Skimming

You skimmed my long, steamy letters,
the creamy portions floating up with the froth,
the spices revolving with the bursting bubbles,
separating from the dark and tangy chunks,
the slow-moving orange slices and chewy first-person.
You just dipped in your long-handled
bamboo skimmer with its wide mesh,
checked it was done, thoroughly done,
pulled out the sweetest verbs and most
pungent adjectives, added the tapioca flour
and left the letters to thicken and cool,
poured the purified notes and poems
into elegant ramekins whose surfaces
you scorched until they were brown,
brittle, smooth, disemvoweled.
Break through with your spoon and taste only
heavy softness and sweet vague memory.

"Heavy softness and sweet vague memory"--yet the memories are hardly vague.

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Wed, 29 Aug 2012

MARCH AND MAD WOMEN by Linda Aldrich

The thing I like best about the poems of March and Mad Women by Linda Aldrich is how gracefully they move between narrative and lyric: they weave themes from the past and present into an intricate whole.

Here's an excellent example of her technique at work:

Seeing Red

The cardinal goes after his reflection
in the window, then makes slow slides
down, like kites do when the wind dies.
A red flag thrown at me all morning,
morning of hard rain, dark like eclipse,
wet tree trunks bare of green, fist
of held breath, bulb of rage.
I do the things I need to do: get wood
from the dwindling pile, make a fire
I can turn my back to while I pay bills.
Today, I will drive over to see you,
bring photos and soup. I will remember
your yellow pantsuit. I will do the right thing,
show you're forgiven if the words don't come.
But the bulb cracks its strange and strangled
density, punching out the walls of rooms
where I have kept myself to please you.
I am the green stalk of the amaryllis.
The immensity of my bloom will carry me.

Juxtaposing the images of a bird, flowers, and a loved one, the speaker of this poem creates a rich portrait of emotional hues.

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LABOR DAY AT VENICE BEACH by J.D. Smith

There are flashes of darkness and glints of light in J.D. Smith's Labor Day at Venice Beach; the combination is provactive, like a shaft of sunlight breaking through stormclouds.

"Aged Parents" is an especially strong example of Smith at work:

Aged Parents

After William Meredith

Who are these grizzled children
with the same names as Mom and Dad,
sometimes wearing the same fraying clothes
they would not replace while saving
for our braces, our schooling?
Suddenly since last week,
or twenty years ago
they are drawn like pouches
of something, such as vigor,
nearly emptied.
After decades of our why and why not,
Where is or What happens when?
it is their turn to ask questions:
Can you reach this shelf for me?
Would you help me up the stairs?
Their queries may extend to
What is your name?
as if they had not, day after day,
spoken us into being.
We may answer, but on no good authority,
knowing what is now beyond our reach.

The bittersweet tone of this poem--parents losing their vigor and becoming like children--exemplifies the complex palettes that Smith uses in his strong collection.

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HISTORY OF THE BODY by Melanie McCabe

What I admire most about Melanie McCabe's History of the Body is the way that its images of the body intersect with history, evoking the vessel of lived experience, and looking past physical boundaries toward the spiritual.

The book's title poem is an excellent example of McCabe's skill:

History of the Body

What was the body before we named it?

When the skin's pale plane across our ribs was as thin
as rice paper, barely restraining the industry
of the heart and lungs. When the gawky legs
were a means, a transport, and sometimes wholly
animal, translating easily into a canter, into stalk
and pounce. When the throat could whinny or growl.

What mattered then was engine, and not what held it.

Through tar-hot summers, in and out of weeds or the red
clay along the train tracks, there was no body separate
from the self. It was simply the border, the quick sketch,
the outline that made us visible. We lived inside it
as we lived inside our names. At night in our baths,
the body obliged us with gills, with shimmer and fins.

It was only later that it became an accessory. And later still,

a blemish to conceal. There were mirrors everywhere and we
fell into them. There were other eyes and we learned we could
see through them better than through our own. We outgrew
stick figures. Our clay rounded, became other, like a thrown pot.
We ran only to avoid arriving late -climbed merely to look down,
to feel relief that we were not on the bottom.

We move toward eviction, toward learning if the self

can live unhoused. Naked. If we can go on without edges,
or if there will be nothing to learn- if there will remain only
a clean slate that will be clean always, a slate we cannot imagine,
much less write on. But for now, dream something to keep knowing
at bay. Dream that we diffuse like the scent of gardenias after rain-

sweet, unbound, no longer part of the blossoms that held us.

What a powerful poem: "We move toward eviction, toward learning if the self//can live unhoused. Naked." Can the self be separated from its body? This is the provocative question this skillful book explores.

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SONG FOR HIGHWAY 40 by Ellen Chavez Kelley

The lyrics of Ellen Chavez Kelley's Song for Highway 40 connect with the reader over a common thread of human experience: life travels, the highway of time.

"Newborn Daughter" is a good example of her technique:

Newborn Daughter

You raise a wrinkled fist, first
defiance, then curl into me and drink
your fill. Through the open window
glass chimes clink like nomad's bells.
We doze, then enter a dream of heat
and sand, travel over scalloped dunes, past
palm-lined pools until wind shifts
and lifts us back to our chair in the nursery.
We wake, but the long dream of our
journey together, now begun,
will carry us to countless,
unimagined worlds.

"The long dream of our/journey together": that yearning line encompasses many of the book's themes in its brevity. I like the way this brief poem opens out to such larger scope.

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CANNOLI GANGSTER by Joey Nicoletti

Joey Nicoletti's Cannoli Gangster is a book that is haunted by the culture and language of Italy, a sense of loss and memory as much as lived experience. That sense colors many of these poems and gives them a melancholy shade, which I find compelling.

"When Italian-American Grandmothers Rule the World" is a good example of the book's themes:

When Italian-American Grandmothers Rule the World
--For Nancy Pelosi

Weapon-like glares are fired in the direction
of those who dare
to put their elbows on the table.
Everybody gets a chance to talk,
be heard and eat and eat and eat and eat.
When the men's stomachs are sufficiently filled,
the women gather in the den and unhook their bras;
talk about their kids or watch
in arrested-heart delight
as John Travolta dances the night away
with Karen Lynn Gorney.
Smelling of garlic and Chianti,
the old Neapolitans who still curse Mussolini
clear the table with their knotted hands;
wash the good china and silver wear,
while Grandmother always prepares the next course.
When it's ready, she calls everyone back
and the women peel themselves off
the rearranged furniture of power,
still wrapped in plastic.

Literally enacting the struggle to gain a closer connection to his heritage, the speaker of this poem depicts the old and new worlds set against each other, and then finally comes to a restless peace: "Smelling of garlic and Chianti,/the old Neapolitans who still curse Mussolini/ clear the table with their knotted hands;/ wash the good china and silver wear,/ while Grandmother always prepares the next course." Powerfully spoken.

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Thu, 12 Jul 2012

A BOUNTY OF 84s by Barry Spacks and Lawrence E. Leone

A Bounty of 84s by Barry Spacks and Lawrence E. Leone is a spritely collection of poems of stanzas that comprise 84 characters each, showing, despite their short length, how capacious poetry can be; I admire their combination of brevity and breadth.

"Be Simple" is a good example of this unusual book's approach:

Be Simple

What’s needed? Comes an answer:    
         Get yourself a radish.
  Oh get yourself a Japanese radish.
                   Be simple. 

    *

When first love bloomed it was so simple
                      then came the work –
                      after 30 years it’s simple again
                             go figure    
           
    *

Opting to say nothing 
                  they sat
                  each
                  refusing to disturb the other’s reverie
       be simple
                              sit with a lover

    *

Just her shadow on a rainy pavement
a misaimed photo

all that remains
           this memento by his bed
       unframed

    *

As a teacher, I led them to complexities,
oh many warring thoughts.
                    Now I give them
                  my Dalai Lama smile

    *

   He who simplifies
respects complexity,
      does it the honor of
           strict simplification
      kensho by kensho

             *

We do get wadded up,
     defended in our own knot
when all we really desire
     is to river,
     all we need
       is to flow

    *

        Before dawn,
                    stumbling
then insanely slow steps
        to sit
        on a zafu
           with absolutely nothing to do 
            but sit

           *

Now that the neighbor’s baby has stopped crying 
             a vast nothingness
this simple bed
                       unshared too long

    *

          Simply the moon simply a river
fisherman fishing his line
             meets the water simply
    a fisherman fishing

             *

Not knowing what it is
                   to be simple
                   two old men exchange poems
                   on simplicity        
                   drink tea
                   laugh at the moon   

Simple? Despite its brief lines, this poem, in the way it circles around its subject, this poem is hardly simple--but it is powerful.

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BLIND UNCLE NIGHT by Art Homer

I admire the earthiness of the poems in Art Homer's poetry in Blind Uncle Night, their engagement with work and physicality. They feel real rather than ethereal or deeply ingrained in the intellect (though there is abundant intelligence in them).

"Buck with a Broken Horn" is a good example of Homer's approach:

Buck with a Broken Horn

First your ribs, your half-fleshed face, a hip socket
cocked above blown leaves-I call my eager pup
to "leave it"-then your rack, atypically narrow,
four points by the western count, sans eyebrow tine,
and finally the broken stump of your right horn
reminds me of the coyote chorus here two weeks ago.
Such jubilation that the owls fell silent.
It could have been the fourteen-point buck
that broke this near the base, a misplaced shot
from some early season hunter. I vote
for Mr. Big, killed days ago and processed
into steaks and summer sausage.
If I go hungry, neighbors say, it's myown fault,
because you'll feed us all, coyote, man, the lust
of does for stronger genes, and in the cold that waits
this year till spring to settle on the land,
the thousand gnawing teeth of mice,
and finally the land itself.

Ribs, face, hip-socket: this poem is palpable and engaging.

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A STUDY OF EXTREMES IN SIX SUITES by Irene Mitchell

The intense poems of Irene Mitchell's A Study of Extremes in Six Suites are remarkable for their fusion of music and memory. I am grateful for her skill.

Here is one example:

Chiaroscuro


White and flat as an altar,
tundra bruises against sky,
so pure
it's miraculous a thought survives.

This is distance without shadow,
without mist or gorge.
This is evanescent silence.
This is brooding.

The world is a disorderly place
of endless complexity,
cubes and cylinders on a bed of stone.
That's the beauty.

One covets a little glitter
against a darkening sky.

"This is evanescent silence./This is brooding." This is also powerful work.

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CARPE SOMETHING by Michael Milburn

The embrace of Michael Milburn's poems in Carpe Something is fierce: these poems grasp experience in their taut lines and don't let go.

"Lust" is a characteristic example:

Lust

Lust runs
a man as
a plow or

a gunned
motor, as
tiredness

and thirst
drive him
to satiety,

but what's
his intent?
Sex, yes,

though
sex fails
to get at

the heart
if you will
of what's

clamoring &
why, when
the stirring

on her side
says she's
not asleep,

I, who had
no plan to,
turn to her.

This poem is indeed stirring.

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HEART. WOOD. by Eric Torgersen

Eric Torgersen's poems in Heart. Wood. are dense with imagery and rendered memory. The result is a world that is full, alive, and rich within his sculpted lines.

"In March" is an excellent example:

In March

In the year's
new mud
we search out
every last
stick of wood.

We burned
in high winter
great logs,
their grain
and fragrance;

today
a damp,
chewed stick
is too good
for the dog

and fire exacts
rolled-up news,
last year's catalogs,
junk mail,
even books.

We burn
the chopping-block,
spread ashes
on the snow
over the garden.

The physicality of these lines immerses the reader in the scene they depict.

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WOMAN WITH CROWS by Ruth Thompson

What I like best about Ruth Thompson's Woman with Crows is the way these poems form a chorus that is a narrative of a life, indeed of memory itself.

Consider the spark evoked in "Fireworks":

Fireworks

Cars park in front of our house, sit there
till midnight. It's July, and hot. Rap thud, and rocket
whine, and the spit of firecrackers.
We look out our window to see the flash,
then umbrellas of stars open red or green or blue,
sift down slowly onto the dark hill. Soft as rain.

I remember lying on the grass with my friend Kurt
as running children called to one another in the darkness,
and the moment fell open around us - whistle and thump
and blossoming, and the drift of ash petals onto our faces.
Yet later, sitting in the open car, night in our hair,
we could not hold it. Fondness would not catch fire,

and we gave it up. Back at school he wrote a few times,
but friendship was nothing to me then,
tenderness was nothing, I was pursuing sex, power,
and did not have time for damp powder.
Only now do I think of him sometimes,
his sweetness which was like your sweetness.

Here in our bed tonight let us set match to fuse,
flame, blossom, open, drift like petals,
and in our hearts let there be the shapes
of all who have ever been there: lovers and friends,
wives and husbands and animals and children,
pouring molten as stars into what we are together.

There are many such poems in this book, embracing life with brio, connecting, touching.

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WALKING WOUNDED by Robert Hill Long

I respect the way that the dark poems of Robert Hill Long's Walking Wounded achieve redemption in their grim and graceful lines.

The book's title poem exemplifies Long's technique:

Walking Wounded

Strapped with a boy's lipstick-red guitar, this whitebeard
plays a last set for tips in a near-empty joint.
His longhair-boy band used to play Camp LeJeune, Fort Bragg--
head-shaved kids, beer-drunk, gung-ho, Saigon-bound. He fired

airbursts of feedback to shake them up, they yelled Fag
but sang along. Four hoarse hours later, pacified,
they called him Brother, packed his amp, shared killer weed,
girlfriend pics. Then flew off to join the body count,

or the amputees, or the ones with no visible scar
who zipped the war in their skin like a body bag
and came home to long nights, bunkered in the corner bar.
That's their whitehaired brother Orpheus who points

his red weapon at shadows, and sings, We were all gods
once. And fires the last note into the back of their heads.

This is a poem about wounded warriors, a brotherhood that transcends time, even as the men in this poem age. It's a powerful portrait.

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Thu, 24 May 2012

EVERY POSSIBLE BLUE by Matthew Thorburn

I love the jazzy flow of Matthew Thorburn's Every Possible Blue; it is a powerful collection that encompasses a rich range of emotional tones.

Consider this poem:

Horse Poetica

The one I rode in on. That mud-colored nag.
When he blinks his black eye bigger
than my fist, his eyelid's an upside-down
pocket. And the scrape, the spark of horseshoes
on dry rock-each sound has a silence
tied to its tail. Or else it gets penned up
in the mighty barrel staves of his ribs.
Oh, but staves? That makes me
hear music. That tinny harmonica, that tuneless
squeezebox, the song we ought to know
better by now, but still follow for days
down a path that's only a path because
we believe it is. Now where'd our giddy up
and go go? My horse can't canter. I hop along.
We've been outfoxed. Farmed out and fenced in.
If we were given a chance, then given
a second chance, we'd both choose a paddle
and a boat and float. Soggy but saddle- less.
We'd both need new names.
Then new shoes. Meanwhile we hang
a left at the one-armed cactus. There's another life
after this one, but it's just as dusty. Meanwhile
we're caught in a crowd of cows and cowhands.
But they part for us, they part like a Red Sea
of beef. Then they get going. Then I get
the bit between his teeth. Then he bites.
Boy, could we use a minor catastrophe or two.
Let lightning like a lasso streak straight at us.

It's elegant, jazzy, and fluid. Well done.

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THE DEATH OF FLYING THINGS by Gabriel Welsch

I admire the earthiness of Gabriel Welsch's poems in The Death of Flying Things. The poems touch the world, have dirt in their fingers, grasp at the world's solidity, while also yearning for spiritual breadth.

Here is a good example of Welsch's technique at work:

The First Seed Catalog Arrives in the Mail

This time for fantasy hits
the same week as thaw, the same
moment of fatigue at the sight
of fir trees belly-up at the curb
and tinsel bits snagged in the froth
at a storm grate this rainy day.
Look up at birds, scan the branch tips
of pear and cherry for the swell
of buds, jump once to see
if the earth gives. Make promises
to grow chard, fennel, leeks, melons-
to aerate, raise the beds, plant greens
in a burning floret at center and then
dream of the abundance junk can make-
the trowels and grow lights, the seed
trays and misters, the copper tags
and silver aerators, before the gold
of twilight warns of snow
and you catch its scent, reminding
you how hope's illusion ends in cold,
how gloss is made, not grown,
how disappointment is older than all
of it, how the best of what we grow
recurs in death after death,
roots deep beneath.

This poem, like the scene it evokes, has "roots deep beneath," extending far past its gritty surface into deeper realms.

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WHEN WE WAKE IN THE NIGHT by Tami Haaland

Tami Haaland's poems in When We Wake in the Night carry the weight of daily observation to their logical end: each poems, fused to the particular, finds great import within.

"Exhibit" is a good example:

Exhibit

The woman in the butterfly pavilion
pretends she is a statue. Today's
docent says sex is in the air, so she stays,
hoping the shine and spark of cerulean
wings will settle, and thread-like feet will
attach to her arm. Though she can't detect
pheromones, the docent says they're like scent
to a fish in a slow-moving channel.
Behind closed doors the air is tropical:
philodendra grow to the greenhouse ceiling,
hibiscus and birds of paradise bloom.
A thousand wings seem so infallible.
The docent says these creatures are reeling.
They don't even eat once they leave the cocoon.

Gesturing outward, this poem achieves its distinctions by locating the universal within the specific. I admire the technique.

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HORSE-MINDED by Suzette Marie Bishop

What I admire about Suzette Marie Bishop's Horse-Minded is the scenes it depicts of openness, of vastness: there is a sense of possibility in these poems. These landscapes do not have boundaries.

Here's one poem that enacts this waiting, this openness:

Desert Shapeshifting

Laredo, Texas

Proteus easily becomes anything here,
clear-imaged for a moment
then he is the killdeer sounding like a sneaker
squeaking outside my bedroom
or making indecipherable grackle cries
like high-pitched electronic codes.
His lantern flashing, he's looking
for Medusa, cursing at my door, again,
then turning into a small lizard,
a wildcat, an ocelot or bobcat,
its coat like a taffeta gown under moonlight.
I can only change form by changing
clothes, slipping lingerie over my head,
or by revising my memoir,
hand-doing these costume changes, uprooted
and pretending to be something desert wild.

The quicksilver transformations enacted here--metaphoric and, on some deeper level, literal--are striking and surprising, and this vivid poem lingers in the mind.

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ALL THAT REMAINS by Peter Serchuk

I like the way the poems in Peter Serchuk's All That Remains fully embody their landscapes and the human relationships they depict. Alternately wry and melancholoy, they fully engage the eye, ear, and heart.

Here's one poem that exemplifies the book's strengths:

Beauty's Saddle

Beauty's in the next room
and everyone's enchanted.
She's sitting on a piano, singing
an Irish drinking song, sober
as a Monday morning.
Her silk cocktail dress is singing
too, a few inches short of breath,
while philosophers at her feet
keep filling her glass, mesmerized
by the fingers of light on her stockings.
Gentlemen, let me be clear;
She bores me to tears with her curls
and her lilts, with her hips and
her teasing. She puts me to sleep
with her spiraling promises:
like the one she's making now,
encrypted in notes you can't possibly
hear as if she were a gate swung
open wide, and me, the lone stallion
set free to roam the world.

The wry view of beauty's teasing promises, contrasted with the speaker's desire to be "set free to roam the world" and actually experience it, is powerful. Nicely done.

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Sun, 08 Apr 2012

THE LADY VICTORY by Jane Vincent Taylor

The poems of Jane Vincent Taylor's The Lady Victory are a journey through the lives of the forgotten--residents of a home for unwed mothers and children. These powerful poems articulate their voices in a memorable way.

Here's the title poem:

The Lady Victory

At the end of a horseshoe drive
circling a statue of the Blessed Virgin,
the Home stood waiting.

Without signs, you knew
to slow down. March winds
blew the crowns of old salt cedars.

Call it southern Gothic
haunted by gossipy spirits,
guilty girls, our hidden for-bearers.

Mother sat in the silver Buick,
beautifully pressed, a polished
cotton skirt cut on the bias.
Dad had turned from telephone man
to sad unsinging
Perry Como in a small town suit.

I shivered in the backseat,
dressed to the nines, three months along
in my blue unbelted shirtwaist.

Staring out at Our Lady of Victory
I wondered why
she looked so pale and helpless

having won some war or other,
having come to stand
so high on stone.

This poem, ironically titled because the scene depicts is hardly one of victory, evokes the scene that the reader enters: Our Lady of Victory, a home for unwed mothers and children, in which the residents defy the odds to grow into peace and find a place of hope in the world.

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THE TRUTH ABOUT DEATH by Grace Mattern

One of the things I admire the most about Grace Mattern's The Truth About Death is the way the poems hold grief in a fierce clench, and wrench that grief into beauty.

This poem, "Sense Data," is a good example of how Mattern's technique works:

Sense Data

Trees backlit by morning sun
rising beyond the brook,
the reds and yellows of leaves
patterned with their own shadows.
Last night the house was noisy
with pops and cracks as if
the wood floors were adjusting
to your lost weight.
For two days your odor
was the stink of disease.
Now your car smells like smoke,
our son and his grief.
Your skin was sweetest
and stayed sweet at the curve
of bicep to shoulder, my hand
under the sleeve of your shirt.
Fear tastes like metal, tears of salt,
grief sour on my tongue.
Death is green bile bubbling
over your final smile.

The bitterness in this poem is startling, almost washing over the tender recollection of "your final smile." But this is grief, and grief is hard, and these poems are powerful.

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CADUCEUS by Sorina Higgins

I find myself deeply moved by many of the poems in Caduceus by Sorina Higgins: the poems encompass heartbreak and faith in equal measure.

"Stigmata" is a characterisic example:

Stigmata
to G. S.

Oh Lord, will You tell me: What good is grief?
What is the value of this litany, these names
like rotten beads fumbled by mumbling fingers
over and over, the terrible list always the same?

Do You not see the skin of mourning, withered
into age-brown wrinkles, hanging on the skeleton
of loneliness, or the mouth of sorrow that knows only
senile whimpers, useless dribbling undertones?

Whittled down to the diction of solitude,
bereft of loveliness, the shrinking body's
pain can wallow at the self-bent heart--
or else, transform the hands and feet to agonies

like Yours. Perhaps nearly a century of loss
need not condemn, but can resemble something like a cross.

Nicely done.

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SPOT THE TERRORIST by Lori Jakiela

A narrative collection about the working life of a flight attendant: this subject matter is promising on the surface. But Lori Jakiela's memorable collection Spot the Terrorist!--by turns absurd, poignant, and brutal-far surpasses the term "promising."

"Working the Red Eye, Pittsburgh to Vegas" captures the varied tones of Jakiela's work:

Working the Red Eye, Pittsburgh to Vegas

The man in the emergency exit row
has been drinking
from his own bottle of duty-free vodka
and because he was quiet about it,
kept his clothes on , and didn't hit
his call button even once
no one notices until we land in Vegas
and he refuses to get off the plane.
He's sure we haven't gone anywhere.
"You people think I'm a sucker," he says.
"I'm no sucker. I paid good money for this."
He boarded in Pittsburgh, my home country.
In Pittsburgh, we have two dreams:
to go to Vegas to live
and to go to Florida to die.
The gate agents call the police.
The pilots are pissed.
The A-line flight attendant
with the fake French name
twirls a pair of plastic handcuffs and says,
"These make me so-o-o hot."

My father, who stopped drinking years ago
but never found his way, loved Vegas.
He'd carry a sweatsock full of good-luck
nickels through security
and get stopped every time.
He died at home in a rented hospital bed
in Pittsburgh, not Florida.
"Sir," I say to the drunk on the plane
who squeezes his eyes shut
so he doesn't have to see me.
"Please put your shoes on."

"Fuck you," he says. "I'm not going anywhere."

The narrator's weary observance of the traveler's weariness is complicated by memories, both affectionate and hard, of the speaker's father. There is a great deal going on in this poem, emotionally, beneath its narrative surface, and the result is one of richness.

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WESTERN MOTEL by Wendy Drexler

The wry humor and sense of the solitary individual against the wide-open world are what make Wendy Drexler's Western Model compelling to me.

Here's one fine example:

Parking Lot

Cyclone fence, the daylight spill
of grocery bags casually snagged
empty on the bare corset of a branch.
I look out at the weak light of November.
A starling on the Norway maple
in the parking lot shakes
itself out all over, spangle-singing
into the wind's wide mouth.
I eat a bacon cheeseburger in the car.

It's hard to imagine a starker scene, the "bare corset of a branch," sitting by the cyclone fence, under the wind's wide mouth, as the speaker eats a bacon cheeseburger. This is humanity's place in the world, encapsulated. This brief poem is a powerful reminder of that fact.

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THROAT SINGING by Susan Cohen

Susan Cohen's Throat Singing is a gorgeous book: the poems indeed are full-throated songs. I admire the skill and richness of these yearning poems.

The title poem, "Throat Singing," is an apt illustration of Cohen's skill:

Throat Singing


he can make his bass
notes rumble with the pulse
of hoof beats on the Steppes

while his larynx also squeezes
the freakish whistle of thin air
heard in the highest passes

and his words ride hard rasping
where have you gone my ponies
where have you gone my country

as he scrapes his hopes together
across the chords
tensed in his throat

but so much straining
as he oscillates the octave
between what he has and what he wants

drives his blood until the veins
leather to reins around his neck
and throat singers die young

with the effort of singing
so many notes at once so much
longing wears out their hearts

These couplets flow down the page, and flow through the mouth of anyone reading them aloud. Powerful stuff.

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Tue, 13 Mar 2012

My websites--now mobile-friendly

Since joining ranks of smartphone owners by buying an iPhone 3GS, I've noticed that a lot of the websites I visit are optimized for mobile display--and the various websites I host are not.

Not any more.

Over the past couple of days I've tweaked the layout of my sites to make them display equally well in a desktop browser or a mobile browser. If you are looking at one of the poetry books I've published, a "purchase link" in a mobile phone will take you to a mobile version of the book's Amazon page. If you are looking at the same page in a desktop browser, the link will take you to Amazon's standard website for purchase. Seeing that effect is pretty neat.

This improvement was ultimately achieved by adding a slightly modified layout Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) for iPhone, and by adding a few lines to my sites' HTML to determine which type of browser was accessing the page. I got things working with my current HTML setup, some Googling, and a lot of trial and error of different design tweaks. Seems simple, right?

In one sense, yes, it's simple--a few dozen lines of text. But don't be mistaken: it's not a small project. The two business I run, poetry publishing and software development, host a dozen separate websites under various domain names on a Mac OS X server in my office. My sites have hundreds of static HTML pages, as well as three separate blogs running under a dynamic server setup, Blosxom.

Fortunately, my setup is designed so that large-scale changes are relatively easy to implement. When I started doing web sites for my business a decade ago, I used a popular HTML tool, Dreamweaver, to generate much of the HTML for my sites, although I used other tools as well, such as exporting HTML from Microsoft Word. Like many people using such tools, I had little understanding of HTML, but just wanted to get my web pages on display. Dreamweaver also has useful features for managing website structures, uploading pages, and more.

After a few years of this approach, which over time had generated several dozen web pages, I found it to be unwieldy. Because of the mishmash of tools I used to create web pages, I found that making any significant changes to the design of my websites was difficult: I often had to make changes to each individual page, which was time-consuming. Worse, some of the HTML was incredibly hard to change because under the hood it had vast amounts of unnecessary markup (especially the HTML generated by Word).

Finally, desiring to do a significant redesign of my sites and to make their long-term maintenance simpler, I bit the bullet and spent weeks diving into the HTML of my websites, ripping out all unnecessary HTML markup and formatting, leaving just basic HTML for each page's text, a simple page layout template applied by Dreamweaver, and a new styling tool I had recently discovered, CSS, which puts all formatting commands into a single file which are then applied by the browser when the web page is displayed. Instead of changing the formatting of dozens of individual pages, I can make changes to a single CSS file and then have those changes reflected in the site.

That's the structure I use to this day, and on this project to convert my sites to a mobile layout, it saved my bacon. Rather than develop a separate mobile version of my sites, I simply did some modifications to the core Dreamweaver template (to add some commands to detect the type of browser), and added a second mobile-specific stylesheet.

I'm not sure if my setup for websites of this scale--hundreds of static HTML pages with a similar design--is optimal, but it continues to work for me; I don't use Dreamweaver's design functionality much anymore, but I continue to rely on its site management features, which are robust. Migrating to a different kind of site setup, for instance using some kind of dynamic content management system (CMS), seems like a formidable and complex task of uncertain reward. So I'll most likely continue with this present setup, as I am far from outgrowing it.

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Tue, 06 Mar 2012

TRAVELING LIGHT by Glenn Freeman

Glenn Freeman's Traveling Light is a vibrant collection tinged with shades of blue; lurking beneath these poems' exuberant surfaces is the sorrow that powers so much music. It's a provocative combination.

Consider "Autumn Happy Hour":

Autumn Happy Hour
~after Denis Johnson

Late fall's warmth lingers a week or two too long, the leaves
spinning down. The tumbler of Octoberfest like honey
in the afternoon light, long shadows of loss & grief
slipping toward dusk. The garden's in decay.
Brittle vines. Rotting pumpkins. Leaves dried like paper.
Everything bends as if to drink from the light
below the light we see: the glass of amber
in the setting sun, a kind of resin through which the birds flit.
Juncos, out of place in the warmth, scavenge at garden's
edge. Bob Marley sings of Zion. And as beer gives way
to beer, as the cardinals, finches, and wrens
sing their syncopated chatter, as the susurrus leaves play
in crescendo and descrendo, you'll search again in vain
for words for this kingdom come, this hallelujah, this amen.

Amid the celebratory tone of this poem there is a hint of melancholy, darkening and deepening its tonal mood. I admire the richness of the poem, its varied shades of light and dark.

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POISON SONNETS by Joseph Heithaus

What I like the most about Joseph Heithaus' Poison Sonnets is the sheer vigor and power of its sonnet form: these are not delicate, refined lyrics in love with their own elegance. Instead, they are physical, full of intense images and striking rhythms.

Consider "Cleave":

Cleave

It echoes among the first words, Adam, Eve,
the butchery of her birth, the rib cleaved
from the man's breast. Imagine the blood
trailing as it might on the sleeping Adam,
down his smooth belly onto his dull pud
and what he thinks when he wakes and stands
to face her, bone of his bone, flesh
of his flesh, name of his name. Woman,
he offers the air with a flourish
of fear or hope or love before he, the man,
cleaves to her, as in cling to, hold fast, abide.
The word is split between splitting asunder
and holding like faith, it's me, you, caught under
God's cleaver, split, naked, clinging, trying to hide.

This is a bold poem, and I greatly admire the skill it shows in evoking the creation myth in a fresh light.

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BETWEEN GODS by Donna Lewis Cowan

I like the physical qualities of Donna Cowan's poetry in Between Gods. The intense descriptions of these poems also yield intense feeling in the reader.

Consider "Broken Sonnet":

Broken Sonnet: Eve Upon Awakening

You sleep, a shadow bent in careful candor
soft-grown among these chaoses of green,
and I awaken, my midnight visions mounting
the trees. Your fingers slip my hair; you wean
a decadence from my spring soul, counting
half-conscious strands that multiply and pour
hung ripeness on your cheek. What was that fruit
that picks from me the ripeness of this orchard?
Should I maintain these nights are merely duty?
O grief!...that tepid fingers are replaced
by tighter passions, your body's firm embrace
like a grounded planet. These lilies - upright, ruly -
cock their napes away like holy bells.
We shall make lithe blossoms remember themselves.

"We shall make lithe blossoms remember themselves"--what a strong line. It's a powerful way to end the poem.

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RUNNING RED, RUNNING REDDER by Beau Boudreaux

I like the sly humor and hard edges of Beau Boudreaux's Running Red, Running Redder; they win the reader over with endless surprises.

Consider this poem:

The Lit City

Asleep in a mangrove I dream
I built the town out of spit
and newspaper, struck a match to its
outskirts, and let the flames dance in.
The mirror in the park now a black lake
and in it my face looking out, past
the brick red swans deep in smoke, past
the singed grass. A slow wind stirs
bright ashes. It takes the heat into itself,
changes it—the moths, amber throated
hummingbird, dandelion seeds, all blaze
with a scorched sheen. What fire’s
done to me I’ve done to myself:
everything kindled, the luminous grows—
even the coral and anemone sparks,
blooming beneath the black drum of earth.

Good stuff.

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UNDER MY SKIN by Liza Hyatt

I am moved by the way Liza Hyatt's poems in Under My Skin burst from yearning, their energy harnessed through sculpted lines into works of considerable power.

This poem, "Give Me," is an excellent example of what I am discussing:

Give Me

Give me wild roses.
I will hang them from rafters,
as if the sky is a garden
growing down to us,
dying in mid-blossom.

Give me irises, morning glories,
purple alfalfa, hyacinth.
I'll press them, tear them,
paste petal scraps
to mosaic a lost summer night.

Give me a body whose blood
is warmer than poppies in sun,
whose cells are
bits of earth glued together.

Give me a shadow.
Wherever I walk I will find discarded things
and my shadow will pick them up -
a blue-green marble,
broken robin shells,
glass made of ashes,
gutterfuls of crabapple pink.
I will bring these home,
arrange them in a wicker basket,
never throw them away.

Give me a road that twists backward
while going forward, a journey
toward what I am trying to flee.
In the future, I will come to my childhood,
take from my mother's bureau
a ring box holding baby teeth,
traces of blood still on them.

Give me the middle of the world.
I'll walk to the silted river and
hunt for fossils from the Mesozoic sea.

Give me muddy boots and flying dreams.
I won't weed the garden or clean the house.
I hide snakeskin and lady-slippers in the Bible.
Come winter I will seek the rainbows which endure
in the sheer wings of cicada and housefly corpses
strewn on never-dusted windowsills.

Give me memories that can't be forgotten.
Give me a coffin and give me a star.
In an empty drawer lined with silk,
I keep a swallowtail that died wings spread.
Sometimes I put it in my palm,
let go, watch it glide.

Give me the world
where no one knows what happens to life as it dies.
I cry for newborn birds wind-dashed to pavement.
I sing inside the black caves of hollow trees.

Give me today as it turns into tomorrow.
The summer leaves are beginning to dry,
turn sanguine and fall
and I am outside,
gathering them up,
binding them back on the trees.

Through a litany of "give me," this expansive poem opens its arms to the world's abundance. It's an affirming, invigorating work.

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I WANTED A CITY by Janet Marks

Coming to poetry late in life, Janet Marks demonstrates a richness of perspective that poetic technique itself cannot provide. Her vision, which encompasses both the breadth of the past and the pressure of the present, comes through in her book I Wanted a City.

Consider "A Walk in Golden Gate Park":

A Walk In Golden Gate Park


Bouquets from a New Zealand tree
paint the crushed red brick with snow
the cherry trees have loosed their blooms
and the gold climbers in my garden
shower the stones with spent coin.

I think of ruses to people my present
with those loved and let go in love
I hold them in wrinkles of my empty palms
in caverns beneath my breathing
against the cold of this northern summer.

I reach for the steel stays of my mother.
Her voice of loss grips me to her
whose hand I have unclasped
and clasped and let go.
My father comes to say there is too much rain
on the grave where his bones whiten.
The children I have spawned
have learned to swim alone.

The black tree fern gathers the spaces
into large branch fronds.
I pick up bits of rock eucalyptus acorns spruce
needles. There is no eye no thread
in the spaces of this afternoon.

Thinking back to her childhood, and thinking of her own children, the speaker of this poem deeply inhabits the present, what is immediately in front of her eyes: "there is no eye no thread/in the spaces of this afternoon." This subtle poem opens up deeper meanings.

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SAILING ON MILKWEED by Jeanine Stevens

I admire the sheer vivacity of In Jeanine Stevens' Sailing on Milkweed. It's hard to tell the difference between memory and narrative, the past and the present, in this volume.

Consider "After Reading Tintern Abbey" as an example of Stevens' craft:

After Reading Tintern Abbey

And I have imagined a swift breeze
that recalls childhood memories.

Now pale, slippery to grasp
that place where I sat on the church lawn

choir practice over, already late for a worried
mother with chops on the stove.

But, oh! the green blades bending,
the pipe organ's quivering reverberations,

a presence passing in the rustling grass
rushing to linden groves dangling with stars

The experience of the poem evokes powerful memories for the speaker-memories that themselves become a form of poetry. The circle completes, powerfully.

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BREATH CONTROL by Maryann Corbett

Maryann Corbett's Breath Control is an elegant collection that explores the contrast between touch's intimacy and a wider view of the world. I admire the gentle skill of her work.

"Security" is a characteristic example of her style:

Security

It's got to be here. Where I had it last.
The sense that things would work. That, settled down
into the nursing chair, the dumb-beast body
would bend to the task, the milk let down to soak
the nightgown front, the baby's wet gums O-ringed
fast to the nipple in that ecstatic hold
that bit by bit lets up, the fist uncurling
to sleep, slack as a sandbag, warm on the shoulder--
held a minute, before the handing down
into the crib. That under the sleeping breath
the round of prayer would run wordlessly on
making God happy. That storms, colic, and winter
would end. That no one really wished us ill.

"Security" here is defined both in personal terms, and by implication, historical terms as well. We can offer a child some sense of security in our homes; can we do so in the wider world? That's the difficult question this poem deftly poses.

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Tue, 10 Jan 2012

BEARABLE WEIGHT by Michael Cleary

The wry poems of Michael Cleary's Bearable Weight do not shy away from confronting the harshness of life, but they do so in a way that gives grace to the struggles they document, with humor and affection. It's a compelling combination.

"Warm" is a good example of his technique:

Warm


Though my mother complains sheis tired
of telling those worn out sob stories, her life
had the bleak twists of a Dickens tale

starting in the Depression at 9 years old
when her mother died, leaving 8 kids
to their alcoholic father, a worthless

hard hearted 100% son of a bitch
who sold 2 sons for adoption,
tried to hang another, abandoned the rest.

They were stuck for a while, though,
when he wasnit off on a bender.
When floors and water pipes froze

and 10 blocks of wind waited to slice into
the girlsi bare legs and everyoneis thin jackets,
they all skipped school and snuggled

like puppies under a heap of blankets.
Now, 80 years later, she knits baby hats
for donation to the hospital maternity ward.

She favors pink, yellow, white, blue
because, she says, theyire spring colors
and who doesnit love spring?

Despite "the bleak twists of a Dickens tale," this poem ends with an affirmation of warmth, of love: "who doesn't love spring?" It's hard not to love a poem with such rich emotional tones.

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THE CLOCK OF THE LONG NOW by Annabelle Moseley

I admire the way Annabelle Moseley's poems treat traditional poetic subjects with traditional poetic forms in a way that manages, despite its classical overtones, to remain fully modern and engaged with the contemporary world. That combination of old-world craft and new-world subjectivity is harder to pull off than it seems, and she does so in The Clock of the Long Now.

Consider this poem:

The Persistence of Memory

Our house clocks stopped the day my father diedo
at three, the very hour that he passed.
No catch of shifting gears, no pulse defied
his absence. Time itself mourned him. The past
and future froze in one long pause. We kept
this lack of measured music, mourning himo
the clock-lover and watch-buyer. Except,
time offered itself up in grief. The trim
minutes and hours that my father filled
grew greedy to engorge themselves with him.
And days after his death, a parcel thrilled
when it arrived. He had ordered a slim,
black-banded watch. On its face, a DalI
painting of melting time. His memory.

One summer night in childhood, I ran
chasing a firefly. Then I let go.
That is the way my father died; the man
felt time dripping off of his fingers: slow,
honey-paced drizzle. But he shook it free
when he beheld a distant speck of light,
and lunged, then with a laugh, fell forward. He
rejected past and future for the bright
and promised steadfastness of the long now.
My father's unworn watch bore on its face,
between the marks of twelve and six, the brow
of dripping, melting time. And likewise, grace
had marked my father's countenance, though age
had not. He had not reached the fading stage.

The elegant formalism here contrasts powerfully with the eerie image of time melting away, a mix of precision and looseness that remains in the mind. Nicely done.

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SHIMMER by Judy Kronenfeld

I really admire Judy Kronenfeldis technique in Shimmer. She pays careful attention to the details of the particular and domestic, but the poems also give glimmers of the larger cultural, political and historical currents charging those events.

Consider this poem, iFirst Salvoi:

First Salvo

My heart leaps in my throat, I cannot speako
theyire flaunting with the imotheri of all bombs;
I have a daughter in the Middle East.

She has three milk-white scars on her left knee.
iSurgicali strikes roar fire, then the strange calm.
My heart leaps in my throat, I cannot speak.

Mushroom clouds ascend in air smoke-greased.
Her name is Deborah, her name Hanano
my shining daughter in the Middle East.

When palms and almonds blaze beneath blitzkrieg,
I see the birthmark on my sonis right arm.
My heart leaps in my throat, I cannot speak.

Crossfire will get Johnny, a Tomahawk, Malik,
though each one goes to battle saying psalms
for his Godis judgment on the Middle East.
Her name is Fareeda, her name Denise,
his name is Samuel, his name Bassam,
my heart leaps in my throat. Someone must speak
My children all live in the Middle East.

Recalling such intimate details as birthmarks and scarred knees, Kronenfeld places those against the backdrop of the battlefield. The contrast in these rhymed and metered lines is powerful, and enlarges the readeris attention in a compelling way.

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SHE IS A PUPA, SOFT AND WHITE by Elinor Cramer

The poems of Elinor Cramer's She Is A Pupa, Soft And White are careful in their attention to detail and the larger resonances those details reveal. Whether pausing over a lyric scene or narrating a more complex story, Cramer's quiet poems achieve precise illumination.

"Carp" is one example of Cramer's technique at work:

Carp

Drowsing as at the breast,
lips pumping, then not,
big as that feeder come home.
Only a mouth.

Mud baby, bottom grazer,
sucks root and weed.
He suns near my boat, his chubby dorsal
warming above water
in the shallows.

My boat nuzzles into hummocks
and blackbirds charge from the stubble,
their damp nursery.
The boat and I rock in floating rushes;
water laps at baby's back.

Then the carp's gone-
channeling plumes through the muck.

The poem draws an analogy between the lolling fish and a feeding baby, a moment that is disrupted when the carp vanishes into the water, perhaps evoking a parent's fear of the inevitable separation of the child as well. It's a quiet, but powerful, poem.

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HORSEPLAY by Colette Inez

I have loved Colette Inez's poetry for years, ever since I read her heartbreaking collection Family Life. Her new book, Horseplay, takes a different approach--ingenious wordplay instead of documentary narrative--but the result is no less powerful.

The title poem, "Horseplay," is an excellent example of her technique:

Horseplay

Horselaugh from that hussy on the piebald.
Horsefly don't bother.
How many horses to carry the red

afternoon as it rides over the blue plateau?
The astronomer pins her wrists to the dust.
Hoarse voices. Brambles like stars.

Horsewhipped. Giddyap. Hearsay evidence
of horsehide, horsehair sofas,
horse heard naysaying.

She knees him where he's weak.
His hands on her shouldesr sweep down
to her breasts.

The hare's afeard of hearses, hisses.
Nightmares ride bareback.
Four Horsemen talking horse sense.

He says the universe hasn't run its course,
She races away. Mythical horses jumping light years.
The Square of Pegasus desires its hypotenuse.

"Here's looking at you and The Horsehead
Nebula, "the publican nods to the astronomer.
"Ow, that's an 'orse of a different color."

The star bloke orders a White Horse Ale.
"Horseman, pass by, " the woman appears,
nice as you please, pokes him in the eye,

imagines the chap punching empty air
garlanded by stars.

How many punning variations of the word "horse" can be found here? I've lost count, dazzled as I am by the poem's dexterity as it drives toward its sobering, suddenly quiet contemplation of death, of emptiness.

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MONSOON SOLO by Gretl Claggett

Gretl Claggett's Monsoon Solo is a whirlwind book. Claggett creates razor-sharp lines that cut so deftly the reader doesn't even feel their sting.

Consider "The Send-Off":

The Send-Off

Age six:
I tell my father

I can walk to school
alone. At the corner

my hand slips
from his. Each step:

a birth and death.
I don't look back.

He watches me
stride through an alley

to the main road,
where, without a wave,

I vanish. He stays,
watches, waits,

The crosswalk's
painted lines

fade. Decades
pass.

It's hard to imagine a greater economy of words, but what an emotional impact this terse poem packs. Its sketch of separation and alienation is devastating.

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IN COMPANY by Kate Bernadette Benedict

Kate Benedict's In Company is a sharply observant collection about the foibles of office work, delving into that environment much more deeply than most contemporary poetry does. Benedict finds both objects of satire and celebration within the office environment, and her collection is memorable.

"View from the Front Desk" is characteristic of Benedict's style here:

View from the Front Desk

I'm in before anyone. I'm a sterling employee.
I'm here when the first hiss of air whooshes
from the vents, sibilant as a librarian's shushes.
Then the phones ring, the bosses come, the raree

begins. I take it all in. Whatever messengers bring--
parcels, lunches, roses--I accept.
If all three come at once, I'm quite adept.
There's room on my desk for everything.

It's the lulls that throw me: minutes that drag
on and on and no bells ring. Workers from inside
whizz past, flushing with purpose and pride.
I drum my lacquered nails or claw my bag

for gum. Then all bells blow at once! I grieve
no more: my lot's to wait, my calling to receive.

This poem aptly captures the hurry-up-and-wait atmosphere that envelopes many office workers, especially those in public-facing/customer-service positions, where frenetic activity can give way to crushing boredom--and vice versa. If you want to get a sense of modern office and corporate life, In Company will deliver that sense in depth.

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