When the Cats Razzed the Chickens by Mel Bosworth, Folded Word Press. Reviewed by Lynn Alexander.

“I saw his face grow into his eyes, those big lake blue eyes…”
There are the boys talking about physics, in a bathtub debate, and would-be celebrities spooning in their hut after a street show gone awry. I was glad to see one of his well known and deservedly praised pieces “Leave Me As I Lessen”:
“The children call me Melting Man. I hate pictures, but smile anyway, teeth dripping down my throat. Mom screams when my ears fall off and ooze like slugs to the ocean. My watery toes give dawdling chase.”

Cynthia Reeser has an excellent, thorough review of “Razzed” at Prick Of The Spindle, and you can check that out here. You can also peek in at Mel here, at his blog.

Check out Folded Word here.

When the Cats Razzed the Chickens  by Mel Bosworth

ISBN: 978-0-9778167-2-9

Folded Word Signature Series, 2009

“Charactered Pieces” by Caleb J. Ross, reviewed by Lynn Alexander. “Charactered Pieces” is the second publication of the new Outsider Writers Press. It follows David Blaine’s poetry chapbook “Antisocial” as their second release.

Ross delivers exactly what you have come to expect from him: smart layers of fiction with thematically related elements. We see attention to strange details…and we see sick things that on occasion seem nudged into the foreground from where they stood, poised in the periphery. Perhaps Ross does this to add depth to the characters, rendering them alongside their context.

“Charactered Pieces” refer to flawed diamonds, a marketing ploy developed by the character of Lori who is herself a “charactered piece” and as such, seems unable to win the approval of her mother.

Ross moves on to “My Family’s Rule”, where concealment is part of the game of pushing people to decipher what we want and judging them accordingly. Trying to please the father, the offspring involved want to purchase proper presents, as opposed to presents that signify something negative in his eyes as in the case of the shotglasses: “white trash” presents.

Again, we have the dynamic of parent and child, the child unable to get it right, parent unable to budge.What do our choices say about who we are, and how much of that is wrapped up in the desire to be respected?

What we begin to see is not a pattern of intolerance so much as a pattern of protection, a “for your own good” kind of scrutiny. These are parents who want to bring an understanding of how the world really works to their children, and their years and experience have taught them that the world can be unkind- particularly in the face of our flaws.

These are parents who, in their own ways, mean well. They want to spare the kids:

I turn quick to the living room; ensure Aaron is still occupied with

the television. “Why didn’t you tell me at the time?”

“Don’t ever tell me again that I don’t protect you from bad things. I

do. But this one, you wanted. You’ll never get the image of a falling man

out of your head. Welcome to fatherhood.”

This is when I remember why I admire Ross as a writer. This is when he is in the game, in these kinds of moments, when he shows himself to be a writer with chops.

In this little exchange between a father and his son, he is really exploring the hidden side of parenting: the worries that aren’t shared, the truth, the things spared.

The next story is downright touching, another father and son- and again a father who wants to step up to the plate:

“A guy goes his entire life blaming everyone else for his problems, then a blank slate drops from between a pair of legs and the only thing he cares about is not being a point of blame himself. He stops smoking. He stops yelling. He curbs his drugs and almost stops swinging those fucking fists of his.”

I won’t say what happens, but like the mothers Ross describes from Pompei, the mothers who try to shield their babies from ash- we again see the parent who tries to do the right thing when there isn’t always a right thing. Like the mother who seeks new starts in her vacation planning, who grieves but tries to get out from under it- we see regular people who are trying to do what they can.

The pairing of innocence with tragedy and the parental dilemma forms- at least to me- the subtext of the “Charactered Pieces” stories. Thinking back to what I have read, Ross is at his best here. This book is a true credit to him, and to the fledgling Outsider Writers Press.

Outsider Writers:

With Charactered Pieces, Caleb J. Ross presents a varied world of familial discord, one where a dead fetus evokes more compassion than its mother (“Charactered Pieces”); where two brothers offer the destruction of a family legacy as a birthday gift for their aging father (“My Family’s Rule”); where one brother’s love of Holocaust documentaries pushes his family through the aftermath of his assumed suicide (“The Camp”). Charactered Pieces peels away the superficial armor of public life to reveal the flaws beneath and treats those perceived weaknesses not as hidden sources of pain but as reasons to celebrate life.

Order from Outsider Writers 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?

BlazeVOX (Books) (www.blazevox.org) ; 2009 – 96 pages

I think I’m writing this review in reverse, but the almost too brilliant Angles of Disorder by Zachary Bush is a deconstructive whirlwind around the wheel of life, which when it ends, kind of pulls the whole thread together with a poem entitled “The Hard Truths About Living and Dying,” particularly the last line:

“When you die there is no breath, and your life’s true purpose is finally realized. There is absolutely no meaning, and there is a great disappointment that can never be eradicated.”

Perhaps not so hopeful, but what did you expect from a book whose sections are marked off by a stick figure, ostensibly “the poet” who comes apart piece by piece throughout the manuscript and what’s left afterward, the head (or perhaps even “the intellect”) itself slips off the page until there is nothing left.

What precedes that final line is a Smorgasbord of modernism, put on display by Bush and then reflected through his own prism meditating on the impossible contradiction of poetic existence, that is, a dissonance (disorder) permeating all functioning dichotomies (angles.) They’re all here disguised in Bush’s peculiar yet resonant rhetoric…exquisite corpse (“From Within The Vortex”, invoked in “The Difference”) concrete poetry (When You Are Dead) absurdist archetypes (“The Goldfish”) dream journaling and yes, even some very clever and playful LangPo:

“Overweight Water Queen, sobbing top 50 Doo-Wop Hits. Sketching the differences in U.S. Stop Signs. An American Flag waxed in yellow wax hangs still-to-still life. The flag hangs 8 ½ feet above a village of matchstick castles, unable to melt because of the confused conversion. That, most likely, was just another Blackout contortion. See: no breeze, no sound & nothing near to sestina humidity. Yet something is sweating. Wax sings: drooping, dropping, releasing & splattering onto the sand. The sand, that resembles volcanic ash, covers the ground. Aquarius has gone tonight. ‘A’is as realized now. I see the all-consuming Frequency (trying like a bastard) to consume me…constantly dreaming in circles.”

-from “From the center of The Circle”

The themes of “Hunger,” “Time” and “Energy” get their own sections, as these characteristics, personified, archetyped or otherwise, drive Bush’ deconstructionist spiral.  In the end, there is only the void or the sense of the abysmal, personified and manifest in Angles’ final section, by poems entitled “While You Sleep In The City,” Before the Spinning Color Wheel Becomes our Primary Source of Energy,” and “The Last Three Days of Your Final Starvation.”  “The Disappearing Act” in this section is among the darkest and most chilling in the whole collection:

“This boy’s mother once threw a pot of boiling water at his head when she caught him down in the basement, loving on the hunting dogs. This boy said nothing when the bigger boys shoved a branch inside of him. This boy was found in the woods by his father with the end of a branch planted deep inside of his ass.

This boy, when no one was watching, would urinate and defecate on the things that were for sale: glass ashtrays, silverware, empty bookshelves, second-hand sofas, and manual typewriters. This boy’s father laughed at him, when he found him in the woods, and called him a Patsy.

This boy made sure his mother and father were deep asleep before he took off all of his clothes, walked out the back screen-door, and followed the moonlight to the middle of the lake…”

Bush is at his strongest when he is grinding out his iconic prose analogies. Much of his experimental form here, while well executed, is at times superfluous to the otherwise powerful narrative that actually permeates the entire book with an impending sense of dread.  It is in the prose passages where Bush truly synthesizes a model that is part Buddhist, part Scientific Method, into a genuinely fresh Surrealism. There is the implication that no matter how “efficient” a model for existence is developed by a poet or philosopher or any human for that matter, it’s necessary imperfections lead back to a single, inevitable end.

The ghosts of Ezra Pound and John Keats also haunt this book (“The Vortex & Memory”) as Bush demonstrates in nearly all the pieces here his comfort with Negative Capability and the self-awareness of the poet.  No question Angles of Disorder is a BIG debut in the tradition of poets who are them-selves aware of pushing the form forward.  What’s unusual is finding this combination of talent and awareness in an author who is only twenty-five: not even Gen X but Gen Y.  Many young authors over reach on debut collections, or are too anxious to “flex” their poetic muscles.  Bush has given us plenty of flexing here, but delivers on all the goods.

(for PDF )

(for MP3)

2009, 57 pages

Shudder Pageant is a collaborative multi-media flash novel (as opposed to “micro-novel” – a novel told in 140 character increments) by a couple of young and edgy authors who are probably too good for their own good.

The plot of the story is a spiral, not linear, account of three friends; Jacob, Sophie and Cody, whose lives are irrevocably altered by the enlistment of Cody’s brother Brody into the Army Reserves.  The spiral of events downward (as it turns out) is mirrored in destinations like hospital floors and street gutters before the thread spins out. And it is back along that thread that the pageant of shudders parades.

“The more broken one bucked wild horse on the bed, red foam spurting from his mouth like water from a pinched garden hose.

First nurse leaned back, the leather strap straining damp on her palms.

‘Get the fuck over here and help me!’

Second nurse flicked the cigarette through the window. In the distance, explosions hung in the sky like angry memories. She passed the bed of the less broken one. He’d been awake for 10 hours now but hadn’t spoken a word. The 33 stitches through his lips were thick and sloppy, the result of an overtired and fawning young medic.

He whimpered like a broke-leg pup. Second Nurse frowned deeply.

She knew his time would come, and when it did, she’d be the one holding his hand.”

Xtx and Bosworth have seamlessly woven their interpretations of the three main characters with the perspective of peripheral characters who bear witness to the slow drop out of the primaries; into a story that feels as if it could have been culled from a fevered, attention span challenged Denis Johnson dream.  In just a few minimalist pages, the collaboration draws out violence, crime, drug addiction, broken families and broken loves all stemming from a bleak but familiar landscape:

“At first it was awkward, Brody was different…quieter. But even later, after he acclimated as best he could to his temporary civilian life, he still wasn’t the same. It was a different version of Brody, like someone had taken who he was, washed it several times, and put it back inside him.

His parents put on faces and avoided any discussion about how things were going “over there.”

They never said ‘Iraq.’”

What the collaborating authors have created here is an Ouroboros of narrative structure, a story that essentially gives birth to itself, coming together in the psychic connection between Cody and Brody, whose destinies are irreversibly intertwined and manifest in a two headed mutant which Cody keeps animated (or not) in a jar he keeps cradled close to his bosom and drug habit.

The surreal sense of events spiralling out of control is punctuated by an evolving chorus that runs from “We’re real people doing real things” which runs out to the past tense “I was a real person doing real things,” as if these characters are trying to convince themselves of something that isn’t quite genuine, or even entirely true.

Shudder Pageant is a little online miracle, a multi-medium flash novel in spoken or written form that is absolutely free to everyone, and yet weaves the “NOW” of both evolving literature and the reigning cultural paradigms into a post-modern fable that feels simultaneously unreal and immediate.  Bosworth and xtx demonstrate that they can function as one unwavering and unblinking voice, and one can only hope that they continue to move literature in a direction that is this honest, accessible and revelatory through future collaborations.

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

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)