Month: January 2016

I’ve always been attracted to cerebral poets, or rather a particular niche of them, the ones who explore a certain level of academic fiction and non-fiction. Specifically the David Foster Wallace level: not so genius you can’t follow them but pretty freakin’ smart and well read.

There's a line of complexity beyond which my brain starts to frizz. Conspicuous allusions also breaks my mind. Not that David Foster Wallace doesn't allude. I guess I'm just partial to modern, hip as opposed to Greek and Latin ones, Shakespeare-staling or the backwards-circular allusions to the already painfully allusive T. S. Eliot. I actually like T.S. Elliot just more his haunted, creepy allusions more than the "learned" riff-raff.

The exception is Anne Carson who definitely alludes to the classics but leaves enough in there for some of us dummies out here. I like her language. And that's what it comes down to for most of us–language that appeals to us, to our unique ears and ways of thinking.  Below is my cocktail for smarty-pants poets, the ones I keep coming back to.

In my third or fourth poetry writing workshop at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, my professor Steve Schreiner gave me my first personalized book recommendation (like ever), the book Powers of Congress (1990) by Alice Futon. This was back in the mid-1990s and I found it impenetrable back then. Twenty-five years later (and seven cities later) I got back to reading it.

What I love about Fulton is that there is hardly a dead line in any of her poems. Her poems are eclectic and range in topics from technology to courtship to soap operas. And, best of all, she’s smart about science. As Sarah Howe said in her Paris Review essay "On Relativity," both science and poetry share the need to construct metaphors in order to explain our phenomena and both disciplines are "conscious of how these metaphors can mislead."

I also appreciate the level to which Fulton takes her experiments. She plays with the lyric but only parts of it or one aspect of it. Because of this her point is never lost in abstraction. A good example of this is “Point of Purchase,” a lyric with marginalia from different student characters participating in a writing workshop. The marginalia is funny and naively off-the-mark, workshop comments that are self-involved and prime with agendas.

Another favorite is “The Fractal Lanes” which circles around science and (of course) fractals, but also hints at bowling and writing in a subtle ars poetica. Who knew a few years later I would become interested in fractals and chaos theory myself when working on Why Photographers Commit Suicide.

"Losing heart, mind, or being
Insinuated."

Great lines from the poem “Silencer”

“To live is to be a threshold that persists.”

Or from “Losing It”

"When your brain’s become a byzantine cathedral
Flooded with the stuff of sump and dumpster.
Its frescoes—memories—confetti
into the mortal sludge."

My least favorite poems in the collection are probably the love/sex poems, which seem more convoluted and remind me, for some reason, or Erica Jong’s idea of the Zipless Fuck.

You get your money’s worth with Fulton, this book running over 100 pages.

Much of the same praise can be given Albert Goldbarth and his books. I finally finished the 185 page set To Be Read in 500 Years (2009). Here’s another poet of good quality and quantity for dollar spent. Even more so than Fulton, Goldbarth swims in ideas of science and cosmology and current culture, marriage, fame, product placement, identity theft, history, the Internet, illness. He also references Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman. One example from “I’m Nobody! Who Are You? Are You Nobody, Too?”

"The three, the wind: a fricative relationship.
A sound so shaped that some nights
it’s less music and more language.
Words. A few words, anyway. There
have been nights, admit it, when
you’ve thought you heard your name in the air,
your name being sung, a recognition
that you’re part of the star-resplendent sky
and the must vapors of earth—they
know who you are, you owe them for this special focus.
Listen: your name; a part
of the wind’s acoustical graffiti."

Like Fulton, Goldbarth also experiments but sets his limit. He experiments with stanza arrangements like Fulton and cross-outs and titles. He works out language theory issues but by talking through them. He’s always inclusive.

His micro and long poems consistently make me pause and say, Wow! The poem “Imperfect Knowledge” is an amazing thing. Channeling modernism's crisis of knowing, it references William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman and Bette Midler. Part of the lyric in the shape of a face while discussing prosopagnosia.

“…a museum, of sorts, for errors” is also a great multi-sectioned poem about bad ideas and blunders. “The Blank” is a great mid-sized poem about literary controversy, among other things. It’s hard to say what Goldbarth poems are about when they ramble luxuriously.

Here's an example of a tiny ars poetica called “Birds,”

"It’s hunger and territory
although we choose to call it song."

He’s also very funny. From “The Voices,”

“My mother worked in condemning.” Well whose
doesn’t. “No, I mean that was really her job,
condemning vacant buildings for the county.”

Jorie Graham's book The Dream of the Unified Field (1995) is a collection I’ve also had since the late 1990s and have finally finished, (it’s signed no less; I bought it at a Jorie Graham reading). Graham, although a more "difficult poet" is not dissimilar to Fulton and Goldbarth. She tackles the elusive way the universe works, she talks of hooks and currents and ghosts. But at times she can be cryptically Dickinsonian and she can also invoke biblical and classical allusions. She uses quick cutting transitions, and more often challenges knowledge instabilities.

She goes a little farther in her willingness to let gaps come between her and her readers (from “One in the Hand” – “And see how beautiful/an alphabet becomes/when randomness sets in.”) She goes farther into the project of abstraction (from “Mind” “the unrelenting, syncopated/mind”). And she’s also awfully more serious (from “Tennessee June” “Nothing is heavier than its spirit”).

But she’s abstract in the right recipe with the naturally particular.

From “The Visible World”

I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface
                                 Breaks
into shingled, grassed clustered; lifts.
If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck
I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender
Maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises.
Diggers, forgetters…A series of successive single instances…
Frames of reference moving…
The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands:
Bacterial, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged
                                and rippling
mosses. What heat is this in me
that would thaw time, making bits of instance
                                overlap
shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through
                                this culture
slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings,
                                opportunities
taken?

Last October, near Halloween, I had the opportunity to attend a reading of the poetry faculty at Central New Mexico Community College. The event was called “Faculty in Berets” and aside from the clichéd and hoaky title, it was one of the best lit readings I’ve been to in New Mexico these last five years.And because the college is a community college, (I guess), their bookstore doesn’t carry any faculty books. There also weren’t any books available at the reading. But at least I was able to track down some online.

When Felecia Catron Garcia read from her book Say That (2013), she talked about how well suited her poems were to Halloween–being, as they were, so full of ghosts. Her book is haunted by not only ghosts but domestic violence (From the poem "Whirlaway" — “To think I will have to live through this”) and death, so much death that “death is weary of me.” The book also explores Catholicism, surreal dreams, inertia, motherhood and its moment of impatience, (a most sober look at parenthood), some of the best in traumatic love poems: dangerous love, absurd love, love from the dead.

From “Territorial Jockeying”

"Because I love you, I have given up on the idea of love.”

From “Dreams of the Dead”

"Take off
your shoes and lie on his grave. Tell him
I live in this world and no other.
Put on your shoes. Don’t look back."

All throughout the book I enjoyed her titles that referred to the poems but didn't retell them or pre-tell them. There's a great archaeology poem called “El Mozote, El Salvador, 1992:”

"We are here to discover what happened then,
but I want to know what happens now.
That gray sky is a stroke of luck. My fingers
Clutch the small hand bones of children."

After all the harrowing but honest parenting poems (“Four Gifts,” “Weaning”), the namesake poem, “Say That,” is a beautiful relief, both a play on a lie told to a child about their birth story and some suggestive, creative alternatives to the birth story.

Rebecca Aronson’s Creature, Creature (2007) contains poems that bounce between New Mexico and the Midwest in Kansas and Missouri (the flat parts) and had lines I especially appreciated (having lived in the Midwest) like “There are shadows from nothing but ourselves.”

There are little moments of ritual and religious artifact in the book, a wonderful ode to pepper, a very visceral poem about oranges and body spheres called “Navel & Blood.” The poem “After Surgery” deals with the loopy state of moving through hospital rooms drugged.

Aronson works in parataxis or juxtapositions in many poems and some experimental prose. “Diary of Light” was a favorite experiment which ends “Enter through your own shirt. Try to be your best self.”

She does the elusive Midwestern prairie poem well. "West" is a good poem about prairies, insects and "whatever moves.”Or  from the poem "Crossing" the first line: “I’m driving home, one eye on Iowa.”

“In the Field” starts with “Where cows graze" and ends with

“who
tipped his hat, later introduced
as your mother’s favorite
neighbor at the market where
he shook your hand
a long time.”

“What If” is an example of an experiment I like. Parataxis that builds to something and  “4 am, Sitting in the Dark” and “Echo” would each make a great meditation poem. 

I've been very overdue on covering some of the books I read last year. I have a short little stack taunting me in my office. I didn’t want to just file them away (keep or garage sale?) until I mentioned them in some way.

One of the good things about contest submissions and their fees of late is that some publishers will now send you free books or subscriptions to their magazines as compensation for your submission fee. This is how I got the following two books:

Radio Crackling, Radio Gone by Lisa Olstein, 2006

This book was one of my favorite books of poetry last year. Olstein makes a steady study of perception, border zones, edges, fences, ("a crackling on the radio moving into silence) and she does so with graceful particularness and narrative experimentation. She studies tipping points, sleep’s edge (in the same way Proust explored it), wind shifts, the cusp of change, “the tensile strength of the moment.” Often she does this by weaving ethereal narratives together into poems that become slightly haunting.

From "Dear On Absent This Long While"

"Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods."

When I made it half-way through, my notes say I was getting fatigued of exploring this idea. But then amazingly there were great poems after that, like the long poem "Guide to Self Hypnosis," "Parable of Grief" and "Metaphor Will Get You Everywhere."

This is a book however where the titles seem unrelated to the poems.

I usually like books by nuns and monks. So I was primed to like Spectural Waves by Madeline Defrees, 2006.

However, I didn't. The poems try way too hard to be smart and you find yourself in a tangle of obscure, italicized references. She’s also too conversational for my taste.

An example from "The Visionary Under the Knife"

"…The needle stops. The doctor

inserts a foldable silicone lens, courtesy of
Bausch & Lomb. The surgeon
checks the wound for leaks."

The language feels flat as opposed to simple and the line breaks don’t seem very interesting. Also, the day-to-day content didn’t draw out anything spiritually or philosophically relevant. There were no lessons of language. She seemed to have the confidence of knowing without searching.Toward the end of the book there is a crown of sonnets about Elvis. Since I love sonnet crowns and pop culture poems, I felt sure to like this, but again I didn’t.

The Academy of American Poets sends members a book every year, the winner of the Walt Whitman Award. For 2015 it was the same-different by Hannah Sanghee Park. Rae Armantrout was the judge which gives you a hint that this book might end up being the same-different language type fun.

For a sample of these language experiments, the first few poems are titled “Another Truth” “And a Lie” “One Truth” “And a Lie.”

From the end of "T/F"

“ This statement is false.
This falsity true.”

Poems are word play and etymology fun although some of it's make-believe etymology. There are playful, lazy hearings and cliché weaves, folk tale riffs, muses on the jackalope. I have to say her endings always feel good but I didn’t check a single poem to re-read later.

The book is oddly designed, too. Only every other page had page numbers printed like this “22/23.” I guess it’s the same different as well.

I went to Flagstaff last summer as part of a big family trip across northern Arizona where my father grew up. We visited Canyon de Chelly, Hopi, the Grand Canyon, Flagstaff and La Posada, the Harvey House in Winslow. Since my brother and sister-in-law like to visit college bookstores for t-shirts and I like to visit them for books of local poets who teach there, we squeezed in a visit to Northern Arizona University's bookstore. I only found one local author there but I did find a copy of their local literary journal called Thin Air.

This Noisy Egg by Nicole Walker, 2010

I did have trouble getting started with this book, something seemed off with the rhythm and line breaks and free association. I couldn’t tell if her line breaks were for look, sound,  or meaning. Many feel like they could have easily been written as prose.

But there were poems in here I loved: the list poem “A Number of Things are Scarily Lacking.” This poem illustrates for me how parataxis really works, juxtapositions of content forced into poetry lines is getting old when what we're dealing with are essentially lists of poetic phrases.

From "Mammoth"

“…We can all climb on, ride him up and down 101–
a whole country riding on the back of some awakened DNA, hanging
onto the bucking strands of a mappable–believable—dawn.

Other poems did rise to greatness, like “As if a fact”

“The world, revised is beige not turquoise.
That is easier to swallow.”

I really enjoyed her long poem, “The unlikely Origin of Species” and “Nor do I know the ways of birds clearly” with:

It wasn’t premonition, just air
blown in from chaos, powerless as prayer.”

The lit journal Thin Air was so enjoyable its made me want to add college lit journals to my list of college bookstore scavenging. I would peruse this journal further although the layout was clunky.  The short stories I enjoyed were “Meta-fictional Pasta” by Jaqueline Doyle and "Xerxes" by Andrew Bourelle. And I liked more of the poems in here than I do in most literary journals, student or professional.

"Birdwatching for Beginners" by Mark DeCarteret, the set of Frida Kahlo poems by Robin Silbergleid, "A Small, Graceless Sound" and "To the Woman Who Died After Being Electrocuted While Crossing a Las Vegas Street" by Chloe Warden, "An Observation at the Conjunction of Black Holes and Cricket" by George Korolog, "Goldfish" by Esteban Rodriguez, and "I Knew" by Ross Losapio.

This is a better than average college lit rag. Check them out: http://thinairmagazine.org/

The eBook is available for a limited time free on Smashwords and is available on all your reading devices!

Writing in the Age of Narcissism traces how the narcissism epidemic affects writers, including our gestures of post-modernism and irony, and proposes an alternative way to be a more positive writer, critic and reader.