Category: Books to Read (Page 10 of 14)

A Book About the 99 Percent

November 9, 2013 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I recently purchased a book by the Albuquerque Poet Laureate and slam poet champion, Hakim Bellamy.

Swear is divided into three parts: the first section contains political poems about the Occupy New Mexico/Occupy Wallstreet movement; the second section contains more general political poems; and the third section deals with Hip Hop and more personal poems. I particularly liked "Jamesetta" about Etta James and "Immortal Technique," a great poem about race.

Hakim also touches on issues in New Mexcio, the struggles of Genearation Y, the education system that fails poor kids. There's intimate heartache in his poems about poverty.

I have a degree
in sociology
and survival
and only one
is coming in handy.

Bellamy is great with a calm, angry diatribe and his poems have forceful endings. And is as much a comment on America as "McDonald's apple pies."

Subtext by Charles Baxter

October 27, 2013 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Subtext, Beyond Plot by Charles Baxter was my second selection from Graywolf's The Art of Series. And I loved it.

Although ostensibly the book is more geared for novelists (and I was using it for instruction on my first novel), there is so much pertinent food for thought for all writers here. This will definitely go into my list of best reads on writing. How many poems, short stories and novels fall flat due to…well, their flatness? Writing guides have talked around this issue forever but Baxter finally takes it on: subtext–not only why it's important but, more interestingly, how you can get it into your work.

This small book is divided into 7 sections:

1. A short introduction about why subtext matters.

2. Staging to give external clues to inner lives; dialogue and why not to say what you're trying to say.

3. Subterranean desires and focusing agents.

4. Aspects of denial and selective attention.

5. Inflection and tonality.

6. The problem of conflict avoidance.

7. The art of describing the face.

Aside from Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, this book has really helped me conceptualize certain aspects of attacking a novel that have tended to frighten me. I also think there is much to learn here for poets: discussions of tonality and focusing agents, particularly, and what we pay attention to, what we tend to avoid writing about just as much as what we choose to write about.

Three Jim Morrison Books

October 19, 2013 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

In my quest to build a shelf of celebrity poetry, I took on Jim Morrison's three books last month. Yes, I used to make fun of celebrity poetry…because that's what poetry snobs do; but for the last few years I've decided to approach these books with an open mind. After all, celebrities can't help it if they're famous and also trying to express themselves in verse. If you became famous, would you stop writing poetry? No, you wouldn't…even though it would be potentially embarrassing and a big laugh to non-celebrity poets such as you used to be.

I took on The Lords and the New Creatures first, a volume of "revealing, early poems from the voice of a generation." My husband, Monsieur Big Bang, laughed when he saw me reading this. He said only angry teen boys read Jim Morrison. I've never been a Doors fan or a teen age boy but I dove into the project anyway.

In any case, this was my least favorite book of the three. These were his poems at their most enigmatic. In some cases his thoughts were indecipherable and maybe in early stages of something experimental. The problem with experimental poems is that they can be awfully indistinguishable from drug-induced pieces. And I'm saying that without judgement. Drug writing has its own value ("Kubla Khan"). You just can't read too much into it, unlike more sophisticated experimental work. But occassionaly, Morrison would catch my attention with some pithy scrap of thought, (usually when he was talking about fame or show business or his possible messiah complex), all bits which were disappointingly rare. I did find a quote or to which will be of use in my next Cher Zine,

"But most of the press were vultures descending on the scene for curious America aplomb. Cameras inside the coffin interviewing worms."

i will say this, Morrison is good at noticing what's going on around him. In this book he mulls over ideas of voyeurism and participation, film studies (he was a film student), issues of power and possession, alchemy, and a few interesting comments about motherhood. The random notes included are not fully formed. They seem almost like notes for future essays. And many of the poems seem like a string fo terse images in search of a vague mythology.

One of the most interesting things about this used book I found in a Santa Fe bookstore was the inscription on the inside cover: "To Adam (Pedro)/Love Always, Amy/Christmas '96/The Doors Rule!"

I surmise Adam did not feel so much love for The Doors forever or I would not have acquired his Christmas gift book.

I read Wilderness next and then The American Night, companion volumes which came out after his death and were best selling books in the 1980s and 90s.

Wilderness was my favorite book of the three. Maybe I was just beginning to get into his idiosyncrasies like his shorthand or his capitalizing randomly. This book coheres much better as a book about American culture from Morrison's point of view. There are scattered southwestern images from his young life (he mentions the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, rattlesnakes and cattle skulls) and over and over again he considers his idea of wilderness where he is referring to the wild city of Los Angeles and "the American night." The word 'LAmerica' appears a great deal over the two volumes as poem titles and in the text as does the phrase, "the American night." My favorite parts were discussions of androgyny in Los Angeles and "miles and miles of hotel corridors." There are sexual poems here too and contemplations of the poet,

"Real poetry doesn't say anything,
it just ticks off the possibilities."

and more sad reflections on fame and futility:

"But I deserve this,
Greatest cannibal of all.
Some tired future.
Let me sleep.
Get on w/the disease.

Again, his free association writing can feel almost language poetry-like. He believes a great deal in the meditative power of the ritual of writing poetry and this is as valid as anybody else's use of it.

When I read great lines like "Each day is a drive through history" I wonder why he was so enegmatic for most of this and if his fragments had anything to do with a fear of fully telling.

I guess The American Night felt like a whole lot more of the same. And it's jacket hyperbole fell flat with me, "a literary last statement from rock's poet of the damned."

I'm always interested in sexuality poems, like "Lament for the Death of My Cock." But they seem so tame now. I'm sure they were scandalous at the time.

In fact, this might be part of the problem with Morrison's legacy over all: it's the Cher/Madonna/Britney Spears/Milley Cyrus exponential reveal: what was so shocking yesterday becomes deflated in our hyper-drive culture of pushing boundaries. In light of Miley Cyrus making so much offence at this year's Video Music Awards, Morrison's sexuality seems almost old-fashioned.

Which sort of renders the art of shock sort of flaccid at the end of the day. How far can we go beyond S&M?

In this book, I sensed some racist undertones in a few poems (see the Paris Journal for an example). This book is also propped up with various reprinted lyrics. One lyric from the song "When the Music's Over" was a haunting prediction of our current culture of rampant narcissism and insatiable greed:

"I hear a very gentle sound,
With your ear down to the ground.
We want the world and we want it…
We want the world and we want it,
now, now, NOW!

In the end, Morrison seemed to view death as a clean slate, from "Hurricane & Eclipse" where he says, "I wish clean/death would come to me" to "If Only I" where he claims "If only I could feel/me pulling back/again/& feel embraced/by reality/again/I would gladly die."

Maybe it's this very state of mind that appeals to teen boys, stressed out by the fog of adolescence and living a life not yet fully in control.

Notes on Translations II: Imaginings and Struggles

September 29, 2013 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Although I didn't love this book, it was an interesting project edited by Alan Michael Parker: twenty-two poets were asked to invent a purely fictitious poet and pretend to do a translation of that poet, including an introduction with a life story and why they appealed and a sample poem or two. The editor wanted to explore issues of narrative and translation, to call "into question the axioms of translation and the use of fiction-in-poetry, the work that…allows the contributors to slip between speaker, self and other."

Many of the poets conjured up their ideal (or so it seemed) poet, one of a choice between progressive-woman-before-her-time, political radical, resistance fighter, suppressed refugee, or one of the exploited or insane.

My issue with the result was boredom. If you go to poetry to get inside a living person's idea of themselves or their processing of an experience, or to understand a foreign experience…this might leave you cold, too. It sort of proves how we come to fiction and poetry with different needs. Also, it proves how hard it is to get away from your own voice: "Readers familiar with the poems of any of these writers will surely find affinities between their self-signed work and the work of their imagined poets; perhaps it is…true that no matter what we do, we cannot run from ourselves."

I'm pretty sure the poets were trying real hard to escape themselves, too. And then there was the problem of invention: were these poets really all that good at it? A few fictions were hilarious, rarely did they become profound, but mostly they just felt like practicings.

In some cases, pertinent points about translations arose: Laure-Anne Bosselaar talked about how literal to go, preserving the stanza form or rhyme scheme or syllabic count and maintaining the poem's tone. And she showed multiple attempts. Martha Collins talked about the problem of translating emotion, linguistic accidents of meanings over two languages, and how the monosyllabic Vietnamese language "has much less connective tissue than European languages." Judith Hall talked about wimpy translator "mea-culpa" concessions about translation failures but then herself concedes that there is no perfect translation of poetry. Translations metamorphize in keeping, hopefully, with an original spirit. But then she dismisses the "translator's dilemma" to "secondary and debatable scholarship. What the reader wants to remember is not a process but a poem."

Well, that depends upon the reader.

I loved Maxine Kumin's poem "Inge, in Rehab." She talked about voice and the work of enjambments and slang. Overall, I loved the fictions best of Mark Strand and Annie Finch. And I liked Eleanor Wilner's poem "Pandora Novak."

Soon after reading this book, I dug out an old Poetry Magazine issue I had not read, "The Translation Issue" from April 2008. This was my first reading of Poetry and I loved the format of reading a poem or two and then reading the translator's note on it. You never see the original poems.

David Harsent translates Greek poet Yannis Ritsos and talks about translations being not another version but a re-imagining and how Ritsos poems are "indelibly Greek."

Stephen Edgar translates Russian Anna Akhmatova and talks about the difficulty of forms and rhyme schemes that, when kept, can distort sense. He wonders what should be sacrificed. "A poem is about many things and the literal sense is only one of them." Meaning might only be a hanger for rhetorical or musical features. He feels some poets, like Akhmatova, lose most of their magic in their translations. He says he first does a literal translations and "them begin[s] the remoulding."

Michael Sells translates Arabic poet Ibn Al-Arabi and talks about playing syntax against line breaks to recreate rhythmic play of syntax against meter. I'm not sure what he means.

Peter Cole translates Hebrew poet Natan Zach and says, "A Zach poem…is both a thing in itself and a demonstration of what makes it that thing…therein lies the challenge of translation–accounting for that aural intelligence as it moves along the lines."

Don Paterson translates Cesar Vellejo and says most "faithful" translated versions are "mere hommage; they really belong to a category of meta-poem."

Finally, this week I finished my new issue of American Poetry Review. I really liked the Cynthia Cruz poems. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence so I find it very ironic that she capitalizes every line of her poems, when everyone in Kate Johnson's class there in 1995 really came down on me hard for being an impossibly outdated conceit. Arielle Greenberg finishes her essay series on the differences between second and third-wave feminist female poets (highly recommended). Tony Hoagland's new poems take on language poetry (is this a lengthy bitch fight between lyricists and language poets?).

In any case, the essay by John Felstiner about translating a near-death Neruda is interesting here in that he talks about how his translated lines "strangely seem like my own creation, speaking not only through me but for me" and he calls this a "foolish kind of occupational hazard." He says, "What's worse, if I turn back to Neruda's Spanish it seems an uncannily good translation of my own poem!"

Translations are so interesting.

The Art of Description

September 15, 2013 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

When I met with the writers group in Phoenix last month, we decided to read and discuss a craft book and some short stories. For stories, we chose Art of the Story by Daniel Halpern. None of us loved any of the four stories we chose from the book, or the physicality of the book (which was heavy and contained tiny margins). But the more we discussed the stories, the more we found redeeming about them.

Of those of us who read The Art of Description by Mark Doty, this book didn't fare much better. I think this was mainly an issue of expectation on our part. The book is part of a Graywolf series on craft called The Art of…. I have another installment ready to read, The Art of Subtext.

I think our group hoping for a book that would break down the how-to craft in creating description in our work (some of us were poets, some were fiction writers, one did non-fiction), instead of a book of explications on poems that utilized description effectively for image making. And even if that was the rubric, I'm not sure such a lofty goal could be achieved in these small pocket books.

Although I do love Mark Doty in general (his poems, his live readings and the breathtaking book Dog Years) and he is brilliant at mulling over a topic, we wanted more button-down organization here . I felt like the book was mostly comprised of five essays created for other purposes and a clever glossary of ruminations on description at the end. I did appreciate how Doty pulled in criticisms of lyrical description from certain language poets and his respectful, yet fair minded, response to them, "It's what I do, the nature of my attention…" meaning for some poets, constructing literal descriptions is their way of thinking and that's no more or less valid than someone who deconstructs as a tendency.

And when doubting the stability of naming things, Doty says, "But we have nothing else, and when words are tuned to their highest ability, deployed with the strengths the most accomplished poets bring to bear on the project of saying what's here before us–well, it's possible to feel at least for a moment, language clicking into place, into a relations with the world that feels seamless and inevitable. It that is a dream, so be it." Which is a solid defence allowing lyric poetry to proceed.

My friend Christopher and I read and added marginalia to the same copy of the book…mine. We both marked off the line, "The pleasure of recognizing a described world is no small thing." We also both marked this line in a discussion of Elizabeth Bishop, "…her aim is to track the pathways of scrutiny….the poet seems to proceed from a faith that the refinement of observation is an inherently satisfying activity." We also met up at, "Perhaps the dream of lyric poetry is not just to represent states of mind, but to actually provoke them in the reader."

But defenses of lyric poetry may have been beyond the scope of the book and in the process, some dissection of descripting was lost. We also had problems connecting with some of his samples.

There were some hints on effective metaphor-making that my friend and I both agreed on, "The more yoked things do not have in common, the greater the level of tension, the greater the sense of cognitive dissonance for the reader." The book is only 137 pages. We would have liked more of these condensed and practical lessons.

I felt the book gained more traction in this way in the second half, in the glossary of descriptive ideas called "Description's Alphabet" which broke down ideas about beauty, color, contouring, economy, juxtaposition, etc.

A Book About Neighbors

September 15, 2013 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I've just posted a recent interview with Gwendolen Gross, novelist and author of When She Was Gone, as well as many other books. Wendy (and Ann Cefola) and I graduated from the same MFA class at Sarah Lawrence College (back in the olde pre-Internet days).

We discuss the border between our personal lives and our sense of our neighborhood,
how to assemble a novel with a "gravitational" central character who
drives the story, the motives of characters and opportunities of plot,
pacing and point of view.

Interview with Gwendolen Gross, author of When She Was Gone

Books I’ve Been Reading

September 9, 2013 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’ve had a Selected Poems of the German poet Hans Magnus
Enzensberger on my shelf for years and I finally read it over the summer. In my
Vintage anthology I really liked “For the Grave of a Peace-Loving Man,” “Song
for Those Who Know,” and “The Poison.” This time around, however, the “bare bones” style wasn’t connecting with me at
this point in my life. So much of how we respond to poetry seems to have to do
with where we are in our lives and our intellectual pursuits of the moment. Like
tastes in music, it’s ultimately subjective and beyond rational.

But I do see many checkmarks in this book. My favorite poem
was “Notice of Loss,” a cascading list of possible losses, ending with,

I’ll be through in a moment,
your lost causes, all sense of shame,
everything, blow by blow,
alas, even the thread of your story,
your drivers license, your soul.

I also rediscovered Alice Fulton from an old copy of
Palladium that I had. For some reason, I now enjoyed the more lush vocabulary
she provided. In college, a teacher recommended I read “Dance Script with
Electric Ballerina” which I found impenetrable at that age and
eventually gave the book away. On my shelf I also have Powers of Congress which I
haven’t yet finished. At first Palladium felt jerky and disjointed but as I
went along I realized I just had to get used to her particular train of thought. I loved
her pretty intellectualisms, her variety of line lengths, her whimsy. From “Nugget and Dust”

…I told lies
in order to tell the truth,
something I still do. It was hard

to imagine a world in tune
without his attention
to its bewildering filters, emergency
breaks, without his measured tread. Diligent world,
silly world! Where keys turn and idiot lights
signal numinous privations.

From “Orientation Day in Hades” she brings together Disney
and Detroit. In
fact, I loved her Detroit poems, especially now
that I have more adult knowledge of what the personality of the city of Detroit
is.

Fulton tried to integrate meanings of the world palladium to
hold all the poems together section by section, similarly to James Thomas Stevens with Bulle/Chimere but Stevens does it better. Where Fulton excels are her fresh wiley similes
in densely packed poems.

She deals with machinery but not in a cold, clinical
way—with lush and laden prettiness: “The Wreckeage Entrepreneur,” and ”When Bosses
Sank Steel
Islands.” She can come across as unemotional in
“My Second Marriage to my First Husband” but then addresses the physical
complications of flirting in “Scumbling.” Sometimes she slips into stream of
consciousness as in “Aunt Madelyn At the White Sale.”

One of my favorites was the football poem, “Men’s Studies:
Roman De La Rose.” The third stanza of “On the Charms of the Absentee Gardens”
is a haunting depiction of the World
Trade Center
(considering this book was published in 1986):

…We need such leavings—
not to tell the seasons but to help us
imagine famine, fire, abandonment. To help us see
catastrophe—the mesa as the basal column of a bomb drop.

Some say remnants of the World
Trade
Center will leave much to
be desired.
but isn’t that a ruin’s purpose—to be less
than satisfactory, only partly
knowable, far gone, not fully
lovely, changing each observer into architect?
To make a posthistory wonder
what god needed a prosthesis
of compressed, freestanding steel, Monolith, a rock

band, fired ingenious music through the bars
of Troy
when I was seventeen.

The book ends with a note on the loss of her father in
“Traveling Light”

Behind me the ocean
stares down the clouds, the little last remaining
light, as if to remind me of the nothing
I will always have
to fall back on.

50 Contemporary Poets (in 1977), The Creative Process

July 7, 2013 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Judging by the 2.00 sticker on the spine, I found this book at the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, annual library book sale over 11 years ago. I opted for their "all the books you can stuff into a paper bag for $10" special and came out with many old books such as this, 50 Contemporary Poets, The Creative Process edited by Alberta T. Turner.

Have you ever loved reading a book so much you slowed down the reading of it to make it last longer? I did that with this book from 1977. Turner sent 100 poets a questionnaire to help poets describe their process writing one of their poems. Fifty poets complained that such an endeavor was impossible (imagine a mechanic saying that) or they were too busy (understandable) and fifty others were game.

Says the last poet, David Young:

"I'm aware as I finish this (more fun that I thought it would be) that my discussion in unlikely to change anybody's mind or affect anyone's judgement. To those who dislike the poem, a consideration of its writing at this length can only be ludicrous and vain. But to acknowledge in more words and detail than one has ever used before the intricacy of a process that is painful, joyful, mysterious, and absorbing requires a kind of honesty and patience that may bring a measure of satisfaction both to writer and reader."

I'll say. This book is fantastic on many levels.

I learned more from the introduction than I've learned in whole poetry guides.
All the poets are from 1977 and you get a good review of late-70s thinking.
I haven't heard of most of these poets. Not only a good survey of popular 70s poets, but it reinforces the idea that some poets come and go.
All the poets are widely different in how they work allusions, endings, beginnings, metaphor, use of language and how they assemble poems. There's something for everyone here. If you think one poet is an annoying twit, the next one will give you epiphanies.
One question is about paraphrasing their poems. It's entertaining to see all the ways different poets freak out about this question. It can't be done! It robs poetry of its special magic powers! (You don't think students do this before a test?) Or paraphrasing is Jack the Ripper to their poems. One of my favorite responses was simply, a poem is a paraphrase. Wow! Like d'uh: all the paraphrases take longer than the actual poems. Anyway, it's fascinating to see how poets squirm or rejoyce in the questions.
Because I have been watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show DVDs all June, I heard every essay in the voice of Rhoda.

I believe this is an out-of-print book but I see many used copies to be found. Enthusiastically recommended!

The Case for a Poet in Tennessee Williams

July 7, 2013 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I can't tell you of many good literary rags from St. Louis, Missouri. Although I lived there for almost two decades (1977-1995), I was not connected in to the literary scene. I could tell you all the animal welfare organizations I used to belong to, however, from my futile and depressing animal rights involvements when I was 21. The only holdover of literariness I still receive from St. Louis is the literary review belle lettres from Washington University, the university Tennessee Williams attended.

Notably, we didn't study Tennessee Williams in either high school or college in St. Louis. I assumed this was because he was controversially gay and plays like Suddenly Last Summer (I only saw the movie but it was brilliant) were often gay. We did read plenty of depressing Russian authors so it couldn't have been his sense of tragedy. We also studied T. S. Eliot briefly; but only briefly because he was, after all, an ex-patriot and therefore an anti-midwestern snob. But we still were forced to read "Love Song of J. Alfred Profrock" before we were ripe for it. Why no class in Tennessee Williams at the University of Missouri?

Anyway, belle lettres just reviewed the new book on Williams, My Friend Tom, by William Jay Smith who was in a casual university group with Williams called The Poetry Factory. Smith makes a compelling argument that Williams (due to his descriptions, stage directions and early poems), was more of a poet than a playwright and that his final, experimental plays have been misread and his entire oeuvre should be reconsidered as poetry. The book reviewer (and Wash U professor of drama and comparative literature) agrees, which is a significant enough opinion for me to jump on board with that.

Three Books I Took Home From IAIA

June 23, 2013 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

While I was working at the Institute of American Indian Arts as interim faculty secretary, I was given or procured a few books of poetry.

A Book About Mothers and Daughters

The first one I found on a table of giveaway books near the offices of the creative writing department. I wasn't expecting much from an old book from 1978 titled Tangled Vines, A Collection of Mother & Daughter Poems edited by Lyn Lifshin.

Happily I've been looking for mother-daughter poems recently, but, (due to the publication date), I was expecting some annoying hippy-speaking mama-drama poems. Women were just starting to dig into their true feelings back then (as I recall) and their first poems were understandably indulgent and self-centered. For me, a Gen X feminist, the results are sometimes over-the-top and eye-rolling, such as transpires from a daughter to a mother.

But these poems were far more restrained than I expected. Even though I'm not a mother, there were poems from the mother's point-of-view that I liked: "Rachel" and "Aubade" by Linda Pastan (the latter capturing a mother's amazement at her daughter:

Now my daughter takes the day
into her hand
like fresh baked
bread–
she offers me a piece.

I also liked "Waiting for the Transformation" by Judith Minty, and "Mothers, Daughters" by Shriley Kaufman which perfectly captures the love-hate relationship many mothers and daughters have: "

If I
break through to her, she will
drive nails into my tongue.

"The Second Heart" by Ellen Witlinger ("The child I do not have/rides on your shoulders/when we go out walking./Everyone we pass notices") and "Pain for a Daughter" by Anne Sexton were both moving.

"The Petals of the Tulips" by Judith Hemschemeyer is indicative of the honesty of the age these poems were written in. In response to the old-worn attack, "I didn't ask to be born" the poem infatically states, "You? You were begging to be born!"

There were also many daughter point-of-view poems I could relate to:"My Mother Tries to Visit Me in the Dead of Night" by Diane Wakoski, "Mother" by Erica Jong, "Daughterly" by Kathlene Spivack, "The Fish" by L.L. Zieger (about a daughter's plea to be accepted as she is), "The Dirty-Billed Freeze Footy" (about laughing with your mother), "38 Main Street" by Lyn Lifshin (about aging in time behind a mother), "Trick" by Sharon Olds (the magic of women: "All this/I have pulled out of my mouth right/before your eyes"), "Color of Honey" by Anne Waldman (captures a litany of conflicting emotions about one's mother), "summer words of a sistuh addict" by Sonia Sanchez (a drug-addled poem that asks: "sistuh/did u/finally/learn to to hold yo mother?"), "Mothers" by Nikki Giovanni, and "Mourning Pictures" by Honor Moore with the haunting final line:

Ladies and gentlemen, one last time: My
mother's dying. I haven't got another.

Bottom line: I haven't found another book out there like it. Until one comes along, this is a recommended read for mothers and daughters both.

A Book About Soldiers; A Book About War

Poet Jon Davis gave me a copy of this book, Phantom Noise (2010) by Brian Turner. This book is (shock) and awe inspiring and definitely one of the best books I've come across this year. A veteran of Bosnia and Iraq wars, Turner's poetry figuratively take no prisoners. Poems are delegated to small, unnamed sections and I had to take a day's pause between each just to let the wounds sink in. Turner writes solid poems, well-crafted in his pacing and use of language and metaphor. He's good with his endings. The titles I found hard to connect with and I wasn't always sure how they corresponded to their poems.

Turner writes about V.A. Hospitals, lovers in wartime, the chaos of war, the human connection among strangers, the violence of infrastructures falling, childbirth in combat, being back at home, skeletons in the sand, Iraqis, rape, prisoners or war, studies on bullents and shrapnel.

My favorites were "Mohmmed Trains for the Beijing Olympics, 2008," "A Lullaby for Bullets," "The Mutanabbi Street Bombing" and "Ajal,"

I cannot undo what the shrapnel has done.
I climb down into the crumbling earth
to turn your face toward Mecca, as it must be.
Remember the old words I have taught you,
Abd Allah. And go with your mother,
buried her beside you–she will know the way.

Bottom line: Not only do I love the poetry Turner brings to bear on warfare here, the emotional imagery he resurrects, but I love the fact that he's writing about the horrifying technological now regarding warfare. He's using time-honed tools to turn over and pontificate on the very modern existence we're dealing with today, instead of hiding from it, dismissing it or turning it inside out with his own ego experimentations.

An Anthology of Prose Poems

Jon Davis also gave me a copy of the anthology of prose poems, The House of Your Dream, edited by Robert Alexander and Dennis Maloney. I was disappointed that the poems in this collection were organized by author alphabetically. You get strange bedfellows that way.

And I learned something here: what I usually love about prose poems is their dramatic contrast amidst more traditional poems. I am the sort that is attracted to the contrast itself, which is while I like certain Allan Houser sculptures and why I wanted to visit the new Getty Museum so often in Los Angeles (rough surfaces abutting smooth ones). I even like sentence length contrasts, where they lure you in with a long sentence and then punch you with a short one.

And contrast is what you completely lose in an anthology made up entirely of prose poems. The prose poem-y ness gets lost and they become simply dramatic shorts. At their worst, prose poems can read like an act of indulgence. At their best, they are little blocks of braniac beauty. And there were many shorts I did like here.

Stuart Dybek's "Alphabet Soup" and Peter Johnson's "Return" both were a great critique of poets. I loved Russel Edson's short pieces "Sleep" and "Bread." I liked Jean Follain's untitled piece and Maureen Gibbon's "Un Brit Qui Court" (A Sound that Runs) and her mother poem, "Blue Dress." Jim Harrison's "My Leader" is a nice piece about his dog and goats who "know what's poisonous as they eat the world." I liked the rebelliousness of Holly Iglasias in "Thursday Afternoon: Life is Sweet" and the odd sweetness of David Ignatow's "A Modern Fable."

"Letters of Farewell (1)" by Christopehr Merrill put a bug in my bonnet to try to write some epistolary poems some day. "Moon/Snail/Sonata" by Lawrence Millman was beautiful:

When I landed, I was all flotsam. Maybe a little jetsam, too.

And there was an eerie conglomeration of poems about ghosts and the dead starting around page 134. I love ghost poems so I loved "Ghost Triptych" by Nina Nyhart, "Mortal Terror" and "Cat Shadow" by Tommy Olofsson, and "Nights at the Races" by Robert Perchan.

I liked the travel poem "I Remember Clearly" by Imre Oravecz and the particular historical quality of Francis Ponge's "The Pleasures of the Door:"

…shutting oneself in–which the clip of the tight but well-oiled spring pleasantly confirms.

Seeing as my friend Christopher was recently caught up in the recent Santa Monica College shooting (luckily he was unharmed), the poem about the psychotic shooter, "Carpe Diem" by Vern Rutsala resonated with me. I also liked Rutsala's poem "Sleeping." "Medals" by Gorgan Simic was interesting. And the poem about the panda who escapes and becomes an entrepreneur is a fine, funny story in William Slaughter's "China Lesson:"

"Doing a tidy business. Smiling all the while. Never looking back.

Bottom line: The poems regrettably lose something packed alongside so many other prose poems but there are some pearls in here worth finding if you're willing to dive for them.