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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Kevin Walzer, a poet, poetry publisher, husband, and father.
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Tue, 02 Jun 2009
I've updated the tool that we use to connect new postings at this blog--the news feed for WordTech Communications--to the sites for each of our imprints. The previous tool worked OK, but it was slow, and the server to update the tool was often offline. We've since moved to rss2html, which is fast, lightweight and easy to use. I'm very pleased with it.
Mon, 01 Jun 2009
GHOST OF FASHION by Leslie Jenike
Ghost of Fashion by Lesley Jenike is a jaunty, humorous read: Jenike riffs on popular culture with a casual wit that belies the sophisticated intelligence at work.
Consider "Bye-Bye Birdie":
Bye-Bye Birdie
The army’s got you now
So the Lord came down, said, Lemme make you
sovereign of Heaven and I said, Man, take me back
to that long brown torso of a desert, Jordon a scar
dragged through the land and I would’ve kissed him,
would’ve held a sign and waited on the tarmac
for his plane to land ‘cause, Lord, see if you can stand
when the wind comes in playing a man playing
a woman playing the guitar all hips and lips and
ass. You be his bitch, his décolletage glowing star-
bright symbol, his choir of teen angels singing
in paradise forever. “Do you know how to twist?”
Boy, do I. My little river and fruitless lake
can mambo even in the middle of a horror
of a winter when the sky is an eye clouded over
and mother comes in, just as his song pitches
a fit on the radio. The phone’s tucked between
my jaw and shoulder and I’m talking to God
and I’m telling God I’ve loved more. More
have I spent so bye-bye now to my holier-than-
thou baby digging his pin into my naked chest
saying, “Now we’re going steady. Now we’re official.”
This poem drives through an intense stream of phrases and associations, evoking as much as it states, until it lights on the gentle line: "Now we're going steady. Now we're official." Sound and fury, sigifying something.
The poems of Serena Fox's Night Shift are gritty in their subjects--scenes from an emergency room--but surprisingly varied in technique. Some of Fox's poems are traditional lyrics, while others are more fractured and fragmentary sequences--a collage of voices, images, data, and stories.
Here's one good example of Fox's style:
The Angio
My father lies at the end of my white coat,
witnessing his own angiography. He jokes,
winces occasionally. The techs are reading
Malcolm X. Two vein grafts are
occluded. The internal mammary artery graft
looks good in many different projections. In
this decade, we are redirected towards the
mammary, for our hearts’ blood. It
strikes me that my father has no grandchildren.
A patient of mine had his coronaries done for the
third time with a graft from his gastric artery.
Truly, the way to a man’s heart...
ha ha... We have bitten of the heart and the
heart is The Tree. The serpent recoils post-op.
Not one of us is ready for the next exposure.
I did not want to
bring him here, because I did not want him to
know how easily he fits into my pocket, and
to what lengths I’ll go to keep him there. My
father observed the
autopsy of his father, who walked around Miami
for a week with a massive coronary occlusion,
and he can— my fingers at his temples,
holding all I ever need
to be-- watch steadily as the
dye, serpentine, drips
down the screen.
The rapid stream of images here, bordering on surrealism, evokes the sense of dislocation that a patient faces: this small example is entirely characteristic of Fox's strong technique.
FINDING WATER, HOLDING STONE by James Bertolino
James Bertolino's poetry is striking for the way it makes quick, startling connections between disparate images and ideas. Melding hyper-attentiveness to detail with, at times, a gentle surrealism, Bertolino's work in Finding Water, Holding Stone never fails to surprise.
His technique is on strong display in "Molecules":
Molecules
Back when electric lights
were a new thing,
people thought the tiny
flashes they sometimes
saw beyond the corners
of their eyes
had to do with
the mystery of electricity.
Now we know those
blinking bursts are from
almost unimaginably small
alien spacecraft.
We needed to comprehend
that intelligence doesn't reside only
in things that are large.
Even molecules have
creation myths
to help prove
they exist.
Alien spacecraft? Perhaps that's a bit absurd, but the notion of creation myths applying to the smallest units of matter is a striking one.
GEOMETRY OF DREAMS by Barbra Nightingale
Geometry of Dreams by Barbra Nightingale is a collection full of surprises. Nightingale is not afraid to make connections between the small events of everyday life and large, even fundamental questions about love, the physical and natural world, and more.
Here's one good example:
Particle and Wave: Quantum Physics
Say there is a wall
and a gun
and atoms clustering
where they can't be seen.
Each "bullet" floats
to a Bell curve
as clearly as if pasted,
as unexplained as light
exiting before it enters
like two people
whose spatial planes
move together and apart
in the destabilized air
if only for an hour.
What quark of recognition
ignited in that time?
What charm created or broken
in the unstill space between them?
Does movement make a sound?
If so, does it go ta dum
ta dum or tinkle softly
like broken glass?
Evoking atoms as if they were bullets, as it were, is a striking connection. Nightingale's work offers many such pleasures.
POSSESSING YOURSELF by Tim Kahl
What I admire about Tim Kahl's Possessing Yourself is the way the poems in the book often worry their ideas, work through them, turn them over in a thinking-aloud fashion, that shows the mind at work. Here's an example, "To Live Enough":
To Live Enough
The morning sun slaps me with purpose,
and in America that means I should be
competing somewhere. But I am analyzing
the news come from afar and making no progress,
witness to another moral vacuum,
dark clots of desire thickening here and there.
I push myself to ask what’s wrong with
wanting, that little pinprick of the flesh
that keeps everyone moving in the morning,
but in America the word heaps: it means
wanting too much. I ask the empty branch
of the apricot why it should want to live enough.
The mouth of a busy robin answers.
I hurry off to school with my two sons.
A mother tells me she is holding her son
back from starting kindergarten,
another year before he learns
how to do what must be done.
I could tell her that the markets will
punish him, but I don’t want my story
to influence her decision. She hails from
Mexico City, and I let her America soak
into me. Time for analysis later,
when my winnings are
bleached and burned by the sun.
"I am analyzing/ the news come from afar and making no progress..." This is a frank admission. But the poem itself enacts the process of analysis, before finally concluding, "Time for analysis later,/when my winnings are/bleached and burned by the sun." The "bleached and burned" image is startling, evocative, and, emerging from Kahl's musings, decisive.
Karen Head's Sassing is an aptly titled book: these narrative poems are full of sass, their speakers standing proud against difficult, sometimes hardscrabble experiences.
A particularly strong poem is "Southern Gothic":
Southern Gothic
The best I can offer
is that my granny and papa
lived on a dead-end dirt road
in a single-wide trailer,
that one of Daddy’s sisters
accidentally drank rat poison
stored in an old green wine jug
after a night of cards and drinking,
that Mama and Daddy married,
sixteen and eighteen,
three weeks into his Army Basic Training
and no baby came for over a year,
that I was born on Peachtree Street—
Crawford Long Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia
six weeks early, four pounds,
nothing but wailing,
that I was baptized outside
Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church,
then blacklisted from membership
when I became a Catholic.
My life has been full of movement
one Army base to another—
opera in Stuttgart
schnapps at a Mississippi levee.
Hell, for me, has two syllables
and I’m always fixin’ to do something
so, you can imagine my surprise
when the doctor said, “Lupus,”
and I realized what was finally at my door.
"Hell, for me, has two syllables/and I'm always fixin' to do something": that's the voice of defiance. The poems in Sassing are always doing something.
Tue, 21 Apr 2009
Book of the Day: All That Is Left by Judith Harway
I am haunted by the narrative arc of Judith Harway's All That Is Left: her family fleeing pogroms, travelling far until they find relative safety, but never really escaping. The journey, these poems suggest, is never over.
This theme is strongly evoked by "Before the Pogrom":
Before the Pogrom
Early spring.
A dark room lit
by candles. Children
on the floor before
a smoky hearth,
toes of their shoes
cut off for growing.
Smells of soup
and cabbage,
damp socks hung
to dry. Straw mattresses
piled high with winter
quilts. Outside, a shawl
of rain drawn over
evening’s face. Flocks
of goats lie huddled
on the leaky sod
of rooftops, handcarts
turning home
down muddy lanes.
A gathering of relatives
who stare into
the slow shutter of history,
afraid to move.
At Pesach
the Haggadah tells us
of a time of bondage,
of the flight
of the Israelites from Egypt
into the wilderness
of freedom. Plagues
rained on the land.
The hand of the Almighty
smote even babies
dead. This is the way
I understand the day
my grandmother’s family
left Meskaporichi:
there never was a choice:
A journey starts
when it is time to go.
"A journey starts/when it is time to go." And go Harway's family did, not a minute too soon.
Book of the Day: The Girls on the Roof by Mary Swander
Mary Swander's The Girls on the Roof is a rollicking tale. Narrating the story of a Mississipi River flood, the narrative sequence is fast-paced and downright entertaining.
While the poems are too long to quote in their entirety, here's an excerpt that gives some of the flavor of the book:
From "Fireworks"
The day the levee broke,
the day the Mighty Mississippi washed
Maggie and Pearl, mother and daughter,
up on top of their catfish dive,
the river rushed through our tiny town
of Pompeii (pronounced Pom'pee),
with a whoosh, crack, bam-boom,
a power so Herculean that with one
swift slap of its hand, the water
knocked out all the windows
and tore the door right off
the hinges of Crazy Eddy's Cafe.
The very gates of hell opened and
the Great Flood of the Twentieth Century
came crashing, dashing through.
Maggie and Pearl had been warned.
Sure, the whole town knew.
Any fool could've seen it coming.
Yup, and now ten years out
we're all back here
at the Great Flood Reunion.
We sit in the cafe,
landlubbers and river rollers,
shaking our heads and clucking
our tongues about those bad waters,
the flow that carries us
back to a different time
when the very ground
under our feet gave way
and every twig we clung to
floated off beyond our reach.
And now ten years out,
we struggle to remember
that summer, think about where
we were and where we went
when the big wall hit.
We gather here together once again,
the living and the dead,
the seen and the unseen,
the genuine and the ghosts--
all who've come and gone,
each taking a place at a table,
in a booth or on a stool,
duct tape stuck to vinyl.
We gather once again
to piece together a tall tale,
a story too long and wide
for a single person to spin.
We tilt back our chairs,
watch turkey gizzards
swimming in the Mason jar
on the counter, hear the waves
lap at the banks outside the door
and realize just how lucky we are
to be here on dry land
with a beer in hand.
Pearl, as always, takes orders,
white apron tied around her waist,
pencil tucked behind her ear.
She scratches down our yarns
on her stained yellow pad,
and oh, we wish her near,
just a little closer, bending
her sweep of red hair,
her bosom, over our steaming
plates of eggs over easy.
Around and around,
we twirl, overalls
and rubber boots scraping mud
on the bottom rungs,
recalling that horrible year
when we thought
we'd never see the sun again.
I invite you to take a closer look, sit back, and let the book's energy wash over you.
Book of the Day: Modigliani's Muse by Jacqueline Kolosov
Jacqueline Kolosov's Modigliani's Muse is a powerful collection of poems that depicts the interior life of the noted painter. Kolosov's poems are well-crafted, with a painterly attention to visual detail and rhythm.
This poem is characteristic of Kolosov's technique:
First Meeting, Lunia
The Polish emigre, Lunia Czechowska, became one of Modigliani's closest friends and posed for numerous portraits.
You wear new stockings, shimmer,
as you sit in the inflorescent moon-
light on the terrace of that queer cafe,
seized by fatigue and the mercurial
energies pulsing in and around you.
A rustling in the chestnuts, he
approaches. Eyes whisper, I adore you.
Cigarettes at once are handed round.
Pencils tumble from his pockets,
a silver flask, a squirrel-tipped brush.
Once you, too, worshipped at this altar,
but found you could not live
on moonlight alone. Around your finger,
a band of diamonds; around your throat,
Maman's clutch of pearls. In the cafe,
his eyes upon you--Beneath this moon,
face like a madonna's, where is your man?
Indulge such possibilities, and you'll be
lost. Besides, you like life as a soldier's wife;
so many days like freshwater pearls.
Circling, his voice already sketching,
once again, that Sphinx's stare.
Were the cafe a pyramid along the Nile....
You suppress the thought, sip iced anisette.
Moonlight swims through your hair.
Feverish strokes swiftly capture the face
you've laid bare around the soiled cups,
the brooding pigeons, cafe chatter.
An immortal you is on the rise.
Around you, a murmuring of the gods.
"A murmuring of the gods": that luxuriant sound is found throughout Kolosov's book.
Book of the Day: Two Estates by David Rigsbee
I hope it's not too much of a pun to describe David Rigsbee's Two Estates as a book of stately lyrics: dense in the rhythm of their lines, deep in the historical, even classical sense that they evoke.
Here is an excellent example of Rigsbee's technique at work in this collection, "Into the Wall":
Into the Wall
An anvil-shaped cloud
spreads its iron shadow
across the hill adjacent to our town.
As on a floor viewed upside down,
other clouds, in turn, suggest
figures of the moment,
requiring only the arrival
of the next bit of future to cancel
the suggestion. The struggle
is ancient: clouds’ agon drives the painter
into the wall, attempting impossible
compressions proper to time beyond
a lifetime. Here, where the sound
of a scooter merges with a wasp’s nest,
a pack of flies beats up a swallow—
until the next frame. Or the classical
head turns with its look
of a god disappearing into time:
things are as they are,
turning in middle air,
and as they will be,
emerging from the rock.
This poem has a strong sense of solidity, unfolding itself line by line, as meaning comes "emerging from the rock." Rigsbee's subtle mastery is on display here.
Fri, 27 Mar 2009
Book of the Day: The Surface of Things by Phebe Davidson
The spare lyrics of Phebe Davidson's The Surface of Things hold up small details to great scrutiny: Davidson's images and lines are clean, precise, and quiet, yet evocative of larger truths. Here's one example, "Aubade":
Aubade
You left the dock early today
the water gray,
light just smearing
the lake, nearly
but not quite here. The kayak, white
and clean, riding
low and graceful.
The long paddle
dipping smoothly. All elegant
gliding movement.
One bright color
your orange vest.
This morning poem, picturing a kayaker gliding on a lake, makes great use of sound and color for its atmospheric setting. Like the kayaker, the poem is all "elegant/gliding movement."
Book of the Day: Ecology II: Throat Song from the Everglades by Anne McCrary Sullivan
Anne Sullivan's Ecology II: Throat Song from the Everglades immerses me as deeply in a specific landscape as any book I have ever read. Sullivan brings a deep, specific knowledge of the Everglades' ecology, and from that rooted position, opens up her subject into rich, resonant detail.
Consider "Anhinga Pairing":
Anhinga Pairing
When the male anhinga's bright blue eye ring comes,
when he displays his fine feathers, raising his tail,
waving the wings, she begins to pay attention.
Then they swoop and glide together
near the nesting area--preen together, lifting
and fluffing feathers, rubbing each other's bills.
But they are not a pair until he finds the perfect
twig, offers it to her and she accepts.
Last year we saw him offer a twig, and she took it.
Even as we were all saying "Ahhh..." she lifted
that stick and hit him in the head with it, flew away.
Acceptance means something. And when she does
accept, they become monogamous in a bond that lasts
several years. What I haven't been able to learn
is how they go about separation. Is it mutual, a sort of inherent
biological timing? Or does one just leave? And for the other,
is there grief?
Sharply observed, the poem brings both insight about the behavior of a native Florida bird, and a larger insight about the nature of love. Nicely done.
Book of the Day: Imagine a Door by Laura Longsong
The narrative vignettes of Appalachian life in Laura Longsong's Imagine a Door are carefully, vividly crafted, giving Longsong's work a real richness and surprise. Reading these poems, I found myself drawn in time after time into Longsong's world.
There's a particuarly stong poem, "West Virginia Catholic Girl":
West Virginia Catholic Girl
Ponderous as the Sunday procession of nuns
the B & O and C & O train cars pass
by my bedroom window night and day
heaped with coal that sweats silver shine
from beneath the same earth where I find
broken arrowheads, dirt-caked blue bottles,
rusted shards of tin lids. I give up these treasures,
childish trinkets, for Joey O’Shannon's wet lips
meeting mine next to the chimney of the house
that burnt down so long ago nobody
remembers. He gives me a ring shaped
like a rose, with a bud of coal in its center. Never
to be diamonds, coal burns steadily, like the fires
of hell where I can expect—at the rate I’m going—
to endure Evermore, at least that’s what the nuns
predict. You will reap what you sow, they promise,
observing my dawdling days, imagining
my baffled nights, and I in turn can easily picture
my soul in hell. Coal flames simmer from one
flat greenish-black horizon to the other, flickering
lavishly upon the tattered cloth of my life. Yes,
Sisters, I knew even then, I will rip what I sew.
The numerous details of Catholic life, set against the backdrop of a coal-mining community in West Virginia, come alive for the reader--and, at the last line, I can't help smiling. Many of Longsong's poems offer similar pleasure.
Book of the Day: Midnight Voices by Deborah Ager
One of the things I admire greatly about Deborah Ager's Midnight Voices is the sonorous, sensuous quality of her lyrics. Ager is a poet who takes great care--and pleasure--in the way sounds collide in her lines, and the result is a poetry of unusually controlled intensity.
Consider "The Problem with Describing Men":
The Problem with Describing Men
If I said lacerated light
In an unusually warm November.
If I said ice-cold palm on my inner thigh
And the way a tree opens its branches
When sun finally heats the garden.
If I said the power of a ‘67 Charger
Mixed with a detective’s mystery.
If I said love, sometimes, yes, love
And jumping-from-a-moving-car anger.
Said the whir of a sander, the scent
Of birch, and tablespoons of sawdust.
What if I said night or a wave
Rocking into shore? If I said their names
One by one to the red sky? Said empty armchair?
Luck, dusky words, fight, torn photo.
What if I said moon? What if I said
White light dividing a lake in two?
"Luck, dusky words, fight, torn photo": this line is delicious to say aloud, and says volumes about the poem's putative subject: describing men.