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The Futility of the Poetry Workshop

A recent attempt to "workshop" my attempts at poetry with another poet revealed the process to be an awkward and self-negating one. I think we both approached the session with the intent of offering advice, encouragement, and constructive criticism, but left feeling a bit helpless in the endeavor.

The problem with workshopping poetry is that you can only go so far in critiquing mechanics and structure when they are so often perverted by the poet deliberately. When you assume (as you should) that every mistake or idiosyncrasy is a tool or a stylistic device, you can only really critique how well the poet uses such tools to get his point across. But knowing his point is an unrealistic exercise in meta-poetry; it asks how well the poet poetically delivers his poetry. "Real poems" come without their authors to explain them away, so we're really just left with our gut reactions: I like it, or I don't.

To Pan or Not to Pan?

A passage from Wilson's critique of free verse caught my eye:

Far from those eroded banks, work that responds to the name “avant-garde” usually takes this tendency to a far further extreme, and robs words of their status as language by printing them in such random, self-confuting order that they no longer constitute a statement, but are merely a hunk of jumbled pseudo-subversive phonemes spat upon the page. We see the latter in, say, Lyn Hejinian’s senseless Writing is an Aid to Memory, which I quote at random (honoring the fashion in which she wrote it):

its consent to time

mass perhaps in a form against it

a cheap reading of what surrounds

this taste of opinion

it all can be admitted up

Thanks to her collection of essays, The Language of Inquiry, which by some hundreds of pages dwarfs her poor little ticker tape of “poetry,” I am aware of the radical intent of this work. Above all, I am aware she has succeeded in creating a kind of writing that refuses to be read...

Sometimes slamming someone else's work just doesn't have a place; it never enhances your argument unless your argument is "this sucks, and I'm pissed." Although a poetry review is a decent place for paltry scatterings of such malice, a supposedly accredited journal of academic criticism is surely not. Wilson's undermines his own persuasions here, taking cheap (albeit well-written) potshots where he could be developing a more convincing line of reasoning. It's rhetorically ineffective, to put it nicely (although personally, I find it deplorable, pompous and vain, but in order to maintain my ethos I will withhold such opinions from my argument, reserving them instead for this bit of parenthetical irony).

There is a conspicuous line between support and insult, and choosing to breach the threshold is a professional risk; I'd be surprised if Wilson didn't sacrifice some esteem in doing so.

Comic Relief: ABPJ Review

Professor Roy and the Amazingly Bad Poetry Journal is a healthy dose of snide, belittling fun. The poems come from undisclosed locations and read like high school English assignments. Some of them aren't quite insufferable, but "Professor Roy" has a way of making even the most earnest attempts seem embarrassingly inadequate. Depending on your perspective, this can be seen either as cruel or hilarious. Either way, a love poem called "Mr. Fix-It" deserves some kind of attention, doesn't it?

Free Verse: Fight the Good Fight

Become a freedom fighter! Send a comment using CPR's suggestion page and stand up for free verse in all of its liberating glory. Tell them you've heard enough from haughty pedagogues like James Matthew Wilson.

"Begone, J. Evans Pritchard, Ph. D!"

CPR: Literary Pedantry

Contemporary Poetry Review's recent feature, "Our Steps amid a Ruined Colonnade: Grammar and Expression," is brimming with unintended irony. Its third part, which is essentially a denunciation of free verse, is either a masterful example of self-mockery or the work of a turgid buffoon. Here are some examples:

#1: After all, Kant’s obscurities launched a thousand ships of obfuscation from which philosophy in general has never fully recovered. In contrast, whatever the complexities of the reality he describes, St. Thomas Aquinas found a clear and efficient medium to express that reality—and, crucially, it is the clarity of Aquinas’ writing that helped ensure the soundness of the thought within it. If he were forced to write his articles on the Incarnation of the Word in Sapphics, more people might read Aquinas but even fewer should understand him properly.

Hmmm....talk about obfuscation! Wilson has the audacity to slam Kant for being unclear, but the essay itself is an exercise in prolix conceit and nebulosity. He establishes the dichotomy here between formal clarity ("determination," as he will later refer to it) and the chaos of free verse, but wavers arbitrarily between the poles.

#2: But formal verse certainly does not prevent anyone, student or master, from saying anything that needs to be said. I have always been perplexed by those persons... who seem to believe that the writing of poetry is primarily about self-expression.

Perhaps his perplexity comes from confusing opinion with fact. How can anyone criticize artistic motive or significance? How can Wilson sincerely rely upon his own discursive feelings and free associations as the primary mode of their censure? It's this kind of contradiction that makes me wonder if the whole thing is a joke; the essay champions free verse in form while denouncing it in message.

#3: The freedom of free verse is anarchy like any other anarchy, eschewing form for formlessness; liberty requires discipline and rewards it with accomplishment. Formal verse offers poets the only kind of freedom that actually exists: the freedom to be determined.

Wilson apparently becomes a demigod by the end of the essay; he can tell us what kind of freedom "actually" exists, and equates freedom and determination in near-biblical alpha and omega fashion. I'm sure he would call it a "holy paradox," but any logician or semi-literate yahoo will see it as sophistic contradiction; he takes the most licentious of liberties in decrying the dangers of taking liberties. Here's the kicker:

Only an easy drunk could expose himself to such obvious contradiction.

The Best of Joanna Newsom

But always up the mountainside you're clambering
Groping blindly, hungry for anything:
Picking through your pocket linings - well, what is this?
Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?

***

so;
my bride
here is my hand, where is your paw?
try and understand my plan, Ursala
my heart is a furnace
full of love that's just, and earnest
now; you know that we must unlearn this
allegiance to a life of service
and no longer answer to that heartless
hay-monger, nor be his accomplice
(that charlatan, with artless hustling!)
but; Ursala, we've got to eat something
and earn our keep, while still within
the borders of the land that man has girded
(all double-bolted and tightfisted!)
until we reach the open country
a-steeped in milk and honey

will you keep your fancy clothes on, for me?
can you bear a little longer to wear that leash?
my love, I swear by the air I breathe:
sooner or later, you'll bare your teeth

***

Last week our picture window produced a half-word
Heavy and hollow, hit by a brown bird
We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake
And pant and labour over every intake

I said a sort of prayer for some sort of rare grace
Then thought I ought to take her to a higher place
Said: "dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you
And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view"

Then in my hot hand
She slumped her sick weight
We tramped through the poison oak
Heartbroke and inchoate

The dogs were snapping
So you cuffed their collars
While I climbed the tree-house
Then how I hollered!
Cause she'd lain, as still as a stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two

Then, saw the treetops, cocked her head and up and flew
(while, back in the world that moves, often
According to the hoarding of these clues
Dogs still run roughly around
Little tufts of finch-down)

The cities we passed were a flickering wasteland
But his hand in my hand made them hale and harmless
While down in the lowlands the crops are all coming;
We have everything
Life is thundering blissful towards death
In a stampede of his fumbling green gentleness

Joanna Newsom: Master of Assonance

2006 brought us Ys, Joanna Newsom's second full-length album and a welcome evolution from her debut in The Milk-Eyed Mender. Van Dyke Parks contributes full orchestral arrangements to the five lengthy songs in Ys, rounding out Newsom's departure from Mender's folksy minimalism. Luckily, lyrical prowess accompanies her instrumental maturation, delivering an unprecedented blend of lush soundscapes and inspiring poetry.

Newsom is undoubtedly a master of assonance. Her lines flux and weave with a phonic waggishness that makes them at once memorable and moving. They're sometimes reminiscent of hip-hop, relying on a bouncing slant-rhyme scheme that renders more congruous lines than you would expect:

It was a dark dream, darlin', it's over
The firebreather is beneath the clover
Beneath his breathing there is cold clay, forever
A toothless hound-dog choking on a feather
...
Awful atoll
O, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow!
Bawl, bellow:
Sibyl sea-cow, all done up in a bow

Toddle and roll;
Teeth an impalpable bit of leather
While yarrow, heather and hollyhock
Awkwardly molt along the shore

Despite her structural playfulness, Newsom conjures a somber ambiance, expressing frustrations with the dualities of body and spirit, desire and fulfillment, pragmatism and idealism. She yearns for past idylls, pastures, kith and kin, while metropolitan modernity drifts in the distance as a "flickering wasteland." Yet she acknowledges our confinement within cosmic and individual schemes, and abandons the plaintive mode for a se la vie mentality:

Stay by the gate you are given, and
Remain in your place for your season...
Loving Him, we move within His borders,
Just asterisms in the stars set order
We could stand for a century
Starin' with our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing -
Joy
Landlocked
In bodies that don't keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Till we don't be
Told; take this,
Eat this

Newsom champions those who make the most of their earthly provisions in spite of inherent limitations. Like her lovers in "Only Skin" that "shuck and jive" in a doorway, we too are expected to find joy within solid perimeters; our bodies, our lives and capacities must be reflexively contented. If ingenuousness can help in this endeavor, it's found in Joanna's skipping stones and treehouses. But, as she shows us in "Cosmia," voluntary innocence is only a half-truth, and spiritual freedom is still thwarted by a very prominent corporality:

Water were your limbs, and the fire was your hair
And then the moonlight caught your eye
And you rose through the air
Well, if you've seen true light, then this is my prayer:
Will you call me when you get there?

It's this kind of "left behind" sentiment that puts Newsom out of joint with her desired existence and at odds with mainstream fare. Her music, depicted as a "white dove made with love," suffers at the hands of the profiteering industry - an avaricious conquistador that leaves the once pure bird "stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds."

But Newsom's birds can always fly, as long as they remain in their own kingdom, away from the world that "moves often according to the hoarding of these clues":

And though you die, bird, you shall have a fine view...

Cause she'd lain, as still as a stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two
Then, saw the treetops, cocked her head and up and flew

Live Blog: Samuel Pepys Reading Featuring John Dufresne

Thursday, March 27, 2008

7:02 - The bookstore is already overcrowded. Several hopefuls glance around in bewildered anxiety, hoping some extra chairs will fall from the heavens.

7:04 - Said chairs arrive from an unknown seraph. Tom DeMarchi passes around his student checklist, revealing the reason for the squeezin'.

7:08 - DeMarchi introduces Laurie Cornelius, who speaks about Dufresne's impact on her life
"I lived in a world of my own creation, and I probably should have sought psychological help."
"His stories revolve around the writer at work...Dufresne taught me that we are not so strange, that writing stories is really okay..."

7:14 - John Dufresne takes the podium. He's relaxed, a bit disheveled, and unassuming. He cracks open his book of short stories, Johnny Too Bad, and begins reading one of them, "Epithalamion."

Somewhere between 7:14 and 7:20- I lose track of time amid the nearly-tangible ecstasy that poured from his mouth:
"Lovers don't finally meet somewhere, they're in each other all along."
"In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must, in fact, take place somewhere."

7:20 - He drops a flurry of pop-culture references, clothing brands, etc. during a character profile. Despite their attention-grabbing acerbity, they help a bunch with concrete characterization. Just flashy enough to show how flashy the character is.

7:24 - "On Tuesday night Brandi dreamed of Texaco..."

7:28 - "She wondered what would happen to her other self, on the distant planet Earth..."

7:29 - Dufresne finishes the story and talks about the real people who inspired his characters. He tells us that in real life, Rodo reached into his pocket for an engagement ring and a condom fell out. Everyone laughs.

7:30 - He begins a new story from Requiem, Mass.

7:32 - "Thing 1 had a rock band called 'Glorious Sunrise' that had a racy underground hit called 'A Glands in Your Direction.'"

7:36 - Drastic mood shift. Topic veers from quirky characterization to spousal abuse, a wheelchair-bound wife careens down a flight of chairs, a philandering husband leaves her broken and immobile on the floor. The narrator speculates that the husband later killed her.

7:41 - Concludes this story and reads a brief(?) snippet from "Geography," also from Requiem, Mass.

"Once again hypochondria had murdered sleep."
"I could do what I liked to do. I could make things up."

7:47 - After a lengthy passage of encyclopedic details, Dufresne takes a breath, looks at the audience and says, "You see the problem with memoir?"

7:49 - The Q & A begins. This post will reveal the A's.
"You love your characters but you're not nice to them."
"Writing fiction is a pathetic cry for love and affection."

7:52 - Cites as early influences: Salinger, Harper Lee, Dostoevsky, Kerouac, Faulkner, and tawdry gossip from his mother and aunts.

7:57 - "You write better than you think you can if you revise...revise at least 20 times."

7:58 - "It's the best day when all the words come."

8:02 - Discusses writing Naked Came the Manatee, a collaboration with twelve other authors in which each author writes a chapter. Dufresne's chapter introduces Fidel Castro to the storyline, a bold and apparently controversial move for the book's small readership. Dufresne admits that part of his motivation was to complicate Carl Hiaasen's job of writing a suitable conclusion.

8:05 - Conclusion, applause, exeunt.

Defense of Sloth

Sloth is a deadly sin?

---"I consider America responsible for the shame of our age: the glorification of work, that stupid ideology which has engendered the idea of material progress and the disdain of every utopia or poetry tending toward the perfection of the human soul... I cannot help opposing those influences... with the most violent lunge forward, the idea, and the most creative of actions, idleness."
-Tristan Tzara


---"And for that poor Ambition - it springs
From a man's little heart's short fever-fit;
For Poesy! - no, - she has not a joy, -
At least for me, - so sweet as drowsy noons,
And evenings steep'd in honied indolence..."
-John Keats, "Ode on Indolence"


---"Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with
linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait."

-Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

---"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy."

-Charlie McCarthy

Into the Void(3): Curing the Conflict

Studies reveal that artists are commonly plagued by mental illness, which results in both fantastic art and memorable quietus.

While any degree of madness arguably works to the creative mind's advantage, it also stigmatizes its social manifestation. The artist shares a certain opprobrium with the outcast and the criminalized, and his behaviors are labeled with almost clinical distance: hypergraphic, logophilic, anti-social, bipolar, erratic, noncomformist, etc. Of course, many poets encounter no trouble sequestering their private temperament from their public persona. Others find the act to be an agonizing performance, and still others make no attempt to divide the two. This is the categorical difference (respectively) between the likes of Emerson's intellectual equanimity, Sartre's "l'enfer, c'est les autres," and Ginsberg's homoerotic impudence. In varying degrees, each involves a clash of the private and the public. Sometimes such a war just isn't sustainable.

The artist takes more than he is given, devotes his body to sloth and his mind to violent crusades. The individual imagination puts him at odds with a pragmatic world that demands economy, action, and industry. When emotional resonance is labeled "strange," or worse, "useless" by the dominant ideology, the poet is stripped of his social validity (unless he can play the part above). This devaluation is either effacing or pugnacious; it disavows the artistic mindset or puts it at odds with social orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy requires uniformity. It tells us a tree is a tree, that light doesn't slant, and that proverbs cannot come from Hell. The poet is Faust, Prometheus untethered, a proud Satan shrugging off his nimbus.

The poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.
-Charles Baudelaire

He is a hero to fellow demons. He cannot comprehend business. He may kill himself to cure these conflicts:

Private vs. Public
Sloth vs. Industry
Creation vs. Consumerism
Exile vs. Acceptance
Internal vs. External
Individual vs. Communal

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! ---The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks ---

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air ---
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel ---
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

-"Ariel," by Sylvia Plath

Into the Void(2): Elevated to Madness

Looking at Wikipedia's list of suicides is a shocking reminder of the poet's affinity with the reaper. But what drives our best and brightest to divorce this life in monoxide trysts? What is the impetus to self-sacrifice? Studies reveal that artists are commonly plagued by mental illness, which results in both fantastic art and memorable quietus.

This works to their advantage in craft, but may become self-defeating in practical life.

+ The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences.
-Arthur Rimbaud

The poetic process is thus an act of distillation, an ingestion of the raw world in all of its agonizing grit. It is an all-too-intimate relation with nature and an homage to the unseen. A good poet turns reality into fantasy, and what is given into what is taken. The poet is a valiant conduit to mysteries that lie beneath the hard rock. He plays shashdara and wins, courts Pandora, opens the gates of Les Paradis Artificiel. He wields the power he finds, and channels it onto the page. His mysteries possess him, and he is reduced (or elevated?) to madness.

+ I accustomed myself to simple hallucination; I saw quite deliberately a mosque instead of a factory, a drummer's school conducted by angels, carriages on the highways of the sky, a salon at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries, a vaudeville poster raising horrors before my eyes.
-Arthur Rimbaud

And this is all part of the artistic paradox. The vision of the poet blinds him to proprietary success. His subjective reality is a collective fiction. He is married passionately to life, but seeks death as relief from its blistering intensity. He ensures immortality through death.

On the other hand, it could be pure narcissism that pushes a poet to the edge. A lifetime of unenthusiastic reception is quickly cured by an untimely (and grossly public) death. I'm sure over half of Plath's readership came to know her through her morbid suicide, and even Thompson sprang from gonzo-counterculture obscurity to the limelight of his sacrificial altar in 2005.

But the fact remains: troubled lives make for good literature.

Into the Void: Early Entry

The artist's attraction to suicide is a startling reality. Although often described as a blanket misconception, the stereotype of "artist as self-destructive" is becoming more concretely typical. Research conducted by James C. Kaufman at the Learning Research Institute in California has determined that poets die younger than other artists, and are more susceptible to depression and suicidal tendencies:

''It's a whole confluence of reasons. If you ruminate more, you're more likely to be depressed, and poets ruminate. Poets peak young. They write alone."

Roughly 20 percent of the studied 1,987 dead writers died by suicide. These include but are not limited to: Thomas Chatterton, Paul Celon, Charles Clegg, Hart Crane, John Gould Fletcher, Heinrich von Kleist, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Sylvia Plath, and Hunter S. Thompson.

Wikipedia includes a list of historically-notable suicides. Even a cursory glance will make it disturbingly evident - the artist is statistically doomed to a self-inflicted demise.

Sylvia Plath Reads "Ariel"

Lexiconfusion: "discursive"

This adjective can get you into a bit of trouble, especially when characterizing someone else's work.

Discursive

1 a: moving from topic to topic without order : rambling b: proceeding coherently from topic to topic
2: marked by analytical reasoning
3: of or relating to discourse <discursive practices>

Note the conflict between a and b in the first sense. The definitions are directly opposed, and can mean the difference between panning and praising (depending on the work).

Scenario 1: A scholar strives to "proceed coherently" in his thesis, and avoids "rambling" at all costs. A critic calls his writing discursive. How should he react?

Scenario 2: A poet aims to disorient his readers with parataxis and stream-of-consciousness. A critic pans his work for being too discursive. Should he assume the critic understood his aim but thought it was overdone? Or should he think the critic missed the point altogether? Or should he worry that the critic understood the point but believed him to be a failure at the art of meaningful rambling?

Note: Definition came from Merriam-Webster Online

Segregated Words: Alexie and Trethewey

Concept poetry always risks disinterest. A book of poems – or an entire collection, in some cases – that focuses on a single topic can only hold so much attention, and the audience that does attend must either share in the monomania or be coaxed into its obsession quickly. The right seductress can take you to her room and entertain forever with the curtains closed, like Anne Wies in Floating City. Despite the urban fixation, she lets us in on joyous secrets, the beatitude of the city, and we transform alongside her subject with a smile.

But not all concepts can be so successful, and many overstep the boundary between focus and fixation. Questions of race and identity, as popularized in poetry by Sherman Alexie and Natasha Trethewey, walk the fine line and often stumble into tedium.

The problem with conceptualizing emotion is that its expression becomes exhaustive; one can only talk for so long about being a fish out of water or a disgruntled half-breed or an indignant native American. These things, although potential topics for one or a few poems, are the means to a more creative end, not the ends themselves. Unique human conditions produce uniquely emotive beings, people capable of fathoming the world in endlessly different ways. These people, then, should do more than just poeticize their complaints ad nauseam at the expense of other creative ventures. They should exorcise past demons and charge onward rather than stand on a petrified soapbox.

What a strange soapbox it is, too - demanding restitutions, decrying intolerance, and elucidating personal plights with supposed social resonance. We hear their hollering loud and clear. She is black. He is Native American. But their attempt to promote diversity is a rather uniform one, a singular self-sabotage. It proves that they can curate their own Museums of Me but are too scared or proud or boring to walk outside. She is still that little mulatto girl trying to fit in (or stand out), but she can’t because her struggle has won out. It has replaced her and speaks volumes while she remains mute: "A true account of how things were back then. / On screen a slave stood big as life: big mouth, / bucked eyes, our textbook's grinning proof - a lie / my teacher guarded. Silent, so did I". And he can only stew indignantly, waiting to strike back: "You understand and know / why I was so quick to rage, remember / why my hand closes easily to a fist."

Move on, move on, move on...

New Phenomenon: The Ostrich

Somewhere in between the exhilaration of flying with falcons and the ho-hum of sitting bored in a birdhouse is the Ostrich, a flightless thing but a bird nonetheless. The Ostrich is too weighty and ponderous to fly, a decent stab at soaring but aeronautically doomed by its own makeup.

Unlike the Birdhouse, the Ostrich is mobile. Unlike the Bird, the Ostrich is grounded. Alfred Corn touches on what can turn one into the other in his review of Robert Hass's Time and Materials, saying:

Although Hass briefly expands the scope of the subject by alluding to the Aeneid (the moment when Aeneas flees the burning city with his father on his back), I think the allusion is too weighty for this poem, given how unliterary and unadorned it is. A defense would no doubt argue that resolute austerity of presentation matches the dire events recounted; even mildly aesthetic touches might seem like window-dressing. As for the Trojan allusion, though grand, it conveys the notion of a son bearing the burden of his father. Fine, but then Hass is repudiating the paternal legacy here, whereas Aeneas intended the opposite. If I’d written the poem, I’d have dropped the Trojan allusion and reconceived the text as a brief prose memoir.

In a sort of anti-statistical vein, we can view the birdhouse-ostrich-bird schema as a continuum on which most poetry can be plotted. An abundance of popular references, familiar themes, traditional forms, and even jokes can relegate a poem to Birdhouse status; they entice readers with the promise of communal enjoyment and wink-wink accessibility, sheltering us from pounding hearts and discouraging the flutter of wings. Unique forms, personal allusions, bizarre analogies, and exotic topics will earn the title of Bird-of-Flight; they fly freely and of their own accord, gracefully shattering gravity and permitting us to enjoy the ride. Then there's the Ostrich, trapped dead center. It is a poem with vision and potential, with wings that flap loudly but in vain due to the gravity of their own philosophy. The Ostrich is loaded full of hefty allusions, lengthy clauses, and theoretical intent, and is easily categorized according to its respective school (i.e. Tjanting and Language Poetry).

Here are some examples of where certain works lie on the ornithological spectrum:

Birdhouse: Denise Duhamel-Two and Two /Natasha Trethewey-Native Guard / Sherman Alexie-First Indian on the Moon
Ostrich: Ron Silliman-Tjanting
Bird of Flight: Maggie Dietz-Perennial Fall / Anne Wies-Floating City / Dean Young- Embryoyo

Please feel free to edit this list as you see fit; it's certainly not exhaustive and most labels are arguable.

Sylvia Plath Reads "Daddy"

"Floating City" Soars

Floating City, Anne Pierson Wiese's premier release and winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, is more than deserving of such acclaim. Despite the childish praises on the back cover ("Floating City is a super debut!"), the book's interior shines brilliantly and explores the shadows it creates.

The book is a concept collection; every poem is a poem of place, and the place is New York City. Wiese carves into the city's core, exposing natural mysteries that hide beside the megalopolis' sidewalks and streetlights.

St. John the divine,
listed in every guidebook yet seeming always
like a momentary vision on Amsterdam
Avenue, with its ragged halo of trees, wide stone
steps ascending directly out of traffic.

And we do transcend the hubbub of the streets, but first Wiese plays to our notions of metropolitan life, starting her poems like guided tours that both orient and confuse, as we shoot quickly through a 5th Avenue blur of pastry shops, subway stations, and street signs. She trivializes the taxi-window view of the city, not giving us cause to brace for her clever shift from the surface to the deep.

Under the streets
We flock together, fleet and half tame
as rare birds loose in a cavernous
pet emporium, returning for the night
To their rows of pagodas.

By the time we've read "pagodas," it really doesn't matter where we are anymore. The city and all of its neon sterility is transformed into hallowed emotion and history, and we happily trail just behind Weise as she leads us through parks, gardens, and cathedrals that all have a secret to tell. She helps us to penetrate the facade of New York, and we find an inviolable force no skyscraper can overshadow.

Gentlemen, here is a substance
we cannot move...The old maples and oaks,
plumbing the hill as humans could not,
whisper of what's below: more rock- more rock- more rock.

The (In)Voluntary Exile: Blogs Break the Boundary

The dominant perception of artists and thinkers throughout history has marginalized their role (or lack thereof) in society. Part of this is a flaw in collective ontology, but most of it is a valid response to the likes of Voltaire, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, and Alan Ginsberg, who have defined the opposite of conventional behavior and assumed official "weirdo" status in the annals of cultural history.

Now the stereotype is a self-fulfilling prophecy; an aspiring or accomplished poet invariably relegates himself to reclusive cloisters or tight circles of fellow outcasts. This is why death, solitude, and unrequited affection have been the top subjects of poetry throughout the years. Profundity is a personal endeavor, and its quest is sometimes a righteous one. The best poets have a paucity of devotees who venerate them as "sacred heretics," although in common minds their heresy is commonplace and contemptible. They are too different, too dangerous; they always border the criminal and sometimes cross the line.

The world of online poetics, however, has proven an effective method of snapping such notions, not only thrusting the concept of literature and literary theory into the mainstream but catapulting its creators into the limelight as well. Modern poets can publish and publicize themselves in blogs, and although they may retreat into unorthodox seclusion while they write, their bloggerly persona remains just as accessible and public as Perez Hilton.

See also Gabriel Gudding's February 2nd Post entitled "Varieties of Masculine Experience."

"Tjanting" has More to Say

The hard copy of Ron Silliman's "Tjanting" has a secret to tell. Unlike the pdf sample of the book's introduction, the printed pages feature seemingly random words and punctuation in bold type, which when strung together form another poem. The lines are stylistically removed from the jumbled chaos of "Tjanting"'s linear read-through, revealing both the softer side of Silliman's poesy and a sense of linguistic irony. Despite the assumed logistical barrier of constructing a poem from prearranged words, the encrypted poem is in fact much less cryptic than the body from which it was culled:

Cry into the night, the Dark, an endless search, a past entombed and doomed to human confusion. The whole damn thing is just so subjective, like everyone is breathing and copulating and praying in their own grimm fairy tale and writing their own words and forcing others into it sometimes without realizing. A flash. A winter vignette. Around the edges we are all snowblind. Snow is not an outlandish sex fantasy. The crack of the real whip on real flesh is mortifying, painful, demeaning. The thrill is in escaping, and laughing at yourself for once craving that raw and rosy flesh. But snow is always beautiful, moreso than its image in the mind, moreso than Monet and his oil magpies, moreso than Christmas lights or pillow fights, moreso than cocaine. I have seen lights in dark places and a fresh crest of snow is one, like turning the page of a moleskine and crying for the cleanliness; the virgin blanket waiting to be ravaged and stained, erected, defended, carved, trampled, balled up by toddler warmongers and catapulted with a laugh into the blustery fray. I have seen people smile at their own tracks in the snow, while others just hurry to the hearth and collapse with grateful skin. I have seen the sun burn away the page, and underneath is a new one, a bit soiled, silently beseeching another turn.

The decoding process took a long time. Was it worth it?

Workshopping in Progress:

Go easy on me!

Lunch Poems at Berkeley: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Word Alert: "Tjanting"

Just so you know.....

Somewhere in the wispy cross-fade of Tjanting's cover is a design reminiscent of Batik, an ancient form of textile art that produces unique dye patterns on cloth. Since its (probable) inception in Egypt, Batik artists have employed a tool called a Tjanting, used to apply hot wax onto fabric. It generally has a wooden handle and a metal resevoir at the end with a small spout to allow the wax to run onto the fabric. The wax is used as a resist against dye.

Thanks to Celia on Jacquard Forums for this definition.

"Tjanting" Something Else

Click Here for the introduction and opening pages of Tjanting

Not this.
What, then?
I started over & over. Not this.

So begins Ron Silliman's 2002 release Tjanting, a ponderous intermediate piece of his lifework, Ketjak, which is comprised of several other works published in succession since 1979. Each release functions as a long Language Poem, and Tjanting begins in this fashion with unabashed insistence upon the movement's tendency to disjoin: "Not this."

What follows is a flurry of prose poetry, a bizarre stream-of-consciousness account of the speaker's ruminations. Sentences are fragmented, spelling is perverted, and thoughts spontaneously jump in helter-skelter confusion. But there is order to this chaos, as images and actions recycle, multiply, and progress towards ambiguous ends in slow and agonizing detail.
"Call this long hand," he says amidst a discordant staccato of moles, airports, weathermen, and numerical puns.

The action weaves about in cyclonic fashion, turning over fragments of language, culture, and commentary in an endless (and often tiring) pageant of the unconventional. Then we hear it all again in loose pidgin; the semblance of linguistic integrity that once existed disintegrates into ejaculations of "No thingdis deep. Build an onion. This long hand call," and recollections of the vague become even less coherent.

Even with Silliman's deliberate unpredictability, the long poem fails to surprise after its first page or so. Looking at endless block paragraphs, despite their montaged intrigue, forces his linguistic experiment to blur in the mind. But this may be the point, as the mere reading of the pseudo-language itself stamps abstract impressions of an imagined world into our own. Paradoxically, the abstraction is wrought of concrete signifiers; simple nouns and visceral imagery give us a sense of firm footing inside each sentence, but refuse to provide anything more than fleeting vignettes. We feel we know the lexicon, but its meaning eludes us through its syntax as we struggle to read a new English with an interpretive accent.

It's really quite unfair. Just as we begin to feel solid about something quaggy like "analogies to quicksand," Silliman giggles and chides, whispering "Nor that either."

Silliman Sells Out, For a While

I was dismayed to find a few posts on Silliman's blog dedicated to Project Runway and Barack Obama. I'm not sure how they crept into a site concerning "contemporary poetry and poetics," but a huge screenshot from Project Runway's final competition, as juxtaposed against a picture of his most recently reviewed book, is downright disturbing.

While the image of anorexic waist lines draped in gaudy couture haunted me for days, his eighteen-paragraph political commentary merely disillusioned my faith in Silliman's good intentions (and blogging decency). The posts aren't just OT, they're obscenely OT. If he feels strongly enough and has enough material about Obama and pointless television, he should start another blog and deposit that filth there.

Nevertheless, I am happy to report that he has returned to his more admirable and pertinent endeavors, and currently features a lengthy list of poetry-related links (go figure!).

The Very Worst of Denise Duhamel

This travesty of originality speaks for itself:

Do not swallow.
If you accidentally swallow this poem, contact a Poison Control Center
...immediately.
Do not read this poem while sleeping.
If you consume 3 or more alcoholic drinks everyday, consult your doctor before
...reading this poem as a pain reliever.
This poem is not for use with the browning unit of your conventional oven.
Never place this poem in a microwave.


This poem may cause stomach bleeding.
In case of bleeding, consult a doctor promptly.
Do not take this poem by mouth or place in nostrils.
Do not put this poem into the rectum by using fingers or any mechanical device
...or applicator.
Avoid contact with open wounds.
Do not read this poem for persistent or chronic cough.
If symptoms persist for more than seven days, discontinue reading this poem
...and consult your doctor.
Do not place this poem in any container in which you are heating water.
Do not apply this poem to broken or irritated skin.
In case of serious burns or animal bites, do not read this poem. Consult a
...hospital.
If you are pregnant or nursing a baby, seek the advice of a health care worker
...before reading this poem.
This poem has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This
...poem is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.


This poem is not intended for weight reduction.
A very small percentage of readers may develop a sensitivity to this poem. This
...sensitivity may result in an allergic reaction.
This poem may contain nuts or nut fragments.
This poem contains caffeine.
This poem contains phenylketonurics which contains phenylalanine.
This poem contains 21-28.7% mercury. Reading it may cause serious mercury
...poisoning.
This poem contains saccharin which has been determined to cause cancer
...in laboratory animals.
This poem contains ical known to cause birth defects.


Read this poem only in well ventilated areas.
Avoid fire, flame, or smoking while reading this poem.
As with most poems, electrical parts of this poem are electrically live even when
The poem is not being read. To reduce risk of death, always "unplug it"
...after use.
Do not read while bathing.
Do not place or store where poem can fall or be pulled into tub, toilet, or sink.
If this poem falls into water, do not reach into water to retrieve it.
This poem may explode or leak and cause burn injury if disposed of in fire,
...mixed with poems of different types, or disassembled.
This poem contains liquid and vapors which may ignite.
Never spray and pull poems apart at the same time as this action creates static
...which in itself is an electrical charge which could possibly ignite.
Do not puncture this poem.
Do not attempt to iron this poem or any poem while it is being worn on a body.


Rinse this poem thoroughly before reading it. Defrost.
Always shake well before reading.
Read with food.
Read on an empty stomach.
After opening this poem, read it within seven days.
Do not turn this poem upside down before reading.
Refrigerate after reading.
Read at room temperature.
Read in a cool dry place.


Do not read in temperatures above 120 degrees F as poem may burst.
Do not attempt to drive or operate heavy machinery while reading this poem.
Deliberately concentrating and inhaling the contents of this poem can be harmful
...or fatal.
Read only as directed. Entering this poem into the ear canal could cause injury.
The red tip is to remind you not to put this poem in your eye. If accidental
...contact with eyes occurs, immediately put down this poem and flush eyes
...with water.


Read liberally to the affected area.
Do not read more than three times a day.
For external use only. If rash develops, discontinue reading.
Avoid reading this poem if you have skin prone to spider veins and/or skin
...which is sensitive to peel-off face masks.
If the reading of this poem is accompanied by fever, headache, swelling, nausea,
...or vomiting, stop reading immediately.

Do not read to children under twelve years of age.
Supervise any children over six who read poems.
For children under two, use only a pea size amount of this poem.
Consult your pediatrician before reading to children under six months.
Keep poems away from baby's nose and mouth.
Keep this and all poems out of the reach of children.
The reading of this poem does not enable you to fly.

No kidding.

Spider Woman Wields an Uzi? Give Us a Break, Duhamel!

Every birdhouse requires a craftsman, and I've found the perfect carpenter in Denise Duhamel, who shamelessly hurls her woodwork about and doesn't bother to brush off the sawdust. Her 2005 release Two and Two epitomizes pop poetry, dropping hefty cultural bombs and Hollywood wit into the hands of dilettantes eager to feel "in" on the joke. And joke she does, relentlessly. Like the pairs of jackasses and geese on the book's cover, her poems bray and squawk with twisted whimsy. At times (once), she pulls this off without seeming too grating, like in "The Accident":

He used to sing to us, Down
In the bottom of an itty-bitty pool...Now he can't fall
Asleep without falling, down
in the bottom of his own big pool of blood...
My father steps up the hill
To fetch another pail of blood

She does, of course, know how to play with language, but squanders her gift by turning the game into juvenile gibberish and pulp poetic puns:

Our Americano was an example to
yackety -yak yes-men everywhere. He inspired a
zillion Zen hipsters, zoot-suiters, and zazoos with his zing, zazzle, and zowie.

Duhamel draws from memes and common ground to make us all grin and laugh, and to be honest it is hard to resist. But it's like she's screaming for attention and recognition, hoping to strike the fool's fancy with pop references and radical form, as in "Pituitary Theft," a short script acted out between a bad guy and an uzi-wielding Spider Woman. Or how about a "poem" comprised entirely of warning labels from familiar household products? Sure, they're comical. They may even be clever, but they are much too comfortable for someone who knows the potential of language and poetry to move, transform and bewilder.

Ungaretti and Cruz: Hermetic Evolution

The works of both Cynthia Cruz and Giuseppi Ungaretti flooded my mind through some bizarre providence in the same day, and I could not help but notice their similarities. Sparse, mystical, and intensely personal, these poems proudly wave the flag of Hermetic poetry and assert the role of writing as a chiefly personal exercise. Rather than sparking a tete-a-tete with a popular audience eager to recognize themselves in the words of another, Cruz, like Ungaretti, leans on nothing familiar and refuses to provide the cushion of cultural references for those who shy from the unknown.

Ungaretti, considered the father of Hermetic poetry, presents beautifully terse lyrics that sing loud, despite their brevity. Here's a beautiful excerpt:


Time is silent among motionless rushes...

Far from moorings drifted a canoe...

Exhausted and sluggish the oarsman...The heavens
Already Fallen into abysses of smoke...


Stretched out in vain at the edge of memory,
It may be falling was mercy...

He did not know


It is the same illusion world and mind,
That in the mystery of its own waves
Every earthly voice is shipwrecked

He doesn't write for a reader, nor does he care if a reader responds to his work. Note the lack of popular allusions. Note the lack of interplay between writer and reader. This is a personal meditation, devoid of extension or concern for the critic. Welcome to Hermetics. Like Cruz, he seems to write for himself, exploring a private purpose and passion that exists in separation from another's expectation. Whether this is pure confession or pure creation confounds the "art for art's sake" paradigm of objective poetry. Confessional or not, the offerings of troubled souls give us much to think about. Let's think about them, rather than discount their lines as perverse spoutings from foreign minds.



See It's the Accent That Freaks Me Out for more Ungaretti.

"Ruin" Press Kit With Two Sample Poems

Here's the link to the pdf file: www.alicejamesbooks.org/images/ruin_press_kit.pdf

The book is also on tap at the Fort Myers Public Library in down town FM.

Cruz Grants Redemption in "Ruin"

"Ruin," Cynthia Cruz's debut collection of poems, delivers a rare emotional force that has been scorned by some critics for its sentimentality and unabashed grievance. Small Spiral Notebook, despite offering some hearty praise for Cruz's efforts, condemns her style for its quasi-maudlin tendencies - "too histrionic...too sonically agonized...wreaking too much self-inflicted pain."

Indeed, the speaker's cold and haunted reminiscences are sometimes a sufferance, reading like the disturbed reflections of a girlhood traumatized by untimely death. But such hauntings are nothing to shy away from, especially when they are as creatively rendered as this. The entire collection is unified by a wintry despondence and a shadowed ambiance, where confession blurs with creation and the reader struggles along with Cruz to find redemption in the ruins of a shattered past. And such moments of salvation are found in the most unlikely of places, nestled in the deathbed of her frail and doomed brother "too fragile for the world," her atrophying mare "wasting away in the barn, her weak limbs at rest," and the murderous games played in a shadowy orchard: "Let's find something still alive / to kill."

With her brother and her innocence hovering upon the brink of death, the heart feels heavy and one wishes not to read further. Then a stab of light comes in the form of a brief rhapsody like "Goleta," where we are extended a good memory and allowed to savor it. And we do so with more relish than ever imagined, as the imprisoning ruins are outshined but for a moment by simple and exalted beauty:

Little Fox was mine, upon whose back I broke
Loose those locked rooms, that
House. The Ranch, Goleta,
The impossible fire. A field, a world, a winter
Of singing that would not stop. At night,
Even now, I can hear the sound
Of great flocks passing overhead.

Cruz's "Ruin" tells a tale of transcendent pain and healing. She plays with the abstract, the surreal, and an endlessly strange array of metaphors that drag us into haunted milieus and then grant us the wings to escape.

"360°" Has my Head Spinning

In a good way, I assure you. The poem by Deborah Warren, which originally appeared in The New Criterion in February 2008, achieves the subtle lyricism and pathos attempted (miserably) by Franz Wright in God's Silence. Although independent of any rhyme scheme, certain lines recall previous images and assonance, creating a kind of fluid cohesion that spins through your mind with more grace than Warren's weather-vane :

All afternoon the wind complained, and the willows
would have come to blows—but yielded
(being willows), swimming along the air.

Thick with purposes, the same wind—squealing,
rocketing down my narrow veins,
taking the corners fast—

spun out into a hurricane in my heart
and made of my will a weather-vane—
reading every gust—

that shifts at the wind’s direction and, too willing,
hoarse on its hinges, bats in vain
and croaks and spins, not getting anywhere.

The poem, however, reads with the light ephemerality too common in modern writing - witty, immediately moving, and immediately forgettable. Still, it knows its place. Like Warren's willows that yield "(being willows)," so too do her quiet tercets stay quietly affective. The words themselves "squeal" and "rocket," but are nearly silenced by Warren's controlled contemplation in the last two stanzas. This impuissance, however, functions very congruously with the last lines, which, despite their croaking and spinning, are "not getting anywhere."

Archive Off-Limits

Reading is a free pleasure. Reading online is even freer, or at least it should be. CPRW.com (Contemporary Poetry Review), however, turns reading into a race for access, allowing the general public to view only their current articles and reviews. The losers must pay a subscription fee to access Cprw's valuable archives. Granted, the site is worth much more than your average blog or poetry fan site, but the restricted access is in itself nearly annoying enough to divert my attention to a less accredited site like HgPoetics. No barricades there. No esteem, either. But a middle ground between accreditation and accessibility can be found in online newspapers like the NYTimes Book Reviews, that offer a massive collection of archived and browsable articles for free.

YouTube Writers Videos and Interviews

A few vids and interviews with writers of prose and poetry

Jeanette Winterson Speaks with Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason
Jeanette Winterson Speaks with Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason (part 2)
Whitley Strieber Discusses parallel universes and his new book 2012
Dean Young Speaks on Poetry and Meat

Poetic prose induces epic reverie

As a hopefully refreshing deviation from the endless trifles of robotic and au natural neo-poetics, I've decided to pressure you into enjoying the invigorating confusion of Jeanette Winterson. Although poetry is not her genre, it is certainly her intent. Her short works of fiction read like extended poems, where paragraphs are line breaks and a new chapter grants enough pause to start the next verse with fresh breath. "The Passion" even features a character named Villanelle, and certain phrases repeat throughout the text within different contexts and between two "rhyming" narrators, mimicking and extending the form's structure.

Winterson plays with our expectations of narration, confession, and myth, weaving surreal tales that read like a history but feel like legend. She doesn't suppose her readers crave the mundane, thus her narrators inhabit the mindset of Bohemia. Androgynous fantasts, outcasts, and gentiles see more than the average Joe, and mystify the surrounding world with delightful incision. Inverted chronologies, unreliable and imagined protagonists, geometric narration, and philosophical meanderings reveal Winterson to be the writer's writer; one who doesn't just tell a good story but but who does so cleverly. The real irony is that she unravels the stories she spins, pushing her readers to question the very nature of storytelling - its purpose and its promise. And a new page of Winterson is always more than promising. Her words are completion, the final act of finding passion where it springs, and never again going thirsty.

If you haven't read her already, buy The Passion and taste the words. Here's an appetizer:

"I'm telling you stories. Trust me."

"On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path."

"I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as [my mother's] I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should."

"His wife had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. like God, she was neglected."

"What makes you think you can see anything clearly? What gives you the right to make a notebook and shake it at me in thirty years, if we're still alive, and say you've got the truth? Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There's only now."

"The heart is so easily mocked, believing that the sun can rise twice or that roses bloom because we want them to. In this enchanted city all things seem possible. Time stops. Hearts beat. The laws of the real world are suspended. God sits in the rafters and makes fun of the Devil and the Devil pokes Our Lord with his tail. It has always been so. They say the boatmen have webbed feet and a beggar says he saw a young man walk on water."

"In between freezing and melting. In between love and despair. In between fear and sex, passion is."

Raping a classic, and loving it

Contemporary Poetry Review recently introduced the Dylan Thomas Random Poetry Generator, a program that mashes together the common fixations and phraseology of the great Welsh poet into custom scraps of artificial poetry and randomized nonsense. Just click, and a new "poem" appears. At first I was outraged that a "journal devoted exclusively to poetry criticism," and one that regularly flaunts its laurels from celebrated academics, would even entertain the notion of allowing such bollocks to exist on their site. On the main page! The nerve. This isn't poetry, it's a mockery of the craft! They equate Thomas' work to that of typewriting monkeys that peck before the hunt. It's shameful, says I. But I confess to the propagation of about twenty of these ignoble creations. Clicking away, nearly laughing at the oddball brilliance of such randomized lines as "salmon lie impatiently / and all the barge-booted eyes kiss / while the virtuous tides burn and rave", I felt a strange mix of perversion and effortlessness, like I was raping the old Welshy with each poem "generated" by the unfeeling byte of software. I, like many before me, went gently into that good night and emerged with a smile.

The Pulitzer Birdhouse: God's Silence

I decided to give Pulitzer Prize-winning author Franz Wright a chance at flight, but found his much-hyped 2006 release "God's Silence" to be a strange mix of boredom and inaccessibility. For me, these two rarely go hand in hand, but Wright gives new meaning to the word “paradox”. The inside cover hails the book as “a deeply felt celebration of what poetry (and its silence) can do for us.” The problem is, “God’s Silence” screams when it should whisper and barely murmurs when it should shout. “East Boston. 1996” doesn’t know when to shut up, and reads like a tiring diatribe that strings together those familiar images we like in a pop poem (deserted cities, ringing telephones, convenience stores, and the goddamn Holocaust) but abandons any sense of cohesion, employing short and sweet cantos that aim at poignancy but only disrupt the flow. He seems to think that separating the last line of a poem from the body will make it stick out, but when its as weak as “what all things stand for,” it just makes you wonder if his faux genius is worth the extra space on the page. Or how about a one-lined poem, like “Love walk with me in the desert, the (italicized) blizzard of Eden.” The italics equate to attempted avant-garde nausea. Nice touch. Nevertheless, Wright has his moments, with some slightly interesting dreamlike abstractions in “Parallel Self”: “Dreamily / smiling / with an ice pick / in my skull / it was all in my mind.” If poems are to be boring, they should at least be understandable. It seems the critics confuse subtlety with apathy, and award prizes to birdhouses.

Conflict: NYTimes Poetry Review Takes Liberal Liberties

The New York Times review of Maggie Dietz’s “Perennial Fall” was nothing short of magnanimous. David Kirby, the reviewer, grants plenty of credit where it’s due, but took a few disturbing turns that beg a brief discussion. When referencing Deitz’s dream poem “Three Dog Night”, Kirby juxtaposes his appreciation of the work with the
conventionally critical aversion to dreams and visions. This seems to reflect poorly not on Kirby but on the poetic community as a whole. If the current trend in poetry is to steer clear of all things surreal and intangible in an effort to make it more accessible, then I may be doomed to uncovering more birdhouses than birds. The stranger, the better. I live everyday looking through my own two eyes and, although I admit a tree isn’t a tree isn’t a tree, I know that her tree and his tree and my tree all boil down to THE Tree. I want something bizarre and foreign and unobtainable, like the “dark man / with joints of light brandishing the moon like a hatchet” Dietz sketches from one of her visions. This is a beautiful bird.
Perhaps more disturbing is Kirby’s completely unfounded (and unnecessary) paragraph in which he tries to equate Dietz’s poetic message to global warming. Climate change and carbon emissions have nothing to do with her poetry and Kirby knows it, as evidenced by the complete lack of specific references or citations in the paragraph. It didn’t ruin the review, but it kept me distracted throughout the following couple paragraphs. The shameless Gore plug ate away at my skull for a few moments, necessitating the rereading of some sentences. Or maybe the rising temperatures have begun to fry my brains. Save the shoddy science for your mainstream publications, Kirby.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/books/review/20dietz.html

First Bird Sighting: "Perennial Fall"

Whilst perusing the poetry section in the public library, I stumbled across a group of thin-spined paperbacks with names like “Ruin”, “Floating City”, and “American Sublime”, each practically announcing their obscure contemporary authorship with smatterings of postmodern cover art and promotions from never-heard-of cohorts. Figuring these to be prime fodder for twenty-first century poetry reviews, I pulled a few from the shelf and, after confirming the post-2000 publication date, scanned a few poems for either that novel, soul altering image or the clichéd romantic couplet. What I found was “Perrenial Fall”, a refreshingly original collection of poems by editor and lecturer Maggie Dietz.
Her writing is sometimes a tease, shifting suddenly between the massive and timeless and the trite and popular, such as in “Colleen in Sonoma”: “The sun blooms clean. My face / framed bare against the ancient mountains…His tears fall like leaves…the strip malls glowed fluorescent as TVs.” The effect would be almost maddening if it didn’t seem so deliberate. Her coy and seemingly trivial poetic gestures, like TVs and sardines and cow shit, follow gorgeous and heart-wrenching flourishes, then gently give way to quiet and beautiful closure: “At night, the stars are like / sardines, white-silver, tight as fists.”
Her poems assume the shape of birds because they are anything but formulaic. More impressively, she never shies from her own imagination. She proudly weaves visions and dreams into a beast of surreal integrity – one that is not easily tracked, but leads the way to clearer skies.

Read page 19 of the Beloit Poetry Journal at www.bpj.org/PDF/V51N4.pdf for a good sample of her work.

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