Wow. Thanks for all the wonderful comments on the last post, everyone; there’s much to add to it, much more to think about, but as was suggested as well, there’s also the business of reading and writing and getting back to the Work, rather than just kvetch about it. In that vein, here are some books that have made their way into my hot little hands over the past week or so.
Susan Briante’s book, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, is new from Ahsahta Press at Boise State University. “It’s a work of shuddering velocity,” writes C.D. Wright on the back cover, “an ode, a screed, a lament, a love song…” The velocity is that of an acute, lyrical intelligence darting from thing to thing, opening the poetic voice to a broad range of perceptions. I’m especially taken with an intermittent series in the first section of the book, “3rd Day of the Rainy Season,” “5th Day of the Rainy Season,” etc., which read as both an ongoing, submerged “ars poetica”/dialogue with the act of writing, a la Robert Duncan’s interwoven “Structure of Rime” series, and a test of the “velocity” that Wright mentions.
“A teenage boy tugs at his crotch then gestures toward yellowing roses in the sacristy.”
What I admire here is the effortless wedding of obscene to sacred, intimate gesture to public display, internal to external, quotidian to quasi-mystical. And the brave insertion of the “I” in the midst of all these things:
“I carry the Nikon into the sanctuary”
in which the personal’s looked at as no more no less than these disparate elements, thus risked:
“Chickadees fight in a mud puddle”
next to
“But who watches over the woman going to bed in a motel alone?”
which could be the speaker, or someone the speaker thinks of or sees, in any case not privileged, no less tenderly set forth, a splendid juxtaposition full of restraint. (Susan will be reading at 12th St. Books in Austin on Saturday, April 14 at 7pm.)
* * *
Bounce by Duncan McNaughton is new from First Intensity Press. The sense of roving intelligence here is both similar to and vastly different from Briante’s, tending more towards the internal drift and the candid aside, not as fastened to the thingness of things, a “radio for no one” that doesn’t seem to give a damn whether or not you tune in. The poetry here plunges you into a story midstream, a mystery where everything and nothing’s at stake:
just in case
Drifting on fumes, touring the tunnels…
when a good-looking dead woman walks by
on the arm of some fat African king.
Nothing transcendent, table for two. He’s
a nice king. Also I know his date. Great
dancer. Moves like a doe. Mates like one too.
To the king she introduces me as
The Prince of Kissing. The king smiles, bows. We
embrace. I then return to the stage, take
up my ‘oud. The song I make up tells of
a red sash, diamond jewelry, and a corpse.
If you are not careful in the middle
of the night she will make you her private
property. Nothing can abolish her.
_____________
to her admirers
—-wherein the “she” could be poetry, could be the Her of Shakespeare’s sonnets (which McNaughton has written a book about), could be…? The nothing/everything side by side, “Nothing transcendent, table for two” yet “the song… about a red sash, diamond jewelry, and a corpse.”
* * *
Lucky enough to see Catherine Barnett read at the KAP House last weekend, and picked up a copy of her book Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (available from Alice James Books). There is a sense of story, and a sense of series, again similar but different from the poets mentioned above. For example, there’s the enviable velocity of this passage, from a poem called “The Disbelieving”:
“We all saw how beautiful she looked
those first six months when she walked a thousand miles—”
which accomplishes in two lines, it seems to me, what many novels take hundreds of pages to do (at the same time it’s reminiscent of a Jane Austen-type opening):
“over the University Bridge
and under it
and into and out of the Arboretum
and up the hill to the sundial we circled every day”
a symbolic/impossible sensation of speed, of the swiftness of time’s passing, spread out in space but compressed in time–
“while the days got longer
and my sister more beautiful,
her red hair turning gray…”
until suddenly, inevitably–
“The night after we picked up the ashes
she drew the brass urn into bed with her”
This both being and not being, time’s passing and time’s standing still, the sort of miracle that only poetry, it seems to me, can perform.
“the mother lifting the sheet to see her child
sleeping and dreaming only the bed is empty
and the mother strips the blankets
and strips the sheets
down to the mattress made of stone.”
The last line, arguably, feeling like a bit of a trick; but one that the poem has certainly earned through its utterly brutal, impersonal-but-intimate story, sifted down to a steely core through a dreamlike intensity, a casting off of unnecessary details like names, occupations, causes of death.
* * *
All of the books above, I think, begin to answer some of the questions I had re. “What Use Poetry” (already knowing there were answers, millions of them, else why go on). I’m grateful to everyone who contributed to the discussion, and to these poets for providing much to chew on. Now it’s back to the work…
By the way, here’s a link to Steve Wilson’s interview re. Jack Kerouac recently broadcast for the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road.
Tags: Small Press Reviews by dhadbawnik
6 Comments »
