Selected Poems 1980-2020 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Chax Press) A Long Essay on the Long Poem by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (University of Alabama Press)

Posted on July 19, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Selected Poems 1980-2020 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Chax Press) A Long Essay on the Long Poem by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (University of Alabama Press)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an intriguing poet (including collaged visual poems) and critic. Her Selected Poems can’t help but feel centred around, perhaps grounded by, her Drafts project: 114 (+) cantos which rework, or ‘fold’, 19 poems six times over, riffing and refining, tangenting away from and interrogating the texts themselves and the author’s processes and poetical understanding. The sequence is both a challenge to and a critical deconstruction of some of the very male modernist long poems of sequences such as Pound’s Cantos and Olson’s Maximus project; and the long poem is also the subject of a recent critical volume.

There are under a 100 pages of poetry preceding Drafts in this Selected Poems, mostly fragmented lyrics, perhaps most akin to the work of, say, Rae Armantrout. The last line of the very first poem included here, 1970’s ‘A Poem to Myself’, acts as a kind of manifesto or flagging up of what is to follow: ‘Come in, come in, I say to all the fragments.’ Perhaps the most intriguing early piece here is ‘”Writing” from Tabula Rasa’, which is immediately followed by ‘Writing on “Writing”‘, which – in part – explores ‘Marginalization’, and the author’s desire to understand it but also create a form and writing that facilitates it:

     Setting the poem so there is a bringing of marginalization into writing.
     ‘No center’ of a section alternates with small contained sections.
     Sections contained by other sections, over writing, writing over, or
     simultaneous with. So that one section does not have hegemony. So
     the reader does not know which to read first, or how to inter-read.

Drafts, which follows, in some ways contradict this: the individual poems/cantos are numbered and presented in order, although of course they have previously been published individually, and the reader can also follow a poem through its ‘folded’ reversions using the included grid, which acts as a visual index.

The actual selection of poems from Drafts is intriguing, mostly presenting self-aware texts that explore a number of ways of writing about itself: redaction, a conversation on the page, and various declamations:

     I want polyphony
     I want excess
     I want no art object
     […]
     I want the wayward and unpredictable
     caused by anything
           (‘Draft 85: Hard Copy 15’)

     Trample the vanity of the poem!
           (‘Draft 107: Meant to say’)

This, however, is coupled with an awareness of the impossibility of weaving everything (or indeed, perhaps, anything) together, with the same poem going on to note that:

                  […] ; it is your archive as well as mine, this little
     piece of nothing, this
     part of the imaginary whole.

The selection of DuPlessis’ work concludes with excerpts from a pair of stand-alone ‘book-length collage poems’, which build upon two collaged texts in Drafts, and from an ongoing ‘serial poem’ Traces, with Days. As yet, although I have several volumes from this project, it hasn’t drawn me in in the way Drafts did and continues to do so. It will be interesting to see how it develops.

Hand-in-hand with the writing’s own self-evidenced poetics is the more academic approach of A Long Essay on the Long Poem, which explores some of the ideas mentioned above, particularly how to include everything, but also how to shape a poem, and indeed how to end it. DuPlessis notes that ‘Long poems may certainly be self-contradictory and oscillatory, dialogic’, here using the shift from ‘epic-polemic episodes’ to ‘lyric quest’ between books two and three of Olson’s Maximus as an example. The desire for inclusion is usefully explained as ‘Long poems become magnetic fields of ongoing events and materials in their discourses and commentaries, not isolated items or singular insights.’ 

Once an author accepts and embraces the notion of polyphony, inclusion, digression and segmentivity, they are able to – notes DuPlessis – invent or adopt a bewildering number of writing strategies. They can reinvent the quest or epic; they can write back to canonical works, reversioning and implicitly or explicitly critiquing and questioning; they can embed their work in a field of quotations (Pound) or paraphrase; they can adopt postmodern slippage, fragmentation and lexical or grammatical subversion or disruption (Ashbery); they can use appropriation and collage. DuPlessis also discusses ‘Confronting gender’ with varied examples of texts and statements from authors such as Alice Notley, Anne Waldman and H.D.; as well as considering subjects such as cognition, truth, conspiracy, numerology, and theology.

She is of course constantly aware that ‘A long poem may develop by rethinking its strategies and rationales as it is written.’ And if I am somewhat disappointed by the concluding paragraph of the book, which suggests not only that ‘the author becomes possessed by language’ but that ‘The poem finally chooses you’, A Long Essay is a thought-provoking and illuminating exploration of its subject, one that neither this brief review nor a single read can do justice to. 

Rupert Loydell 19th July 2023

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Mr and Mrs Andrews Reframed by Lesley Burt (Templar)

Posted on July 12, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Mr and Mrs Andrews Reframed by Lesley Burt (Templar)

An anecdotal style in this series of short poems and prose vignettes brings the three main characters to something resembling life. The tone is both stately and colloquial. Gainsborough is called Thomas, Mr and Mrs Andrews are referred to throughout as Mr A and Mrs A. It’s only in the penultimate poem that we learn Mrs Andrews’ name is Frances. The reader is invited to ‘Picture this’ as Mrs A, with echoes of Alice through the Looking Glass, ‘peers out of the portrait’, breathes on the glass and steps through to the ‘outside’. Her husband and the artist presumably follow her. For once she is taking the lead. 

Incidents and anecdotes occur in an intriguing mixture of countries and chronology. Mr A checks his Twitter feed and comments ‘I see we have taken Pondicherry from the French.’ Throughout, the background is colonial, wealth and status are based on property, exploitation of ‘slaves’ and ‘riff-raff’ is taken for granted. The cover design reveals a trespasser lying dead in a pool of blood. Mr and Mrs Andrews, the dog, the oak tree, the landscape of ownership, are shown as they are in the portrait. Mr A is holding his fowling piece and the caption reads ‘There was no right to roam in Gainsborough’s Day’. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions.

The characters are depicted skillfully. Mr A, true to his nature, is holding a gun in many of the poems. Verbs that describe his actions are ‘grunts’, ‘frowns’, ‘yawns’, ‘snores’. He is content to pat the dog, blast pigeons, wing pheasants, take satisfaction in his estates. He returns to his frame unchanged.

,

Mrs A ‘sighs’ and ‘whitters’, is careful to cross her ankles and clench her knees under voluminous skirts. As in the portrait, she comes over as passive and on display. She does at least have dreams of what might have been. At the end of the sequence, she returns to her canvas with the realisation that ‘men have framed my life’.

It is the character of Thomas Gainsborough, as Lesley Burt conveys him in Mr and Mrs Andrews Reframed, that interests me most. Before she climbs out of the portrait, Mrs A ‘unclenches her knees’. I feel there is a sense of ‘the gaze’ in these poems, the way that someone or something being gazed at becomes an object, there is a hint of voyeurism. ‘In the Library’ shows a dubious side to Thomas as he calls to Mr A ‘Over here! Look at the librarian! Bare arse and bubbies!’ He licks his pencil but the implication is that he is mentally licking his lips. He goes on to paint a still-life portrait which includes a nude woman. 

So what exactly is reframed in this fascinating pamphlet? A layer below the surface appearance? An emphasis on predation? In Gainsborough’s portrait Mrs Andrews’ lap and the front panel of her skirt are left unpainted. There are several theories as to the reason. In the very last line ‘Mr A drops a pheasant in her lap.’ Maybe Gainsborough didn’t show this because the red bloodstains would have been too vivid a contrast with the lady’s blue silk gown. Lesley Burt leaves the reader to untangle many tantalising threads.

Mandy Pannett 12th July 2023

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Spring Journal by Jonathan Gibbs (CB Editions)

Posted on July 11, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Spring Journal by Jonathan Gibbs (CB Editions)

One of the most memorable seminars on my Creative Writing MA* several decades ago was the first on the Long Poem and Poem Sequence module. We were divided into small groups, mostly with people we didn’t know, and asked to start a translation of Beowulf from the original text. In the second half of the session we read and discussed Louis MacNeice’s ‘Autumn Journal’, and were set the task of writing our own journal for the duration of the module.

Whilst I’ve always liked MacNeice’s poetry, and used several phrases from his poems for some early paintings of mine, ‘Autumn Journal’ had eluded my attention. What a wonderful text it is, each canto offering a different perspective and take: a mix of the personal, political, social comment along with observations of the changing seasons, all in a relaxed, conversational metre, with deft use of full, near and off rhyme throughout.

Unlike most of my MA seminar group’s journals, Jonathan Gibbs’ Spring Journal follows the form and shape of MacNeice almost to the letter: 24 numbered cantos written from March to August 2020, bearing witness not only to the arrival of summer and departure of spring but to covid rules and regulations, news items, familial relationships and his own fluctuating emotions. It also sometimes directly addresses MacNeice, as well as dropping in allusions to and lines from other poems of his, or by directly misquoting or subtly changing some of the original Journal.

Having read Gibbs’ subversive and satirical novel Randall, a hilarious and bawdy reinvention and critique of the YBA London art scene of the 1990s, I was surprised to find that he had written Spring Journal. Hidden away in the catalogue of the wonderful CB editions in London (if you don’t know them do check them out) and mentioned in online dispatches by bloggers I had missed at the time, Gibbs had moved from originally tweeting his poem to having it read out loud each week in ‘an online salon’ hosted by a friend, thus setting a timetable for writing as well as offering a way of legitimising the project. 

Most cantos in the final book were written in under a week, although you wouldn’t know it, despite the sense of immediacy and commentary on display. On this page is an angry riposte to politicians, here a longing for parties and friendship, there a considered moment of reflection on Brexit or the fact that students at the university where Gibbs teaches would not have a graduation ceremony that year. There is an initial sense of separation from what is going on; even by the end of April Gibbs declares that ‘still no-one I know has died’, although it isn’t long before he is self-questioning the pan-banging for the NHS set against disorganisation and lack of funding, and by late May he is already worrying about the future:

          As infections decrease and we lift our heads and wonder
     If we understand the next part of the role
          We’re being asked to play in this terrible opera.

This sense of a tragic, bigger picture and how the world is going to cope is contrasted with lower key events: what Gibbs is reading and thinking, what his partner is doing elsewhere in their house, football matches; and also more considered responses to the concept of Englishness (as opposed to MacNeice’s Irishness) and Gibbs’ sense of separation and disbelief at what is unfolding, not to mention the government’s ongoing mismanagement.

We’re all very good at forgetting about things, even my nostalgic self, so one of the most important things about this book is the reminder of how awful being kept away from others and told to stay mostly inside was. How lucky those of us who had a space to sit outside were, how neighbours came together to have distanced drinks in the sunshine, how we all learnt to converse, play quizzes and games or argue, online with our cameras on. How we got used to phoning distant relatives we otherwise didn’t stay in touch with. All those things ceased pretty quickly once the all clear was announced but, of course, the consequences lingered, especially for our children and students, the elderly and those who had been unable to grieve or say goodbye to the dead.

Gibbs not only captures a sense of personal worry and foreboding, but also considers the bigger problems, with Canto XXIII offering a kind of prophetic declaration that appears to have totally come true. Having noted that ‘Crisis needs crisis management, and this bloody fiasco / Will ripple out beyond this week’ he goes on to declare ‘The crisis is not the virus but the government’. This whole section riffs on MacNeice’s suggestion in Autumn Journal that ‘the equation will come out at last’, with Gibbs nothing that:

      […] the bastard was right.
          The equation did come out for Britain,
     The war was won, and from it we fashioned
          The NHS and the welfare state,
     Everything we’ve grown up to take for granted
          And are losing now to toffs and spivs
     Who dress like lawyers and act like thieves
          And know not to waste a good crisis.

The next and final canto, XXIV, is laconic and quiet, if somewhat resigned. The narrator seems to have lost any sense of urgency, is thinking again about the book he was supposed to be writing, thinking about sleep but also about waking up, only to find that ‘we stagger about, stupefied and overwhelmed’, whilst ‘future generations will bear the brunt’ of what has occurred. But with a sense of inevitable acceptance he notes that ‘Time and the seasons are immune to human despair’, and that on one level things continue as normal:

     Swallows gathering on the telephone lines,
         As, close and slow, summer is ending in London.

Many ‘plague journals’ and other works written during the pandemic have been published but Spring Journal is somehow different. It is reflective, yes, but also at times militant and contrary, belligerent and opinionated. I was going to say it is honest, but ‘immediate’ is a better word, or ‘sense of immediacy’ a better phrase. It is self-questioning, doubtful, awkward, responsive and elegiac. Gibbs doesn’t pretend it is polished and honed, he says it is ‘carved from chaos’. That taming, capturing and exploration of the chaos of a few years back makes for an engaging and thought-provoking read.

*The other most memorable seminar was Tony Lopez’s introductory one to his Poetry module, where not only were we introduced to one of Tom Raworth’s poems that discusses how it is written and deconstructs itself, but were all asked to read out ‘Howl’, going round the room. A lot of the students were elderly and somewhat shocked by Allen Ginsberg apocalyptic, revolutionary, and belligerently sexual poem!

Rupert Loydell 11th July 2023

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54 Poems by John Levy (Shearsman Books)

Posted on June 29, 2023 by tearsinthefence
54 Poems by John Levy (Shearsman Books)

I’ve been thinking about poetry networks. I know that’s a word which carries all sorts of negative associations, but I don’t know what else to use in its place. Poetry has always relied on contacts and correspondence, but that of course is much quicker now thanks to email and the internet. Recently, I spent a great couple of hours talking to and drinking coffee with a publisher I have ‘known’ online for many years: it was great to finally meet, and one of the things we talked about was how both geographical and online clusters of poets exist; also, how unlikely some of those clusters and contacts are.

Later the same day, the postman delivered a copy of John Levy’s new book, sent and inscribed by the author. I was trying to think about how John and I knew each other, whether it was from one of my visits to Arizona (particularly the time Sheila Murphy arranged a poetry reading for me in her house) or via David Miller, who also knows John. There was also a packet of review titles from Chax Press, who are also based in Arizona and have published Sheila and David’s work. Stephen Bett, whose book was included in the parcel, and I have corresponded intermittently for several years, and he said in an email that Charles Alexander, who runs Chax, was sure we had met, probably at the same reading. And of course, Arizona is also home to writer John Martone as well as artist and poet David Chorlton, both other correspondents.

It’s a long way from meeting poets at the bar at small publishers events, or at readings or book launches, which used to be how contacts were made, but it all seems to serve the same purpose, which is to locate ourselves within the poetic geographies which exist, be they based on poetics, subject matter, shared interests or friendship. This enables us to share work-in-progress with other poets, to get feedback, share jokes and book recommendations with, discuss ideas, and of course bitch and moan about the poets and poetry we dislike, something almost all the writers I know excel at.

John Levy’s wonderful new volume, which contains what the title says, evidences this conversation and engagement with others. It’s a kind of small selected poems, with work from 1980 onwards that has previously appeared in small press editions, but also a lot of new work. Levy is a down-to-earth poet with an ear for turning the rhythms of everyday speech and thought into gentle, discursive narratives. Sometimes his poems are in relationship with artists and writers such as Picasso, Grzegorz Wróblewski and Robert Lax, at other times friends and relatives; one even brings Hitler into a story about turtles in Greece! Other poems address named relatives, family, landscape or animals, most are a distinct personal take on situations and events.

One of my favourites so far is ‘This Poem’, a wandering litany of thoughts about the poem as it happens, seemingly in real time. We are warned from the offset:

     This is going to be one of those poems
     that goes on and on and calls…
     calls itself a poem […]

but it doesn’t go ‘on and on’ (although it does ‘keep going’), it develops whilst taking an unexpected route, stopping only to preen for ‘a moment in the mirror’ whilst discovering that ‘what could be mistaken / for a caress’ is ‘just a scratch’, 

     the itch about the size of the dot above the lower
     case i. This poem circles that dot
     and rejoices in the space around it.

     This poem, in fact, is primarily about that space
     and how that space embodies
     the legendary

     negative space. This poem is going to say
     almost nothing about what’s positive about
     the negative space, or almost

     positive […]

although the poem and the flow of thought are resolved by turning ‘a sliver of positivity and then another’ into a railway track, one in use: we are warned to ‘Stand back.’

‘This Poem’ reminds me of the way Robert Creeley’s poems sometimes work, although Levy’s work tends to be more expansive and meandering. Like Creeley, however, Levy pays attention to not only thought as it develops, but to the everyday and often mundane. He makes the ordinary into something specific and unusual, be that remembering his childhood TV-watching in ‘The Life of Riley’ or constructing a prose poem, ‘Obit’, on the back of ‘The only local obituary notice of a stranger I cut out and put up on my study wall’. Its subject is ‘a man with a big smile’ who ‘looked like somebody I would’ve liked to know’, says Levy, exploring what he thinks of and invents about the stranger but also the compulsion which means the newspaper cutting stays on the wall at the end of the poem.

Levy skirts the maudlin and over-emotional, and is always aware of what language is doing. His poem ‘My Late Mother’ opens with the self-knowing declaration that

     My mother has died
     in many of my poems

     after she died in
     a hospital, when I

     was too far away

which manages to convey both mourning and regret, but also a poetic distancing, which allows us to read the poem as language on the page, rather than just an emotive plea for the reader to share the author’s grief.

Grief, emotion, longing, loss, delight, and memory are all transmuted here into imagistic plain-speaking poetry. It embraces the everyday, the brevity and transience of experience, digression, conversation and friendship. Levy’s acute sense of the world around him allows the reader to renew their own acquaintance with nature, thought and language. It is a delightful, guileless, warm-hearted, indeed loving, collection of work, which reminds me how lucky I am in knowing the poets I do.

Rupert Loydell 29th June 2023

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Before We Go Any Further by Tristram Fane Saunders (Carcanet Press)

Posted on June 26, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Before We Go Any Further by Tristram Fane Saunders (Carcanet Press)

Before we go any further, let me say I wanted to like this book. But whatever the back cover blurb says, whilst Saunders’ poetry is formally inventive and confident, it does not dazzle beyond its surface.

Before we go any further, let me say there are some intriguing rhymes and rhythms here, but like most end-of-line rhymes they feel contrived and awkward in the 21st Century. Why can’t Saunders be inventive with internal rhymes or syntax? Assonance? The sound or look of his poems on the page?

Before we go any further, let me say that however much these poems map ‘the ways we try to communicate with each other across real and invented distances’, they are still rooted in that idea of content, of what the poem says, rather than what the poem can be. These poems may be clever but only within the confines of mainstream poetry which however much it delights in the quirky, oddball and witty, remains self-imprisoned within the restraints of ego and self-expression.

Before we go any further, let me say that several poems made me laugh or smile, a few even made me pause for thought, but that’s not really what I read poems for. In the amusement category, ‘Five Songs on a Cruel Instrument’ – previously published by Aaron Kent’s Broken Sleep Books – are the best, translations or modern renderings of what I assume to be non-existent folk songs, accompanied by a pseudo-academic introduction and lengthy final footnote following the previously unknown and unsung ‘Lucus’s Hymn’.

Before we go any further, let me say readers who enjoy tricksy metaphors and convoluted imagery will enjoy this book, as will those who like a bit of erudition or pseudo-erudition. The somewhat dull group of poems about Crystal Palace Park, despite some light asides such as the one about Hawkwind supporting Vera Lynn at an anti-heroin fundraiser, are full of information about dinosaurs, mythology Welsh vocabulary and other trivia. Part III of the book starts with these Crystal Palace poems, then gradually moves slowly away to consider pet rat burial, Battersea Park and bedsits, and goth music in ‘Club Antichrist’ which is probably my favourite poem in the book.

Before we go any further, let me say I wanted to like this book. But I’m afraid I don’t. It is slick and slight, well meaning and ever so contrived and dull. It is full of twists and turns and small epiphanies, either imagistic or metaphorical, offering us the key to understanding hat ahs gone before. They remind me of those sad Martian poems Craig Raine produced back in the day, and indeed at times share a coy diluted surrealism: ‘Like a beating toffee apple, my heart in your mouth.’ Really?!

Before we go any further, let me say I do not wish to go any further. As the narrator of ‘Lullaby’, which appears to be a student poem about being students, says ‘I look like something you might like to sleep through.’ You do indeed.

Rupert Loydell 26th June 2023

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California Roadkill by GenXCore (Mystic Boxing Commission)

Posted on June 20, 2023 by tearsinthefence
California Roadkill by GenXCore (Mystic Boxing Commission)

I wrote a couple of emails to GenXCore after I read California Roadkill. Something in it felt familiar, and I guessed that he had studied, as I once did, at California State University, Long Beach. I went to Cal State, Long Beach in the 1990s soon after Charles Bukowski, who always loomed large there because he lived nearby and would visit, had passed away. His influence on the students and faculty was large and a lot of people were writing what you might call bad Bukowski, work that was a pale imitation, where the writer pretended at the lifestyle and attitudes Bukowski had. Others took the lessons of his work, that it should be true to who you are, and were influenced by him. They didn’t write bad Bukowski but good and honest work of their own.

            When I started to read California Roadkill, I was worried that it would be bad Bukowski, which is often pointlessly jaded and simply unkind, but what GenXCore is doing in it is allowing himself to be influenced and to learn from writers like Bukowski but taking those lessons to create something new. California Roadkill is in part about recovery from drug abuse. We have seen a lot of that kind of work and much of it is great. This novel is too, but its focus is something that I have not really seen. It follows Jimmy, a punk rocker and adjunct English professor, who has been in recovery for a long time. The idea of following someone through his day-to-day struggles years after he has become clean distinguishes this novel for me from anything I have seen. Certainly, Bukowski didn’t write about that, but had he been through this experience, he might have. We are not given the saccharine story of someone who swore off drugs and whose life is now eternally better. What we are shown is how difficult the day to day life of an addict is, and how it can be impossibly hard some days. What we are shown is that in California, life can be exceptionally difficult, and money and work are hard to obtain.

GenXCore’s description of adjunct life is more realistic than any I have ever seen. I was an adjunct English Professor for 5 years and a full-time faculty member for 20, and one of the dirty secrets of the profession is that most of the people who work there are treated as though they are disposable. They make little money, they have few benefits, and they are abandoned when it is expedient to do so. They can be driven out of their profession by a department chair who doesn’t like them or is just forgetful through under-employment. To be clear, that does not usually happen. The chairs I worked with were generally good people, but that fact hangs over every adjunct teaching today even though such behavior is illegal. On top of that, the large bureaucratic machinery that controls how people in education act and how little they are able to effect change makes it difficult to treat adjunct professors with the compassion they are due. In California Roadkill, one of Jimmy’s students has attacked him, slashing his face with a knife. The response from the university is predictably underwhelming, and now Jimmy, understandably, does not feel comfortable going back to the classroom. Where does that leave him? It leaves him where so many educators who want to teach in college in the United States are. He has the expertise and the desire to do work that he is good at, but he isn’t able to do any longer. He is underemployed and living in a city where his job would not pay him enough to afford a stable rent in any case. He is a professional who is unhoused and food insecure.

California Roadkill is powerful in these places, talking about addiction and the educational system and California in general because GenXCore permits himself to write about the actual experience of these things. They are hard and often painful, but they are real. I have a personal bias against movies that applaud the idea that teachers are heroic when they sacrifice their happiness and health for their work. Teaching should not contain the false dilemma that if teachers are good then they must be sacrificial lambs, but that idea is built into the educational system. This portrayal is accurate to so many educators I know, especially those who are unable to get one of the rare full-time positions that actually have decent pay and security. It is accurate to the way that many of the unhoused live, in that he is not always sleeping outside but living a life of chaos trying to stay in different places as often as he can. 

            California Roadkill is the kind of novel I would hope to write if I were to write about the problems that I see in California, especially among those who live on the fringes of the city and the academic world. It is a beautiful novel that asks us to reconsider preconceptions, and to think about the ways the world has changed in the last decade. It is not the only book to understand these problems, not the only legitimate point-of-view, but it is a point-of-view that I have not seen represented yet, and it is a book that should be read, discussed, and thought about. 

John Brantingham 20th June 2023

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Because I love you, I become war by Eileen R. Tabios (Marsh Hawk Press)

Posted on June 16, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Because I love you, I become war by Eileen R. Tabios (Marsh Hawk Press)

Some people think I’m a hyperactive writer. A reviewer in Exeter once suggested that either I was one of those names used by a group of individuals or that I had been cloned. Goodness knows what they would make of the extensive two page list of publications by Eileen R. Tabios at the start of this book! Because I love you… is subtitled ‘Poems and Uncollected Poetics Prose’ and contains an unruly mix of the experimental, the imagistic, the political, the conceptual and the explanatory; the author is very, very present throughout.

I don’t mean this is confessional poetry. Tabios knows all about Kenneth Goldsmith’s and others’ theories of re-presentation, collage, processual writing, flarf, variations, responses to and ‘translations’ of work; she’s invented forms (the Hay(na)ku), has an acute sense of poetics, but is adamant about how, even when using ‘the potential randomness of line combinations to create new poems’, the author is present in the work. 

     I thought it important that there be no disavowing or distancing
     of authorship from the work, an element I consider particularly
     important as a poet of color. There are enough forces (from gate-
     keeping to racism) and would-be aesthetic trends (e.g. ‘the author
     is dead’) that would erase the subjectivity of a poet (and any other
     artist) of color. Identity may ever be in flux, but the ‘I’ always
     exists. Without that ‘I’ the speaker does not exist. Without the
     speaker, the concerns of a poet of color would not exist.

‘Yes, but…’ I want to say. The speaker of a poem is (or can or may be) a construct by the author, a character if you like, a narrator. Yes, the author can’t help but be in the poem, leave traces as the person responsible for the text, but does it need foregrounding? 

The interesting thing is that Tabios makes it work. Her poetics prose explains not only how she wrote the work but also why, in both specific and general terms. So, whilst discussing her ‘Murder Death Resurrection’ project, which involves constructing poems, prose poems or prose using lines salvaged from earlier works, each prefaced with the phrase ‘I forgot’ and collected as a database, she notes that even this method of writing, which ‘shifts emphasis away from author to reader in determining the poem’s effectiveness’, affirms what she calls ‘Kapwa Poetics’. This, she explains, is ‘a poetics based on the indigenous Filipino value of interconnection among all beings and things.’

This interconnection also involves time, the past and future, ‘coalesced into a singular moment, a single gem with infinite expanse’. It is also ‘the space in which I strive to write poems,’ she declares, wishing ‘for no one or nothing to be alien to me’. It is this aim, this poetics, that of course, allows Tabios to not only meet environmental damage, economic/political ogliarchism, racism, inequality and colonialism head on, but to write intelligently and fluently about them. This is not right-on rhyming doggerel or militant sloganeering, it is evidence of thoughtful and playful authorial control and purpose.

So in addition to delightful emotional minimalism and self-awareness of

     (Y)our Loss

     Because I loved you
     As if you were a Poem

we get ‘Bauang Beach’, a sequence of six poems which all start with the same 14 couplets but then continue on to form different poems; a lockdown tanka and plenty of chain Hay(na)ku; and the satirical ‘Spots’, written in response to a quote from ‘How to Spot a Communist’, a 1955 pamphlet which in part discusses ‘Communist Language’:

     Comrade, it’s not a witch hunt but a mark of the vanguard to peek
     at the ruling class’ hootenanny (after all, hooliganism has many
     roots), not chauvinism let alone jingoism but the appropriate
     recognition of bourgeois-nationalism—let’s not ignore that divide
     between the progressive and the reactionary—not materialist but,
     if anything, an attempt to dilute exploitation from oppressive
     colonialism, and indeed is simple integrative thinking that might
     even be confused by book-burners as syncretic faith—note, too,
     the length of this sentence as dialectical proof.

The poem – and I love that phrase ‘simple integrative thinking’ – is signed by ‘A Literary Critic For the Sake of National Security’. Elsewhere, other poems take sudden shifts or twists & turns, moving from observation to political comment. ‘Flower’ considers ‘those seeds you kept planting’ and the realization that ‘what you thought was fertile earth was dumb, hard concrete’, before offering a ‘public service announcement’ which lists a number of political figures, criminals and presidents who ‘define “compromised”.’ The poem ends by returning to observe and praise a ‘gleaming-white wildflower cracking, then blossoming, through the sidewalk’ but notes that ‘most curl up and die, never breaking through to attain health from the sun’s ethical lucidity.’

The book ends with some recent poems written in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a postscript offering immediacy and topical writing. This immediacy, the desire to document what’s going on, both the personal and social, underpins this book, as evidenced work such as ‘Kindness, And Its Ease’ and ‘Sustenance’, which precede a poem which simply documents a neighbourly exchange of fruit and vegetables over garden fences. I say simply but, as Tabois observes when discussing her Hay(na)ku form, it is ‘deceptively simple’, and in some ways as militant as her more politically forthright poetry. It is a poem about human interaction, about local economies and society, about how people are or can be interconnected. That said it is not a manifesto or argument, just poetic evidence about what already happens and what might be worth initiating.

I used the phrase ‘unruly mix’ earlier in this review. It was certainly one of my initial impressions of this book, but having lived with it for a while I can see it more as a personable mix, a snapshot perhaps of projects and poetics on the go. Part of me would still like this poet’s work tided up, different projects in different publications, poetics as a book of essays, but that would be to devalue the evident and evidenced interconnectedness of the poetry, essays and poet. I was going to say this book suits the poet, but I don’t know Eileen Tabios personally, so I will instead suggest that this book suits the texts it contains. To use a term from another culture, it has an idea of potlach attached to it, as well as the more English pot luck. It is a gift, a gathering of current writing and thought, which provokes and spins off ideas and thoughts in many directions. In one of her texts, discussing appropriation and re-presentation in relation to a specific work by John Bloomberg-Rissman, Tabois quietly wonders ‘whether the reader will be as avant garde as the poet’. It’s a good question to ask about this volume, too, as those who don’t pay attention or read closely will miss just how radical and aware, how brilliantly playful and subversive, this book is.

Rupert Loydell 16th June 2023

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Wannabe by Adele Evershed (Alien Buddha Press)

Posted on June 11, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Wannabe by Adele Evershed (Alien Buddha Press)

Adele Evershed’s Wannabe from Alien Buddha Press is an insightful and often painful novella-in-flash into the abuse that women often face and the way they live afterward. There are any number of ways that this work distinguishes itself, not the least of which is that it is a novella-in-flash that includes poetry. The prose of the book is clearly informed by the poetic language that moves the narrative and the points she is making as much as any other aspect of the work. This poetic sensibility along with her magical realism allow Evershed to understand what the women of her work are going through in a new way that I have not seen before.

     Wannabe is often painful and difficult to read because of the intensity of what Evershed is exploring; however, her characters are real and ultimately, we are given a vision of how to go through these times. In the final story, ‘Sliding Doors or She Never Had Those Red Dress Blues,’ the main views her life and her body from the point-of-view of someone who has survived abuse and pain.

She ran her fingers over her scars, tokens of what she once thought of as too much love. But really, they were hieroglyphics that told the story of her marriage etched on the tomb of her silence. The one on her thigh, where Ed had stabbed her with the umbrella, throbbed when she touched it, and her black eye peeked through the concealer . . . On the day he hit her for the last time, she became a storm . . . when she screamed, “No” her voice was thunder and her skin lightning (66).

Evershed gives us a vision of a woman who has survived and come through to the other side with a much greater understanding of what she has been through and who she is. She gives us a character who does not see herself as a victim without power, but rather as one who can face and live through violence. In ‘Full Fathom Five,’ an abused girl learns how to breathe underwater when the punishment for not accepting her stepfather’s sexual assault is that he holds her head underwater. The magical realism of the piece helps to develop a character who can escape the cycle of shame that is often visited upon sexual assault survivors. 

     One of the aspects that I appreciate about the novella-in-flash is that it can go beyond narrative and highlight other aspects of storytelling; Wannabe’s use of poetry and poetic language often halts any sense of narrative, so that she can meditate on a concept that can and should be developed. In ‘Remains Found,’ straddles an interesting line between poetry and prose. At times it feels like and is structured like poetry and at times like prose. This duality is a strength as the narrator contemplates the remains of a body and is able to take the time to consider how society has failed when we discover abuse by discovering a corpse when the corpse speaks to us:

Look I have always been here taking up the negative space next to the broken wheelbarrow and skunk cabbage to mask the rot. Maybe you should have tended me — helped me grow — and found out what I looked like on the insides

without an autopsy (67)

This piece with its line breaks mingled with a longer prose section uses a hybrid form, but other pieces are clearly prose or poetry. There is never a moment, however, when her work is not informed by poetry. There is music and power to her language.

     Wannabe is an exceptional and powerful work. It is socially important as well. Evershed is bringing this social evil to light and showing not only that survivors should not feel shame but how they might do that. 

John Brantingham 11th June 2023

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Interiors and Other Poems by David Caddy (Shearsman Books)

Posted on June 8, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Interiors and Other Poems by David Caddy (Shearsman Books)

There are journeys undertaken in these poems – external and interior – but they offer no clear impression of destination or completion. That is not the purpose. What matters is the context and setting – the earth and all its essential elements and facets, a sense of place created by the river, the woods – always the woods which ‘hide as much as cover’ – the land with all its produce, smells, sounds, sights and history – so much history. There is a slight sense of narrative but it is fragmentary, non-linear and piecemeal with the observations and perceptions of one who is a bystander, an outsider.

The poems begin on a path in a wood with a linguistic game – the points of a path, the play of a path – and then there is a sequence ‘Six consecutive walks to the sluices’ where each poem is concerned with light and its effect on the environment. The sequence begins with a slanted January light where the grass is ‘bereft of colour’ except for the verge close to the Stour. The skies are grey and ‘light thins and peters/sideways’ bringing a sense of the solitary. In this set of poems we have the first glimpse of the ‘twin world’, a parallel world, that is ‘beneath the surface’ and which flickers throughout the collection. Bodies here are deprived of ‘minerals and sunlight’, there is a mood of disruption and a horizon edged ‘with digger and saw’. Soon there are ‘shrivelled berries, lost woods’ and rooks that scavenge ‘in grit and gravel’. Tarmac is ’like a bruise’. This is a mysterious, atmospheric environment with its ‘faded whiteness’ and ‘cold sufferance’, a setting where the  ‘invisible and unknown drives/the force onwards through essential links/in and out of focus’ – all this against a disturbing backround of a track marked with potholes and incessant sounds of diesel, the smell of urine and oil. 

An important aspect of Interiors is a sense of the past – the continuous past – an impression of ‘going back in time’.(‘And Added Sunlight Bursts’). This is perfectly realised in ‘Notes from the Minutes’ based on an account of the meeting of the Sturminster Newton Heritage Trust held in September 2019. Here the truth of history, written by the winners,‘becomes slippery’, accounts of slaughter and bloodshed take on a tone of indifference – was it eleven or twelve men killed in the river meadow in 1650? It’s of little matter for they are only numbers. Likewise, 4,000-5,000 men could not have been present in Sturminster Newton on 3 July 1645 because there would not have been sufficient space. This in spite of the fact there seem to have been ‘divers slain and wounded’ and much suffering and a childrens’ rhyme was never going to be enough to ‘ward off despair’.

A similar sequence is ‘The Art of Memory’. This, with its undercurrent of irony and bitter contempt, is one of my favourite pieces in Interiors. The reader is taken on a tour of a wealthy and grand Stately Home and the sequence is written in language appropriate to that of a tour guide who directs visitors to the architectural features and artefacts that should be observed and admired. ‘Please look up’ directs the voice. No matter that ‘underfoot’ are the skeletons ‘of those who fought for apple rights,’ or that the Colonnade Room is haunted by ‘the cries of a distraught woman.’ This whole colonial edifice is constructed on the profits of the slave trade and ‘the discernible whiff of foundry.’ Hard-hitting and brilliant writing.

There are many more poems in the first three sections of this masterly collection but I wanted to leave space to enjoy and discuss the title sequence called ‘Interiors’. It is written in a series of vignettes and poems and the style is fragmentary, elusive and tantalisingly surreal as the reader tries to vain to clutch at any ‘meaning’ or narrative. There is an enigmatic ‘he’ who wanders through many of the pieces but his appearances are inconsistent. There is mention of a wife, of a girl friend, several women – they are faceless and nameless. At times the setting appears realistic – a cricket pitch, a railway track, a blackbird – the world is that of lockdown and there are references to political figures such as Matt Hancock, Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove. There is humour but also murder and menace.

David Caddy has produced a superb collection in ‘Interiors and Other Poems’, one that poets have been waiting and hoping for. There is so much more to say than is possible in a short review – any review. Best if you read and take time pondering it all for yourself. I promise you, it will be worth it.

Mandy Pannett. 8th June 2023

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Monochords by Yannis Ritsos with Chiara Ambrosio Translated by Paul Merchant (Prototype)

Posted on June 7, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Monochords by Yannis Ritsos with Chiara Ambrosio Translated by Paul Merchant (Prototype)

Yannis Ritsos was a prolific poet, who spent many years in prison or under house arrest because of his communist beliefs and opposition to Greece’s right-wing regimes. Monochords is a strange book amongst his work: 336 one-line poems written in a single month in 1979. I have a copy of the text already, but when several poems are presented on the page it’s difficult to allow them the mental space and room for understanding. 

This beautiful new edition corrects that: each page consists of a single poem accompanied by a small linocut from artist Chiara Ambrosio. She already knew the poems, indeed they had been a companion to her ‘for over a decade’, but when the pandemic and lockdown shut down, she set herself the task (‘I felt compelled,’ she says) to make an image for each monochord, one a day, reading and responding to the text, seeking ‘out resonances and emergences’.

They are more, much more, than illustrations though. They have become part of the poems, opening up what Ambrosio calls ‘text and image entwined in mysterious ways, creating often incendiary pairings, unlocking new, contemporary resonances within the text’. The artist describes her daily process as ‘akin to the tending of a garden’, but also ‘a dialogue with Ritsos’, her own ‘personal diary, and ‘a book of days’. It is this complex relationship, the entwining of poetic and visual lines which makes this volume so exciting. The past and present are mixed on the page: 1970s Greece, English translations from the Greek originals, lockdown London, the reader’s now, the timelessness of poetry and the imagination, and the way text can facilitate a kind of time travel:

     How gently time collapses into poetry.   (286)
                                                                                                                                                      
Sometimes Ritsos’ writing can be surreal, indeed the first book of his I came across – in a seaside shop in Greece, 1980 – seemed to present him as a juxtaposer of unconnected images and actions. In hindsight, having found other collections, most of this was due to the translations, not the original text, but there is no escaping the strangeness of some of Ritsos’ minimal poems:

     A naked man with an umbrella. Summer noon.   (72)


     At night, the sea with its ships enters my room.   (244)
         

Elsewhere, there are more straightforward moments: a ship departing the harbour whilst the poet remains on land, memories of ‘lost years’ triggered by ‘distant voices of children’, a red pebble hidden under a white one, rubbish on the stairs, all considered and given recognition or attention in retrospect:

     Much later you see what you saw.   (164)


Ritsos can be philosophical, too, about both the world and words themselves:

     I saw you and remembered poems.    (16)

     A word made fresh by repetition.     (17)
         

He also suggests poetry as a kind of ritual cleansing, a personal shedding and dismissal of, and moving on from, the past:

     I create lines to exorcise the evil that oppressed my country.  (203)
 
In addition to the images and texts of the poems themselves, the book contains several useful and informative texts. David Harsent, himself a translator and author of ‘versions’ of Ritsos introduces the writer himself, discusses the Greek derivation of ‘monochorda’, and then contextualises and discusses both Ritsos’ poems and Ambrosio’s images. The artist herself then describes the project, her working methods and relationship with the poems, which then follow. Gareth Evans’ ‘afterword’ is a wide-ranging essay which discusses re/presentation, materiality, the abuse of authority (and resistance to it), and contextualises the work in relation to film makers Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky, the author John Berger and several other writers, as well as myth and history.

The musician and author Thurston Moore, in his blurb, suggests that these monochords are ‘the essence of a thought, a sign, a glimmer’, the product of ‘singular moments and observations’, which Chiara Ambrosia has responded to in ‘a dance of suggestion’. This beautifully conceived, designed and produced book is the best form of collaboration, one where something new is produced whilst also retaining both the essence and specificity of the original. It is text and metatext, reinforcement, recognition and reconsideration of ideas, poetic gloss and development, commentary and continuation. As monochord 121 says:

     The distance between things keeps growing till they meet.


Rupert Loydell 7th June 2023

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