Pushing verses

Past their limits

R.M. Engelhardt acknowledges that there is a difference between the passive participant and those who live a passion-driven life, but can often be seen in “Versus” wondering if there is a difference in the end. Passion clearly perpetuates the creative  imperative, manifest in poets like Engelhardt as non-negotiable, but to what end? There comes a time in the life of the poet where this question has to be dealt with. It is one thing to accept the terms of “the muse”. It is another to toil in the direction of some outcome, some goal. What, beyond that yielding and succumbing, is the poet desirous of? Fame, significance, appreciation, relevance?

The poet succumbs because he or she must, but it doesn’t end there. The poet is driven to more just as the living are driven to interact in this world beyond survival. We do more than eat and breed and sleep, there is something that pushes us. But why?

In the years that I have been aware of Engelhardt’s work, it is this willingness to examine these concerns head on and in a surprisingly candid manner that I think captures my interest the most in his work, which often gets into the problematic terrain of ego, and the ways that we relate to one another through not only our life’s work but through love and community. He states rather directly in “Versus” that poetry is dead, he comments on the state of popular culture and asks the obvious questions about the poet’s role in it. Why bother, and why persist?

Persistence, I think, is the theme in Engelhardt’s work that prompts people to characterize him as “romantic” as many of the poems convey a sense of pining, portraying people desirous not only of love but of transcendent relationships. “She believes in something unseen”, (8, “Perhaps”) “I’m just sick of passing romances”. (“In Cleopatra’s Eyes”, 9)

In ‘Versus”, we see that relationship between the speakers and both issues: wanting to do more than write, wanting to do have more than a date on a Saturday night. (“toys”, 6, “More than just another dance”, 2) This idea of wanting more, wanting to believe in and have faith in that but at the same time considering one’s observations and wanting to be rational.

Persistence then is challenged by cynicism, both inner and external:

“The time for poets has passed”

“And someone once told me that honest people don’t exist anymore in the 21^st century”

“And someone once told me ‘That love…is dead.”

Do we persist, press on anyway? In “Naïve”,  Engelhardt describes the urge to avoid the trainwreck. In “Truth” we see people opening boxes, digging through metaphorical “boxes” of expectations mingled with mythology. What happens when people confront truth? Some thrive, some perish, some vanish immediately in the sight of their realizations. This brings us back, again and again, to the questions in “Versus”. What are we after? And can we get there?

‘We all grow older/Still trying to find our way/Like children” (“Any Day Now”, 11)

Many poets grapple with a maturing phase not unlike the point around mid-life when one begins to really take stock about where to put energy, what to be concerned with and what to let go of. Some describe it much like finding their way, having gone through what some describe as a period similar to the honeymoon phase of a relationship. There are burdens in the poet’s world, choices about resources and time and energy and in the beginning there can be a sense of eventual payoff that in later years we learn can be quite elusive. There’s no denying that Engelhardt has love for the craft, but he pushes us to consider what that means, and to perhaps distinguish between the love of writing and the expectations. In some instances, the object of love can be easily interchangeable with “the muse” as both are subjects in these poems of that transcendent longing. The love that leaves for the man who promises everything, the “angel” who vanishes, the losses are connected: the poet wants to believe in more, wants to have faith in more, but life can be a series of losses, followed by grief.

Engelhardt closes “Versus” with a shout-out to those who persist, who don’t give up, who keep searching and don’t give in, who stay true to the realm of dreams.

“Michael McAloran sets inner demons to words. He is an artist of sense, a tamer of Muse.” –         Nobius Black.

The Gathered Bones represents the latest collection of poetry by the prolific Michael Mc Aloran in ongoing partnership with Calliope Nerve Media- where Mc Aloran is hardly a stranger.

It opens with the following quote by Georges Bataille: “He who is damned bites at the sky…”

First- why the quote? What does it mean to be damned, to Mc Aloran, and in whose estimation? His sky is the “black vault”, unreachable, unmoving. The existing damned become the leaving damned- and in that process gesture  to a vacuum of quiet, venting words from impotent jaws, emanating from hollow bodies housing damage. The damned, in “The Gathered Bones”, are those who vanish into oblivion in full witness of a seemingly indifferent universe.

Of love

A cadaverous waste

Like shit

Spat at the sky

The unlimbered

Black sky

The density of a

Silent tomb

He describes these states of vanishing, dying, being of the void or approaching it- by bringing us repeatedly back to the body, to the blood and skin and layers of tissue and things corporeal:

“Breath of wasted air”

“Wasted slashed flesh”

“The closed fists of

My flesh”

The flesh is where emotions manifest, at times the object of abuse and at times expressive. The flesh is the interface between living and oblivion, between energy housed and contained within the body and energy snuffed.

McAloran has this way with word economy and density, his lines are quick strokes but in those few words he manages to convey a lot:

“Teeth

Breaking ajar the

Valves of

Nothingness”

And here:

“The wastage of

The bones

Playing their silent

Dead airs”

Over and over, the body rots before the black nothing, or in the sun, the bones “whittled”, the body leaving and the self left decomposing in sight of the “sky vault”:

Upon the

Dark

The gathered bones

Stretched

Raw

Does the body rejoin the blackness of origin? The bones move from their natural configurations to “gathered” and we can’t help but spend some time on this transition and wonder what, or who, Mc Aloran invokes or implicates here. Who renders these states? Nature, design, a creator, what is this drive to give life and in this manner, strip life away from the living?

They become the “gathered bones, dressed in naked amber”, stripped of flesh but bearing the hues that echo that flesh against bones that are now the only remnants, and “the marrow burns”.

Who is implicated, a deity, a creator? “Guillotine of Nothingness/ Cutting the screams/ From the absurd” ? Are we just extinguished, like the snuffed candle? Or is there more to it?

The “absurd”, depending on the literary and historical point of view, are often those who subscribe to the unknowable, to conclusions that are not only a stretch to settle but whose characteristics are unfathomable. To be so certain of the unknowable is therefore “absurd” as is the idea of deriving some higher purpose for the living. If there is a plan, if we have significance- how would we ever become aware of it? There might be more, but we won’t know it- that is a common theme in “absurdist” thought. I don’t know that the poet intends that connection in his choice of words, but there are some parallels in the kinds of questions raised in such work.

I won’t go so far as the say that McAloran was actively pursuing such lines of thinking in this collection of poems- but I do think he is getting into this territory whether he is mindful of any deliberate effort to do so or not. He still makes mention of the nothingness, the black sky, the vague sense that there is a force at work upon this body that is rendered in various states of leaving. Does the body vanish, to the ethers? What becomes of the gathered bones?

We know that there is the distinction between earthly significance, on earth they bear the “earthen kiss of tears” in their burial. (“meat to tear”) But then all is empty.

When McAloran states “I am the impotent flame of absence” the reader again wonders about real absence, “absolute absence” – and what he intends to say here about being truly gone, and is there such a thing? Later, in “Skull”, the vault becomes the skull, again the focus shifts back and forth between death as processed in the intellectual sense and death and questions of significance in the context of our spiritual beliefs. (or lack of) The “salve” and “heavenly smoke” is telling here, salve comforts, salve heals, salve lessens the sting. Is the desire to be more than a flame, snuffed, our salve? Is it our way of dealing with mortality?

To me, these are poems about mortality, they focus on the flesh that falls away to bone but McAloran is expressing a very specific regard for these remains that echo what he seems to see as the corporeal context: the body becomes as dust, shit, existence like spitting at the black sky.

The first time I read “The Gathered Bones”, I found that it was easy to cruise through the pages because of the succinct style of his writing and the brevity of the lines. In that first read, however, I missed many details that when strung together made the collection take on an entirely different meaning. Michael McAloran’s poetry can be read quickly, but I have now learned not to do so and will not underestimate his ability to bring layers of complexity to a relatively simple construction.

Michael McAloran is an editor at Calliope Nerve.

Healing, Optimism, And Polarization: A Collection Of Political Poetry Musings By Jennifer C. Wolfe, published by Blaze VOX Books. Reviewed for Crow Reviews by Lynn Alexander.

Jennifer C. Wolfe has put together a collection of poetry that explores the political mindscape of America on the cusp of the post-Bush age. There’s no doubt that we, in America, had high hopes for change with the election of President Obama- many of us want so badly to see change on so many levels and we have come to recognize that we need a certain kind of inspiring leadership to get there. Even the cynical and disenfranchised by choice share a strong sense that there has to be a change in course because what we have been doing has not been working and is now dangerously unsustainable. Is Obama the change? Who knows. At the time of writing these poems it is certainly too soon to tell.

Hope, optimism, unity…these are difficult ideas to tackle, because the diversity that makes us strong is also the diversity that fosters pluralist animosity that renders reconciliation so elusive. Wolfe aims to touch on the dynamics of competing interests, and the nature of polarization in a society where groups tend to compete before they cooperate on mutual goals and opportunities and where divisive strategies seem to rally citizens and garner support and even rouse the apathetic. Can we heal? Can we come together, find common ground? Is it absurd to hope for change, are we that far gone?

Wolfe opens with a poem about change, via the election of President Obama who ran on the promise of it. It seems hard to imagine the culture of corruption and the status quo being shaken, but perhaps it is the nature of optimism by necessity to want to believe. Wolfe touches on the subjectivity of change and how it is responded to: change is a divisive thing, change is the enemy of people who benefit from the status quo and who need to hold onto their perceptions of the ground they’ve gained. She confronts the strategy of propaganda and the ways any opposition can and will seize on fear to capitalize on the public’s sense of threat: Obama is a socialist, his changes will hurt you, “change is vile”. Change will lead to lines at the doctor’s offices, change will make us Canadian, change will make us soft on crime and let our enemies run free. Change will come along and take your first born!

When we decide not to change, we are making a choice. We are choosing to stay oil dependent, for example. We are choosing to ignore climate change. We are choosing to stay with policies that have failed or behaviors that seem counter to our nation’s identity.

Wolfe addresses that in her second poem “Close Gitmo” where she uses plain direct language to essentially lay out that argument: that Guantanamo Bay does not reflect the “American Way”. She also makes that case for the practice of rendition.

“Close Gitmo and we may open our minds to what America is, what it can be.”(Close Gitmo)

“Let’s render those we classify as our enemy” (Rendition)

In “Polar Ice Caps In America”, (polar also as in polarization, a similar double entendre in “Rush Week” ,college pledges and Rush Limbaugh) Wolfe places much of the blame for the challenges of change on post-election political rivalry, and the subsequent thwarting of efforts along partisan lines regardless of the interests of America. “We are polarized”. Polarized, refusing to meet in the middle.

Ironically, when she gets to “Government Motors”, Wolfe returns to this accusation of socialism and the new era of financial jargon including such concepts as companies being “too big to fail”.

The selective amnesia in America seems to lead us to forget how we got to these places in the first place and under whose leadership. It doesn’t matter who is responsible as there are few mechanisms for accountability anyway.

In many ways, Wolfe’s poetry- from Ann Coulter to Sarah Palin to “cash for clunkers” to lead paint toys reads like a trip down memory lane. Her poems are full of the headlines and buzzwords of recent years and the personalities that everyone talked about- from The Daily Show to Talk Radio, to CNN to the papers. At this point, many on the left are fighting back now armed at last with some talking points of their own- and not a moment too soon. Wolfe is probably pretty happy about that.

Wolfe makes very basic observations, she doesn’t get into theory or get bogged down with the nuances of the issues, she essentially throws out a list of egregious examples of things that need fixing. For a collection of political poems, they are  pretty low key. She doesn’t get radical on the soap box, she comments in the way people across America comment.

“…the food police should first police themselves”

“Health care that is recognizable/Makes consumer confidence sizeable.”

Over the years, much has been made about this notion of political poetry- some love it and some hate it- and I want to get into that here because this collection is an example of what both fans and foes of political poetry are often talking about.

I had no idea that there was venom out there about political poetry until a heated discussion broke out about it a few years ago and I saw how quickly people at the venue took sides. Some thought it to be the poet’s job to speak out, to serve as witness, to lay out the issues using the tools at their disposal: their words.

Being a believer that everything is fodder, I saw no problem there. But a faction soon chimed in that political poetry constitutes a misuse of art, a hijacking of the point to get “all partisan” and worse- to be “one of those preachy poets”. This is a reaction I have encountered since, and it still surprises me. What gives?

Wolfe’s choice to express her political observations poetically is no less valid than writing about trees and creeks. The fact that she has put her energy and gifts in the service of her concerns is something I personally applaud, and would like to think will always have its place.

I wouldn’t say that there is a burden or moral imperative on the writer to do so, but I definitely see the personal as the political, and the political as the poetic. Wolfe, like anyone willing to put their views “out there” in the face of agreement or scrutiny, displays courage with this collection.

Check out Blaze VOX books here.

While legions of writers and poets struggle with punching up colorful words in just the right shade to elicit emotion or punctuate their meanings, Ross Vassilev manages to connect his work with the reader in black and white. Mostly black.

Vassilev, editor of Opium Poetry 2, and Asphodel Madness, has 10 of his works featured in the eBook, Village Idiot, published by Full of Crow Press. Vassilev doesn’t rely on carefully crafted prose or just the right word combinations to create a mood or elicit a response from his readers. He speaks viscerally, in short bursts and with blunt phrasing that often punches his readers right in their gut.

There is an ache and dull flatness in V.I. that concusses one into re-reading the work over and over, giving rise to a certainty that you must have missed something the first time around.

His piece, a miserable profession offers the lament of the poet who has been forced to move back into the home of his parents:

I’m the poet who moved back in with his parents

after getting fired from his last job

I’m the 6-foot-1 poet who’s fat and diabetic

I’m the would-be pseudo poet who’s giving it a try

I’m the poet who sits on the patio summer nights

listening to crickets

and staring up at the stars

………….

Vassilev’s voice speaks to the disenfranchised.  There is truly an irony in this. As we move into the second decade of the new millennium, the obsession with social networking and the insatiable need to connect even with people we are likely to never meet, Vassilev’s prose resonates with those on islands created from their own doing. In the eponymous work, village idiot, the protagonist finds himself fired from work, too lazy to shave, with energy for nothing much beyond staying up all night watching Fellini movies:

I’m a bum.

an idiot. a loser.

I’m a Sandinista.

I’m a goddamn

good-for-nothing foreigner.

…………………..

this country is overrun

with village idiots

………………..

give us all a hand.

Don’t confuse colorless with bleak, or without emotion. There is plenty of punch and even humor in Vassilev’s work. His writing is wry, sardonic and plays with both satire and outright rebellion.

Vassilev is nothing if not prolific. His work is all over the web and in addition to the above zines you can read him at Strange Road,  Rusty Truck, Word Riot and countless other venues. FOC exhibits a light touch with their monochromatic design on Village Idiot. The look contributes to the overall stark feel, a perfect foil for words that stand very nicely on their own, no Technicolor required.

Michael J. Solender blogs here: Not From Here, Are You?

I’ve figured out that difference pays freight
when linked with intelligence; genius trumps odd,
alchemizes bizarre into merely eccentric. (Dark Card)

Rebecca Foust is a delightful new discovery for me. Foust has this ability to write beautiful, poignant things without coming across as excessively sentimental or descriptively redundant-not that most would mind if she did given her subjects. These poems have a graceful intelligence, and hers is a subtle wit. That Rebecca Foust is an award winning poet comes as no surprise.

In “Dark Card”, Foust has written a volume of poetry that explores the experiences of a mother raising a special needs child, with Asperger(‘s) Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder that can present as a cluster of behavioral challenges including difficulties with socialization and connection, repetitive behaviors, and a narrow range of interests.

There is something in the way that she reveals pieces of her world that lets the reader know while she indeed plays the “dark card”- the hand dealt- she is not writing about burdens to be pitied, and there is a sincerity that really comes through about that. Sure, there are emotional themes that she tackles as she engages with the subject, but she does so in a learning and then celebratory way.

She tells us how it is, for example, to be the parent of a child with a disability in the supermarket, prepared for a mishap with a napkin up her sleeve, always on guard. In the middle of mishaps, however, she is still able to step away and see beautiful things about her child. Can the world see them too?

My boy loves who he is,

even if the world does not

(Like Dostoyevsky’s)

Foust wants the reader to see what they see without an expectation of denial or ignorance, but push themselves to see more, as through a loving mother’s eyes. His humming, pacing, fixations- these are ways her boy “keeps time”. She describes how she learns to see that many of these things bring him real joy, and she is learning to leave him be.

In this, Foust asks us to consider what joy really is, what fulfillment is. Who sets the standard for what makes us happy? How can we take our measure and hold that up to another, and decide that they cannot be happy the way they are, doing things that perhaps we would not do or find gratifying? Joy is relative. Joy is individual.

And this is where Foust’s point comes through, I think, about diversity. It is not about simply “tolerating” or “accepting” that children are “different” and might be destined to grow to be “different adults”. Her version of diversity involves appreciating, seeing validity in the choices, having a certain degree of trust in the individual’s ability to seek out happiness- which is essentially the way the spirit triumphs and the person comes to realize a a sense of realized wholeness. It is a terrible mistake to see this is unattainable, unworthy of a parent’s champion or community’s support.

The excitement in the difference between two pennies

increases exponentially when there are twenty,

a hundred, a thousand, and he vibrates with joy

Oh, never to grow bored or experience a numbing

sameness of things! To immerse consciousness

in the sensory present of a bottle cap flattened by traffic

(Apserger Ecstasy)

Rather than attempt to get into the mother’s perspective, I think this particular poem- one that many parents can connect to on many levels- says a lot about the process of reconciliation. I think many will read this book and be glad for parents like Rebecca Foust, will relate to her candor, and will appreciate the courage that comes through.

Refrigerator Mom    by Rebecca Foust

They called them cold and witholding

“refrigerator mothers”, indicted them

with their kids’ autism. You did too,

you soul-less suck of a self-righteous

so-called psychologist, with your “walks

outside” and your “talks up in trees”

that never leafed out. You wasted time

sitting mute next to my son’s muteness

for two years getting other work done,

explained how my “helicopter mothering”

was causing the problems, how maybe

I was the one that ought to be medicated.

It was convenient for a time having me

Paxiled; no more second-guessing

the doctor’s advice to chill out, no more

nagging about homework, chores,

computer, TV. I learned the art of aloof,

how to sleep while awake, how to

speak softly or not speak at all, how not

to feel desire or desire to weep

For nearly a year in our house,

a kind of peace reigned, until one day

it cracked and rained pieces

of everything- propellers, coils, struts,

random refrigerator parts

]]> http://fullofcrow.com/crowreviews/2009/12/dark-card-rebecca-foust/feed/ 0 http://fullofcrow.com/crowreviews/2009/11/cellos-et-ghosts-little-white-book-aj-kaufmann/ http://fullofcrow.com/crowreviews/2009/11/cellos-et-ghosts-little-white-book-aj-kaufmann/#comments Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:18:19 +0000 LynnAlexander http://fullofcrow.com/crowreviews/?p=172 “Cellos et Ghosts”  by AJ Kaufmann, reviewed by Paul Corman-Roberts.

A.J. Kaufmann has demonstrated more than a passing familiarity with Surrealistic and experimental techniques as a sharpshooting member of Bill Shute’s KSE posse.  Small, mimeo-style publications such as Siva in Rags; AntiqueWhite Rain; and Symbolisme Psychedelique are wonderful, loopy head trips of sound and thought-play; a savvy addition to Shute’s varied and informed gallery of word-wrights.
So it may come as a bit of a surprise to realize that Kaufman, while accomplished in these “modern classic” 20th Century forms, is as much an aspiring rock lyricist as he is a poet. His recent releases (Cellos et ghosts; Little White Book) through his own press, New Polish Beat (http://newpolishbeat.wordpress.com/) show a knack for seventies style, roots rock sentiment using a clever mix of hard and soft rhyme within ever so slightly varied choruses.
Particularly in the ten pages of Cellos et Ghosts, the poems are really more like songs that sound as if they could have been penned by a more world weary and heartbroken Robert Hunter:

“Forget to forget all the strives of the past
Cool it down, easy come to be with you again
Ramble on easy rose, you sweet rose of dawn
And let all the love you’ve got fall on me as morning rain
As morning rain…”

From “Lay Down”

Kaufman has shown flashes of this style in some of his Kendra Steiner work as well (Satori In Berlin) which fits nicely with that publishers rock & roll aesthetic, but very little of Kaufmann’s KSE catalogue has pointed to such sheer songwriting as Cellos et Ghosts.  With the exception of “Every Thursday” and “Stunt Man’s Arms,” most of these works, despite containing lyrics, come up short of poetic lyricism as they are more given to rhythm and rhyme.  These are lines meant to be crooned in front of a wailing guitar and a country rock back beat.
“From the towers of the bridge
I’ve seen the city grow
It’s stretching almost everywhere I look
Sick smoke and all that neon glow

And in front of a gas light illusion
I’ve seen your face through the smoke
I see your lips talkin’ so sweet
But what they day I do not know”
From “Beyond The Pale”
No pieces are more blatantly songs than “Felina,” whose title alone hearkens to the Marty Robbins tune “El Paso” (a tune that just happened to be extensively covered by Hunter’s running buddies, The Grateful Dead) and “Julie,” which perhaps represents the best synthesis in the collection between poetry and songwriting:
“After many years of searchin’
For her traces in the snow
In the midst of silver forests
I have found my only love
Yes, I’ve found a wondrous lady
With the world at her command
When she laughed, the flowers blossomed
When she cried, the sun went red

May the sun shine so warmly
May your eyes cry no more
May the shelter of your mountains
Be forever your sweet home.”

Kaufmann is clearly an all around writer, someone who can troubleshoot the song or the poem with the confidence of a craftsman, and the practices of issuing short but numerous chaps promoted by both Kendra Steiner Editions and New Polish Beat will probably continue to give him a forum in which to keep from becoming specialized or pigeonholed for years to come.

Viva Loss, by Sara Fran Wisby, reviewed by Paul Corman-Roberts.

I have discovered, through a series of shoddily unscientific
experiments,-none of which would stand up to a reasoned
scrutiny by a qualified professional, but which are none-
the less extremely valuable to me-that the type of light man-
ifested in boys, while it can be trained, prefers to play.

From “Light Gains Intensity As It Is Approached”

There is a story told by guitar god Eric Clapton back in the late sixties about going to see an upstart blues sensation in a London club by the name of Hendrix. When Slowhand gets to the club, he is intercepted outside by a shell shocked Pete Townsend who informs Clapton that the both of them may as well take up selling door to door insurance. Clapton heads into the club for Hendrix’ second set an concludes that Townsend overestimated their prospects.

Sara Fran Wisby is one of a series of emerging talents (along with super prosers xtx and Mel Bosworth) who are starting to have this effect on the established war horses of the so called “underground” literary scene.

In the wake of diminishing attention spans & disintegrating dialectic it’s not unusual for the poet and/or prose writer to feel some angst about where their chosen mediums are headed.

Wisby’s recent publication from Small Desk Press, Viva Loss, is a Rosetta Stone of post-modern relationship politics, surrealism and Western mythology. Does all this sound too “over-the-top?” It’s not:

The stars are worse off. They’ve got to shine and shine and
shine. I’ve got pills and sleep and hope. They’re all alone,
the darkness pecking at them from all sides. I’ve got electric
lights, umbrella, a tea kettle, a CD player, an Electrolux
vaccum cleaner from the fifties.

Never underestimate the power of contraptions

From “Hope and What Army”

Go ahead, laugh at me for saying this, but Viva Loss not only points the way toward the future of prose poetry, but also for fiction and poetry itself. Keep laughing. I’m right.

…What if I resisted you, if in dying I achieved the sort of pride
that evaded me in life, what if I told you to go to hell, and take
your nursing skills elsewhere, and leave me to die in peace, and
what if you didn’t leave, and instead peeled the sheet gently back
from my body, and picked up a sponge and started washing me
with it, drenching the fiery hollows, murmuring to me in a low
strange voice you didn’t understand, had never heard before,
didn’t know you were capable of.

From “High Drama”

Wisby’s “tiny printed miracle” (Stephen Elliott & he’s right) is a work of transgression
that transcends the “confessional” ghetto; is a work of romance that transcends “Romance” and is a document of analogy, myth and surrealistic disassociation that transcends post-modernism.

The world’s tallest trees are underwater where gravity can’t
get to them. They reach for a greenish blob of light, the mythical
sun, which none have lived to see free of its wavering veil, for as
soon as they puncture the surface, they are painfully burned on
their uppermost new and tender leaves, and this kills them. It
really does.

The World Below

Viva Loss is a study in universal fragmentation. The book is presented in five parts: Parts I through IV and the “Addendum” (perhaps the crowning achievement of Wisby’s imagination here.) But really part IV, a series of listed and continuous prose pieces, sets up the “Addendum” or “glossary of (selected) terms, which in turn manage to unify the themes of this remarkable manuscript in the “final” list: femme couverte; finger; fuck; guilt, hardtack aka “sailor’s delight”, hegemony and homeopathy.

Forms of listing or segmenting are rife through the first three parts of the book as well though, but Wisby’s talent for the ringing line, more the signature of a poet, remains the cause this device she has chosen (wisely) serves. The end result is a series of modern fables, surrealist essays and dadaistic advice columns that come from a world we all recognize but cannot place, other than Wisby’s off the hook imagination.

The temptation here is to say that Viva Loss single- handedly renders language poetry a curious dinosaur (LangPo already was that) and opens up future generations to a slick, stripped down version of really good literature that will make for fun, easy and convenient multi-media packaging because it doesn’t require a huge attention span.

But because Wisby’s approach is that of the poetic, there is nothing simple or stripped down about this work, it simply appears that way, like a plump, non-threatening facebook quiz that clearly appeals to ones identified life choices. But the vision presented by the author here is whole and interconnected from piece to piece, and while a slick marketer might think it appropriate to add illustration to some of the more memorable images rendered (grotesque devils cavorting in the kitchen sink, a couple linked for life in a genital piercing circus act gone awry) the only image that matters is the cover…a torn up boxing glove, indicative of a fight that hasn’t always gone well, and also looking like its been abandoned in a desert hints at one of the main lessons in these pages:

When the desert is lost in you, it sends out flags to other deserts. Hard crusts
of dry skin form along your outer ridges. Your moisturizer fails. People start
to steer clear of you, afraid that you will “suck them dry.” Only other desert
people wander near, the ones who are further along than you. They wear their
deserts on the outside. Wrapped head to toe like mummies in baroque tatters,
moving their sandpaper lips in crass imitation of language. We know you,
they insist. We’re here for you.

From “Dry”

Wisby’s piece “Dry” ends there, but leaves the reader with the dangling, implied fear that maybe those other desert people really just want to suck out your remaining moisture, but also leaving open the possibility that maybe that in itself is some kind of victory or at least, not undesirable. Wisby smartly exploits the beauty of uncertainty in poems or flash pieces or whatever you want to call them, that while perhaps as dislocated in “genre” as many of their landscapes are in “place,” they are, in and of themselves, very grounded in what is universally human and surely real.

Saigon, Hanoi Or Da Nang, David S. Cross. Poptritus Press, Reviewed by Lynn Alexander.

This is the second book of poetry by David S. Cross, and the second publication of Poptritus Press of California, U.S. Cross is a Canadian poet who has been published in both the United States and Canada, and more can be found about him at his website here. Saigon, Hanoi Or Da Nang is available now, through the publisher.

What are the memories of wicked men, pretending to be good?
What is history to a nation whose goals, enumerated, noble- become the goals of selective and strategic interests, in the service of the powerful? Who are the heroes?

Cross begins by directing the reader’s attention to the black caped men who have left behind rags: in the theater, on battlefields, in the opera house, in the jungle, under the earth, in the coal mine. More than capes and costumes, Cross is looking not at the props but at the deeds and the subjectivity of character. What scene HAVE we seen? What fears are real? What is going on while the drivers doze? What about the hypothetical “Gotham”, the American Dream, is really being protected here?

And so the reader is prepared for the questions that follow. The poet takes a nostalgic turn right away:  the lost republic, the age of black and white televisions,  a different time where there was a different sense of economy and prosperity. Society once NEEDED tv repairmen. People traveled the “asphalt ribbons” of highways, before “in disappointment”,“we slipped away, letting others possess our tongues.” (Career Change, Driving With My Baby)
“There was another time” (Decades) reads like a refrain when we hear it more than halfway in. What has changed? Have we changed, or the people who speak for us? What have we become?

To me, Cross is also talking about engagement with one’s country, not only participating in the economy and working toward something common- but being actively engaged in the structure, and voicing concerns as part of civic involvement as opposed to retreating into our own lives.

The poems themselves seem to move between the person, to the person in societal context, observing a neighbor as readily as a nation. Like the inventor (Dead Genius) who quietly invented Big Things, Cross connects his observations on the quiet, small ways of individuals to a larger scale. They work in mills, talk about pensions, live by “rules” and find heroes in hockey players and entrepreneurs and bosses who kill the desire to work.

Life is not necessarily about living great lives, but about adequate lives, like the “adequate but not really good” slice of pizza. (Who?) Life takes the form of regular people, and Cross is taking a look at two important things: who we are, and what is done in our name.

When Cross writes about who we are, he renders us as generally forgettable people and he seems to be doing this because he is making the point that many actions around the world are undertaken with this elusive “citizen” in mind. But who are they? And how do the actions connect?

From Who?

Someone eating pizza

Will not remember your name

Someone outside the bank

Will forget who you were

While remembering that you are dead

Maybe a punk rock band

Will call themselves after you

Maybe a young communist

Will arm peasants in a jungle

And call out your name

Kill in your name

Then emigrate and open a pizza shop

Maybe he’ll serve adequate

But not really good pizza

Stand outs: Too Little, Home At Last

Saigon, Hanoi Or Da Nang by David S. Cross

Poptritus Press, www. poptritus.com

The challenge though in “reviewing” comes from the very nature of the work, the experimental nature, and the fact that very often what is described as experimental is actually quite predictable. Ah- but not so here. The collaborators, I think, want you to step away from your comfort zone and abandon a few dozen notions when you sit with this.

So- how DOES one attempt to write about a work in some kind of objective way (no such thing) when much of the experience wouldn’t even be considered “conscious”? You want to engage, actively and intellectually, but there is something about the strangeness of [+!] that pushes that away. So Baron vonVodKane proposes at the onset that the initial collaborators earnestly apply to the service and whims of “swill”, they will extrapolate from coagulated text, gluts of collected correspondence, they will accumulate as gleeful pack rats- all, ALL fodder for the “chappybuch” collabo.
[+!] is like three players and a pile of lettered tiles.Making and breaking.

To what end, we want to know? Will we know, can it deliver that, does it have to?You have to invest that time, see it through to the end, and arrive at your answer. Or not.

Will they arrange the tiles and make words, arrange the words, and somehow answer that FOR YOU?  They won’t, they will cover the table with linguistic acrobatics and masturbatory couplings (paradoxical, yes) then … it seems one of them must  jump up from the table driven by some derrida dada madness shouting something along the lines of a deconstructionist epithet and chatter- the tiles are tossed to the floor.
The reader is left to intuit, the codex. Built. Broken.

Reading this at times made me feel like I was trying to divine something stable from the tea leaves, the swirling “come togetherness” of this collabo. Faucher, Stamatakis, and Williams set out to build an iron archive.(“We could verily be accused of being pretentious, impenetrable, making art for art’s sake. But this is our cacoethes scribendi, our graphomaniacal urge.”)
I toyed with the idea honestly of addressing the question of intentional or incidental obfuscation. The super bonus scrabble words, the spontaneous forays into polylingualism, smatterings of theory… I can see in the introduction that there is a certain defensiveness about that. Art for art’s sake, but does it also border on complexity for complexity’s sake? If the answer is that this is part of the gig- you came to hear the band so shut up and dance- why go to such lengths to explain, or defend? Why not just let the work stand, why concern themselves with pre-empting criticism? If it is the so-called job of a know-nothing reviewer like me to explore deeply and come up from the bottom of the pool with some sand in my hand, this is the part that made the water murky for me: do your thing, don’t defend. Let it stand, let it contribute on the merit of what it is, or not. Let your work be clothed, draped in some mystery.

I can’t believe I am making a suggestion here, the know-nothing reviewer- but let the reader work for it. Yes.

And earn their trust.

Toiling, messing around with letters, tossing tiles into the spin cycle, grabbing them out, letting them dry- what exactly is on display here?(poetic code decay)
It is at once capricious, and strange. Faucher describes the “echolocation” in their odd terrain at the beginning, how the co-conspirators find rhythm in one another.Throughout, they do settle into some fine grooves.

I think it is important to point out from a “lit” standpoint that the work does not build then splash down upon itself in a linear fashion. This deconstruction is not of the kind that concerns itself with retracing steps backwards, accurately, but rather, they are very concerned with this assemblage …with CONSCIOUS OBLITERATION.

“If we are to consider a method at all in the construction of a lysicoloical project, it should perhaps fall under certain prerequisites such as having some minor (but not expert) limberness in the ability to be trans-linguistic, polyglot, and even polychromatic in the arrangement (dispositio) of fragments- a sort of recombinant series of monstrous neologisms.”

Those tiles being flung to the floor, the tearing down of the reader’s habits, the attack- THAT is what I came away with as my experience with it.
“The letter “A” can be isolated from the remainder of the alphabet, but it still ostensibly refers to it…”
[+!] Download here in digital or acquire a hard copy.
Calliope Nerve

“[+!] is a post-code-poetry experiment, making de-composition into re-composition… art in it’s truest sense… a bizarre, compelling, visually stunning, important work. Lysicology may not be a part of your lexicon now but it will be…” –Lucindo Anthony (Author A Disease of Poetry)

UK poet Richard Wink has been published widely and has released six poetry collections through various publishers, such as erbacce, Trainwreck Press, Shadow Archer Press, and more. His poetry has appeared here at Full of Crow Poetry, and he has been active in the independent press scene through his support for small and independent presses and his work with Gloom Cupboard.

This poetry collection, through BeWrite Press, will also be available as an eBook- the “way of the future” and a medium that has already been embraced by small presses as a remedy to the costly and prohibitive process of connecting writers and readers.

Dead End Road includes over fifty poems, both previously published and new work, most of the poems have not been published before.

Richard Wink is an observer of people and context: behaviors, subtle quirks, mannerisms, placement of people in their significant environments. He begins the collection with a poem about a man who is recovering from an operation, who eats lasagna from a tupperware container from a caretaker and gets lowered into his bath “like a whale”. He does not focus on the nature of the operation or the specifics of the man’s situation, but instead describes the hidden details of convalescence, such as the way his thighs grow damp- suggestive of his sedentary life in the rocking chair as the shadows change around him with passing time. (Time- I’ll get back to that theme)

Wink starts by talking about this man as behind a curtain- this establishes right away what his intentions are with these poems as many read just that way- like glimpses at people and lives behind curtains. We are essentially peering into different lives, at times perhaps different points in common lives.

A housewife looks for diversion, avoiding… something. A commuter must cope with losing his right to drive. A woman worries about lipstick in her car mirror. Another woman slips into alzheimer’s. A photographer stalks celebrities, snapping “upskirts” to sell for “dirty” money, trying to figure out which images will rate in the transient economy of gossip news brokering. (“Pop Sluts” “Rock Twats”, classic Richard Wink descriptives!)

A brunette needs a good shampoo, a couple swaps their cityscape, commuters, workers, tangled in cables and cars and lines. People weave in and out of different kitchens with different perspectives on utensils and one another.

Something stood out in “Student House Party”, a new style, a new pace, something changed in my reading of that poem and a few subsequently.  In some of the poems, Wink tosses text in succession, rapid shots of connected but terse snippets. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that some of his poems seem like they should be read out loud- but presented in monotone blurbs, read in a cycling way with pauses like the skips on old 45′s, recitations.

My favorite is “A Bosch Moment”, it brings the collection’s title home, the meaning, what is REALLY knocking on our doors, behind the curtain, the horror of realization as a process-  time, death, inevitable dead ends. It comes right after a close second “The Daughter”, another standout poem.  There is that rhythm, and he remains the observer of subtle characteristics, but he also gets surreal and strange and so many things come together there, things I am coming to look for in his work.

It might have been intentional, I think that it was despite my sense that Richard Wink isn’t very “in your face” about his methods and some of his creative decisions might seem arbitrary, I don’t think they are- that said- the poem after Bosch (The Silver Birch Tree) again references curtains only now he wants to close them. From what? The demanding customer? Tomato lava drama?  Time? The sea? The poems after this have more bias, the observations seem to include more irritants, perhaps with domesticity or spoons on vinyl versus doc martens. Are we seeing some elements of crisis there, the poet who begins with basic observations who moves through the poems from interest to revulsion?

I note here in a purely speculative way that even Wink’s author photograph is different. He looks downright patriarchal.

Is this part of the “Bosch” moment, a half-humorous way of describing the turning point in many people’s lives where they go along and go through motions of maturity, only to step back in shock, horror? Ordinary elements rendered monsterly, the living become crouching crabs and typing tits, reality merging with the surreal. Is Wink relaying something about transition?

I can’t help but think that Richard Wink is getting existential here. The Model is dirty, set up on the settee. The Model, The Bachelor- now far from the sea. And what of the women? Now the wife is separate from her “pathetic husband”, the dentist, credentials with cobwebs, lethargic and boring, all. There is life, and there is ontology- does it all come to blows behind the door, the knocking, is it reality? Irrelevance?

There are relationships explored here, roles and neutral unnamed family members seated at tables, observing, in their roles (seats). Then we jump to the childless men preparing for a civil union, talking about life insurance. Mothers, men, women, bachelors, wives and husbands, the lady of the purple vineyard, parents and visiting children. People moving away from baggage and the sea.

What holds this together, the snippets between the pauses, are increments of passing time. Time is what happens to the people behind the curtains, time marches on for everyone- irrespective of role. Time is the enemy of the husband and the bachelor alike, time brings the “Bosch moment”, the crisis. Time twists things, twists people, juxtaposed.The realization of the dead end is horrible.

Time passes for the man in the rocking chair, the embers, the people in their kitchens, commuters, ranters with tired swear words, the pious, the irreverent, the internet surfer, the people at the end, the people stuck in overtime. Time passes and all will end, all will reach the end of the road, the dead end, the curtains can be closed and so can our eyes but it comes. It knocks.

Published internationally by BeWrite Books, UK.
32 Bryn Road South, Wigan, Lancashire, WN4 8QR.
© Richard Wink 2009

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