra tossed/ on my turquoise tee-shirt,/ the glacial lake until we are led to your hands, / with a pitch so perfect they no longer/ belong to you.

I could keep going but then I’d end up just shuffling the whole book by quotes into one very long post.

This is her second book of poetry. She runs artist camps and the Writing on the Ridge reading series.The biggest line-up of readers was last year of the 7 years so far.

She did launches of the book on the east coast. She is still doing launches on her west coast home. Maybe that leaves room for a later Ontario launch still if she can come this way.