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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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Thu, 04 Aug 2011
QUESTIONS FOR THE SPHINX by Stuart Bartow
Stuart Bartow's Questions for the Sphinx delves deeply into questions of knowledge and insight (emobdied in the remote image of the sphinx), and the book's search is ultimately tenative--seeking knowledge that can only be glimpsed.
"Ars Poetica" is one fine example of the book's thematic focus:
Ars Poetica
One night you're out walking
in the village where you have lived for years
and stray down a street
you never noticed before.
You pass several houses,
force yourself to ignore the one
whose tenants are under the spell
of a television's blue haze,
pass the one where a naked body
drifts behind a curtain's veil,
and step briskly through the strains
of Hank Williams, another
with Mozart's violins.
In one house there are birds,
Finches perhaps, chaotic and lovely,
in a clandestine aviary.
A voice seems ready to break through a window,
to fly from the house
crying something shrill, insistent,
human enough to make you realize
there is a language all beings speak,
but in unfamiliar words.
Back home you attempt to translate
the dialect you heard
but lose it just like any other memory
you told yourself you would keep forever.
You vow to return to the street,
the house, the living book
that each bird makes.
Things get in the way, so weeks,
or years pass before you're back,
only to find the house abandoned,
windows broken.
So you go home with nothing
and write a poem about an empty house
where the silence inside is massive
as a forest at midnight.
"Back home you attempt to translate/ the dialect you heard/ but lose it just like any other memory/ you told yourself you would keep forever." The knowledge in memory is fleeting, grasped only briefly, before it before it escapes our clutches. It's a sobering thought, of how little we truly know.
WHAT FOCUS IS by Matthew Spireng
The lyrics of Matthew Spireng's What Focus Is have a lovely grace to them, in the way they balance an expansive view with a precise attention to detail. This combination is especially hard to pull off, and Spireng does this effectively.
The books's title poem is an appropriate example:
What Focus Is
... as beauty
makes background of all around it.
- Les Murray,
"The Emerald Dove"
This a bald eagle, the first seen
so all else-the smooth curve
of the road ahead, the distant view across
fields and hedgerows into a green valley-
is lost, guessed at now, though the eagle close
and magnificent flying up from the shoulder
only yards from the car is as clear in memory
as if a photo had been snapped that instant,
even the eyes, head turned toward the car, sharp.
Only the bird, and background, beauty and background,
as the bird soaring might find beauty itself: one hare
seen first from afar, then, as if tethered together,
the magnificent bird swoops down out of the background,
focused only on the beauty it sees-the hare in a field
filled with clover it does not see-to pluck it up from the ground.
The bird may only see a certain type of beauty, but the reader takes it all in, and is the richer for it.
MANIA KLEPTO: THE BOOK OF EULENE by Carolyne Wright
I'm in love with Eulene, the unforgettable protagonist of Carolyne Wright's Mania Klepto. She takes us on an energetic romp through her vision. These brisk poems are never dull, often funny, and always illuminating.
While the poems of Mania Klepto are varied in their length and techniques, they all share a strong, propulsive energy through their scenes. Here is one example:
Eulene's a nun now,
kneeling in her college room.
No vows yet, and no vestments,
she dares to call the winter sun
down on her house. Let it sear away
the hashish smells, dog stains
in the hallway. That bummer,
memory, building its nests in the drawers.
Let it burn into the beer-bleared eyes
averted when Eulene walks in.
Fears that roll the sleeping bags tighter
behind Venetian blinds. Bullies
who look for victims in the mirrors.
Eulene packs her only change
of clothes, peels the labels
from her judgment jars,
the fist in her rib cage
clenching and unclenching.
She's signed her soul up
for a job, reassigned all wakeful
questionings, quick-change artists
moving in next door. She holds
her bones to their own promises,
escape routes into the country
cordonned off.
The protagonist, Eulene, cannot leave the path she is on, "escape routes into the country/cordonned off." Propelled along, she has "signed her soul up/for a job," and she awaits her fate, "the fist in her rib cage/clenching and unclenching." This poem, like the rest of the book, grabs your attention and never lets up.
W.E. Butts' poems in Radio Time are steeped in memory, yet nostalgia never gives way to sentimentality. I admire their affectionate yet clear-eyed view of the world as it once was.
"The Lake" is a nice embodiment of Butts at work:
The Lake
I don't know how Father managed
that summer I was five,
on his factory pay,
to bring us to the glistening lake
and white clapboard cottage
for a week, its small rooms
filled with early July light,
and what seemed to me a thousand birds
singing through the open windows,
past the waving flowered curtains.
Perhaps he borrowed the money
from my uncle, who would
be dead a few years later,
at fifty-four, the only time
I ever saw my father weep.
But we were happy those days,
my parents and I,
by that lake called "Silver,"
and in its bright water
that returned us,
redeemed and shivering,
back to our currency of air.
Each afternoon, I walked
along the shoreline,
gathering shells and stones
from where the wet sand
touched a mysterious silence
that somehow
echoed through me,
even on that final morning
of clouds and rain,
when we left for home.
This poem, recalling a pleasant brief respite from economic and other difficulties, sees both the harshness of the world and the beautiful refuges from it. That tension creates a compelling poem.
CAMERA STELLATA by Dana Curtis
Camera Stellata by Dana Curtis is a intriguing book, freely blending elements of the bizarre and the beautiful into hard-to-forget scenes.
Salamander
She invents the musician at the crossroads,
wrapped in grey silk and a scorched repertoire:
she said her death lobbied to be gruesome,
maggots preferable to fact, her limit
stared volcanic in broken bones-she won't
live anywhere she can imagine, won't
intuit a key, a window, a shred
of cloth caught on thorns. Be no more, in a
cough behind her hand; there will be legless
women on that shore, and their boats
a secret method, music uninvented,
etched in skin. She takes me to the center
of lava rains to stare the headlights black
at the X completing the open door.
The legless woman, the shredded cloth, the thorns, lava rains: this is a provactive conjunction of images, following the logic of a dream, that immerses the reader in a striking landscape. I don't pretend to follow all of it literally, but I'm taken in.
TWO GHOST POEMS by Frederick Turner
I am a longtime admirer of Frederick Turner's work, for its breadth of formal and intellectual range, and the way it achieves this breadth without neglecting the emotional aspects of experience. Turner's latest book, Two Ghost Poems, is no disappointment.
The book is a sequence of two long poetic sequences, exploring themes of the journey, of aging, and of memory. "Terminus" is an example of the book's technique:
Terminus
Behind the corner, over that far hill
Where the last train pulls into the last station
And steam expires into the gold dusk chill-
That's Peace Of Mind, the final destination.
And somewhere up ahead, the traveler,
Who now must haul his bag up on his shoulder,
Knows there's a place nearby where old friends are,
Friends who are never getting any older:
Some kind of cottage with a southwest view,
A kitchen-garden, as the mail insisted,
Grape-arbor, and an outdoor barbecue.
Who might have thought that such a place existed?
Halfway he stops and looks back with a sigh.
A plume of smoke still towers in the sky.
The "final destination," evoked from a suburban landscape, becomes something darker, even eternal.
IMPROBABLE MUSIC by Sandra Kohler
I admire the way the poems of Improbable Music quietly depict scenes from the everyday, while opening those small scenes up into larger perspectives. The poems are welcoming and inviting, on both small and large scales.
"Notes" is one example:
Notes
The sky is an empty bowl, the light
something I turn away from. My son
is in Boston this morning. I don't know
if he's as happy in love as he was. Does he?
In a dream just before the alarm wakes me,
a man emptying a dishwasher puts pieces
of paper away with the dishes, notes
about who each piece of silver or glass
or china reminds him of. My life is like
the glasses this man is putting away, fragile
yet clear container of past and present, full
of signs of the people in it. Everywhere
shafts of language open into our lives.
A friend tells me how strange her husband
seems with his father; another, that his son's
therapist said the child has the self-esteem
of an ant. Separating, parents find they have
divorced their children, not their shared past.
I cannot give up the trappings of motherhood,
my husband those of fatherhood. Love and
alienation are names defining the possible,
a world of interiors, artificial as all our homes.
No one moves freely in their gardens, rooms,
corridors, the spaces of art and order we've
created. We enter them trailing remnants
of bondage, old woes, the stories
and children of suffering.
It's difficult to imagine a more everyday title than "Notes," but from the notes and images invoked in the poem, we move to "old woes,/the stories/and children of suffering." Nothing, not even everyday life, is easy, nor can we escape the press of suffering, and this poem memorably reminds us of these facts.