RSS Feed

Category Archives: American Poetry

Water Look Away by Bob Hicok (Copper Canyon Press)

Posted on April 25, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Water Look Away by Bob Hicok (Copper Canyon Press)

Bob Hicok has always had a serious side, with some of his poems dealing with topics such as racism, sexual abuse and puberty, but I don’t think I am alone in mostly seeing his writing as playful, sometimes smartarse, digressionary storytelling, poetry that has a relation to work by the likes of Dean Young and Josh Bell. Hicok’s work has always been thought-provoking and full of startling phrases and ideas, and although Water Look Away is no exception, it is also an incredibly dark and raw sequence of poems about a failed marriage.

The book starts with a jolt for the reader: ‘Welcome Home’ not only tells us how the husband finds his wife’s body hanging in the basement but that he is ‘Jealous she got. / There first.’ We already have a despairing couple at breaking point, well one of the couple, but like a murder mystery the poems now backtrack and rewind from this event to try and voice, explain, understand what is and has been going on.

Hicok’s poems here are pared back and sometimes brutal. In ‘Last Days of Rome’, ‘She lights matches to see the thoughts / of gasoline’, an ominous incendiary phrase at best. ‘The Opening’ explores ‘the music of conviction’ and asks ‘What if the past never wanted me’ before its downbeat conclusion:

                                                                  King
     of what? Holding a barrel
     to his temple but not being able to finish
     the thought? I never told God
     I was sorry for being sorry
     the world exists. I assumed God feels
     the same way too.

We do not get to find out what God thinks. Instead, we spiral and zigzag back into this doomed relationship: text messages, affairs (‘Her affair was first / a sail raised on a mast / and then the storm / that broke the sail in two’), emotions, lust, ambition and expectations, broken childhoods and families, even confused marriage vows:

     Marriage

     Do you take
     (no

     give.) Do
     you give

     (no
     hold.) Do
     you hold

     (no
     river.) Do
     you river

     (yes I river
     this man/woman
     into/as
     my breath.)

Whatever the causes or the effects, whatever the reason for despair and a brutal exit trajectory, there are also tender memories, frozen moments, passion, indeed love, as well as confusion, despair and deceit. There is a sense of delusional melodrama (from the male narrator, not Hicok) in declamations such as ‘The ash of my hand / will hold the bones of yours’ and there is also an element of self-pity, such as here, the ending of ‘Gone’:

     Have we met? No.
     I have me confused
     with someone else.

But there is also a hint of healing and some kind of acceptance. ‘Used Book, Omen’ moves from a stabbed book of Ovid used as a writing prompt to:

     A crimson shadow, healing by better compliment,
     garments a women in wonder and sorrow.

     A crimson woman, in garments of wonder and sorrw,
     compliments the earth.

     A gone woman, a crimson sorrow, a serpent shadow,
     comrades: my garments of torture.

     Woman gone: shadow torture. Then stood morning,
     a healing garment of better wonder.

This is a raw, relentless book, whose characters ache and hurt, have been driven to emotional violence and infidelity, whose marriage has been ended by the twitch of a extension cord and a bruised throat. It is an elegy, a sad song, an accusation and a confession, a final ‘Goodnight goodnight goodnight goodnight.’ It is evidence that ‘That’s all there is. / That’s all there is.’

Rupert Loydell 25th April 2024


Leave a comment

Posted in American Poetry, Books and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

My Dead by John Brantingham Etymphrastic Art by Jane Edberg (Kelsay Books)

Posted on March 26, 2024 by tearsinthefence
My Dead by John Brantingham Etymphrastic Art by Jane Edberg (Kelsay Books)

The first thing a reader sees is the cover: yellow, black, brown, green, and red; an eye is turned toward a figure in silhouette—etymphrastic art by Jane Edberg. Each poem is complemented by a vibrant illustration.  The poems are set in the Midwest United States, Ohio, where trains are common in both rural and semi-urban towns.  It’s a developed region, not far from a big airport, closer to Cleveland than to the small towns in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson and the poems of James Wright. One poem ‘Euclid Avenue’ suggests Cleveland.  Like the eye on the cover, the speaker in the poems is observant. The poems are other-directed, and quiet, with settings that delineate the distance between the speaker and other people.

  The poems are other-directed, and that other is someone seen for only a moment. In the first poem, ‘4:30 AM.’ the speaker notices someone has spread a blanket over his car, ‘with its busted headlight.’  He says, ‘I wonder where they are now/ that they do not need their blanket.’ In ‘Sunday Morning’ a man is sweeping a street.  ‘The way he moves/ I think he has become/ his meditation.’  In ‘Blackbirds’ birds perch on a pole that runs along the side of a train car. ‘When it jerks to a start,/ they flock into the eucalyptus.’  In ‘Tanker’ a man appears to be waiting to cross train tracks, but when the train stops ‘he climbs the ladder/ of a tanker car/ and tags it/ with white spray paint.’  In ‘Just After Sunset’ the speaker, walking his dog, observes a commuter.

          The man is staring

          up the long street

          for the bus

          that is not yet here.

          He’s unaware of Lizzy

          and her need

          for touch.

   The poems are quiet.  The speaker is thinking of his dead.  ‘I can hear them almost/ telling me things/ that probably matter.’ In ‘Grandfather’ he sees a driver, a man, not staying in his own lane, but swerving into his lane.  He speculates that the man is tired, having come off a long plane flight that landed at the close-by airport, from ‘A trip back home maybe,/ where everything he once knew/ has been lost.’  The poem concludes:

          My grandfather, 

          a man who died five years

          before I was born,

          whispers to me

          that the man found out

          he will move on

          to that next place much too early.

In ‘Euclid Avenue’ the speaker hears the dead ‘under the traffic noise/ of an early commute.’  He concludes, ‘I think they are trying/ to remind me of careless/ moments in my past./ Maybe they’re telling me of theirs.’

   Lastly, the poems’ settings delineate the distance between the speaker and other people, and things such as, in ‘his Dawn,’ ‘the train/ that runs 100 feet/ from my front door.’ The poem ‘Light’ begins ‘I can walk from here to the library.’ Further into ‘Light’ the speaker says, 

           From the glass entrance door,

           I cannot see the books.

           A man who lives next to it

           is watching me from his front door,

           making sure that I don’t break in.

           I wave to him, and he waves back

Of a palm tree hidden in ‘the canopy/of a sycamore’ he says, ‘I’m staring at it/ when my neighbor comes out/ to go to work and deadeyes me.’  Readers note the pun.  In ‘Murmuration’ he watches a train engineer watching a flock of birds that have alighted ‘over the parking lot/ between my house/ and the trainyard.’ In ‘This Civility’ a hawk is ‘being chased by mockingbirds.’ ‘If I squint,/ I can see my dead/ flying about with them.’ 

    In My Dead the landscape of the past coincides with the landscape of the present.  Intimacy characterizes these spare, contemplative poems and their counterparts, Jane Edberg’s striking visuals.  Each poem is its own world.  It’s to the poet’s credit that he tells readers all they need to know and fills the silence with significance.  John Brantinham’s My Dead is pure poetry.

Peter Mladinic 26th March 2024

Leave a comment

Posted in American Art, American Poetry, Books and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

What I Meant To Say Was by Gary Grossman (Impspired Press)

Posted on January 21, 2024 by tearsinthefence
What I Meant To Say Was by Gary Grossman (Impspired Press)

Gary Grossman’s What I Meant to Say covers the whole complexity of his life, but what stands out to me, what distinguishes him in my mind from other writers is the sensuality that he brings to his poetry and also the understanding of scientific concepts that works its way seamlessly into his descriptions of the natural world. This understanding is only natural. After all, he is professionally a professor, scientist, and environmentalist, and his intellectual life brings richness to his poetry. But, far from this science creating a dryness, it brings magic. After all, the magic of the natural world is contained in the wonder of scientific truth. What we miss when we ignore the scientific truths of the natural world is how complex, beautiful, and interwoven all life is with the earth. Grossman does not miss this fact and neither does his poetry. 

To say that Grossman’s work benefits from a firm grounding in science does not suggest that it misses sensuality. His work is often remarkable in its earthiness. His work pleasures in it, and to read his poetry is to enjoy experiencing the world from his point of view. For example, his descriptions of food are often filled with their pleasures: “Melding the mustard with soy, achieving the proper Dao of texture and heat, has the illicit feel of first caress, while suimei, quiver gently in the woven bamboo steamer, and await the sauce” (26). Not only are the tastes of the food conveyed but the scents and textures too, so that we experience the food with the narrator. The whole experience of life is explored here even little moments such as the following moment with his wife:

My wife shifts—her right leg 

now touching mine as I 

sit, drinking black coffee, 

in the dark (40).

These are the small moments that when they are experienced correctly, aware of our senses, make life interesting and worthwhile. Grossman shows us what it is to be awake to these moments.

What he gives us, however, because of his intellectual life is what few other poets can, a casual weaving of the secrets of the natural world in with his work. He writes about gardening, fishing, and experiencing nature as few people could. He writes:

            Planting a garden is revolution— 

hope triumphing over despair. Flower 

or veggie—all green comes from a smoothie 

of crushed rock and humus—spiked with 

nitrogen, phosphorous, and micronutrients (22).

Not only are we given a view here of the ways that plants enliven our lives, but the ways they live and how they live. All of this comes through the poetry smoothly, with the facility of someone used to writing about the technical aspects of life, but the beauty of someone who enjoys experiencing it. Even when we have a small encounter with a creature in the wild, he weaves in details that lets us understand them better. In this case, he casually drops in a detail about the sex of turtles.

Red eyes tell me his pronouns are 

he/him—(53). 

These details throughout the collection without calling attention to themselves, merely adding to our understanding and pleasure of the moment.

            Gary Grossman’s What I Meant to Say embodies the spirit of radical wonder. His work is alive to what it is to be alive in the world and aware. Everything he sees and touches deserves to be considered and celebrated, and his book is one that should be read by anyone who loves to read work by those of us alive to the possibilities of the world.

John Brantingham 21st January 2024

Leave a comment

Posted in American Poetry, Books, Ecology and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

The Inventor: A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography by Eileen R. Tabios (Marsh Hawk Press 2023)

Posted on December 17, 2023 by tearsinthefence
The Inventor: A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography by Eileen R. Tabios (Marsh Hawk Press 2023)

I first got to read Eileen R Tabios’ work through John Bloomberg-Rissman’s 1000 Views of ‘Girl Singing’ project which used Tabios’ version of a Jose Garcia Villa poem as a prompt. I still use this as part of my remix & writing back module and have been able to send Tabios my students’ work now that Bloomberg-Rissman has terminated the project and his blog.

On the book’s back cover, Grace Talusan suggests that The Inventor is Tabios throwing ‘open the doors and windows of her poet’s house, inviting both long-time fans and new visitors to the writing behind the writing’, a description I find far more welcoming than the word ‘autobiography’. Truth be told, I don’t feel any need to know what is ‘behind the writing’, nor how an author lives or lived and how that informs the work; the poem is the text or a reading of it, experienced by the reader. On this last point, it seems we agree: in Chapter 2, Tabios states that ‘[w]ithout a respondent, (my) poetry doesn’t exist’. Of course, there’s an argument to be had about unread words on a page, but I can’t be bothered to go there right now.

Tabios, however, is unfailingly optimistic and idealistic. She suggests that poetry ‘can open you up to new modes of thinking/feeling/viewing . . . and hopefully then a newly better way of living’, despite understanding that ‘[t]his element about poetry—effecting positive change—is […] not based on the words that make up a poem. It’s not based on the visible, e.g. text.’ Some of this optimism is based on Tabios’ understand of and belief in Kapwa, a Filipino humanist philosophy which recognises a shared identity, an inner self, shared with others; or what Tabios calls the interconnectedness of things.

This puts a certain slant on things. Tabios seems more interested in the possible results and responses to writing and reading than the text itself. Where I see process poems or poetic forms, she sees affirmations and communities. Her invented form the Hay(na)ku is an interesting small poem form that subverts the haiku and also avoids the Westernised misunderstanding of them as syllabic forms but it is still, or only, just a poetic form; her Murder Death Resurrection project is a list poem generator that enables the creation of texts from a finite resource of lines. Many contemporary authors use similar structures as workshop exercises with groups, few attach such importance to them as Tabios does here.

It’s interesting to see work framed in this way, but it does seem to want poetry, or at least the effect it has, to be confessional rather than linguistic, political rather than individual. In the final chapter Tabios writes about how she has ‘long preferred the term “transcolonial” because I considered “postcolonial” insufficient for reflecting my desire to transcend being contextualized simply by my colonized history.’ She links this to wanting to ‘trans-cend into other concerns or interests not instigated by colonialism’ and says that in the end she ‘came to something more basic and fundamental: ethics.’

This is uncomfortable ground for me. Can poetry be ethical? Aren’t ethics to do with individuals and philosophy, society and sociology? She quotes the poet Paul le Couer, who says that ‘Being a poet is not writing a poem but finding a new way to live.’ This, says Tabios, means that ‘I’d like my poetry to make me a better person who helps lighten the world’s burdens with more good deeds from the planet’s most powerful species: humans.’ Are we really the ‘most powerful species’ or have we as a race simply colonized planet Earth? It’s quite a human-centric statement and the cynic in me has to ask if poems are the best way to change anything? 

I have tried to read this book as a poetics, but it is positioned so far from my understanding of language and text that I have struggled. I’m aware all writers and writing is embedded within networks of influences, friends, colleagues, pre-existing texts, readings and of course experience, and that all this informs what is written, but at best poetry is to understand and interrogate all of that, not to produce better people or ‘a new way to live’. Tabios seems to want a readership who somehow find a way to experientially make her poems their own and let them affect their behaviour. Me? I’m sticking with the notion of linguistic plasticity and the poet as someone who plays with language before simply offering their writing to readers.

Rupert Loydell 17th December 2023


2 Comments

Posted in American Criticism, American Poetry, Autobiography, Books and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Broken Glossa by Stephen Bett (Chax Press)

Posted on November 12, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Broken Glossa by Stephen Bett (Chax Press)

I’ve taken some time to get a handle on this new ‘alphabet book of post-avant glosa’ from Canadian poet Stephen Bett. Is the title a pun on ‘broken glass’ or is ‘broken’ to do with postmodern poetics and Betts’ deconstruction or re-invention of the glosa, which the blurb glosses [sic] as ‘a Renaissance Spanish Court form’? Both, and much else I suspect.

Bett’s version of the glosa is a kind of summary, critical reading of, biographical note and dialogue with, indeed a gloss on, the poets he has chosen to engage with. Each poem has a poet’s name followed by a colon and a phrase as a title, each includes quotations or adapted quotations from the poem, a response, and sections picking up on details (friends, attitudes, actions, diction, etc.) from the poets’ own work, as well as Betts’ own writing. They are at times funny, disrespectful, worshipful, undermining, critical or a kind of pastiche; sometimes all of these at once. Footnotes help explain or locate some of the references, and in one poem – about John Wieners – allegedly contains the poem (it doesn’t).

The book is a bit like being taken by Betts to a party. It’s good to see some mutual friends and acquaintances but difficult to get to know the strangers there, despite the introductions. On one level these poems seem insular, a kind of in-joke for those in the know. So, I mostly enjoyed the poems about, from or referencing Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Ted Berrigan, Paul Blackburn, Clark Coolidge, Robert Creeley, William Everson, Jackson Mac Low, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Tom Pickard, Jeremy Prynne, Tom Raworth, Gary Snyder, Jonathan Williams, Derek Beaulieu and Guy Birchard, whose work I am familiar with; and had enough to get by on with Tom Clark, Ed Dorn, Hank Lazer, Ron Padgett, Peter Schjeldahl (whom I mostly know as an art critic), Jack Spicer, Lewis Walsh, Paul Violi, Philip Whalen and Jennifer Bartlett.

Why am I writing a list? Well, in a way this is a book that places Bett within a list or network of reading, fellow poets, influences and friends, and I want to do the same. It’s also to point out (although I am not going to list them) how many other poets here I know absolutely nothing about, and how few women there are here. I don’t want to get PC or self-righteous, but this is a book dominated by males: out of 67 poets here only six are women, which isn’t really on in 2023. At least make an effort Mr. Betts!

The poems themselves are convoluted, associative and tangential, often jocular, sometimes knowing and familiar. What, for instance should a reader make of ‘incidentally Pip, you never unzipped my appendicized letter’ in the Philip Lamantia poem which is mostly an exercise in surrealist and alchemical references. I’m assuming there is a sexual pun here, because elsewhere in the poem we are told that ‘psychic automatism lifts up its skirt’ and about ‘randy laddies’ with ‘cum stains on teeth’. However, I’m unsure is Betts is flirting, feeling rejected or just teasing?

To return to my party metaphor, I don’t mind being a wallflower and drinking quietly by myself, or hiding in the kitchen for a deep conversation with someone else who doesn’t know many others, but when everyone seems to be speaking a different language and playing non-party music, it’s weird. My ultimate take, however, is that it’s Betts talking strangely, not the poets who are his subjects; I don’t recognise his version of Tom Raworth, Robert Creeley, Tom Pickard et al, or their writing. The numerous footnotes suggest that the author knows he needs to explain what he has written, although sometimes they do the opposite and present yet another layer of elliptical allusion, whilst others seem like a namedrop or chance to include himself in the text. 

I so wanted to like this book, because there are so many important poets (canonically and personally) included, and also because I have enjoyed Bett’s other books, but I confess I don’t. Michael Rothenberg, on the back cover, mentions ‘lament, exultation, beat improvisation, pop incantation, mantric visitation’, and Orchid Tierney claims the work is not ‘just poems but dialogues, chants, and jokes with the poets on whom they riff.’ This may be true, or may be Betts’ intention, but ultimately Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is closer to summarising when he points out that Betts ‘riffs from an insider’s perspective’. Since I am not a member of the Beats or New York School, let alone a ‘Zen Cowboy’, I am somewhat lost in what Rothenberg calls’ the continuous song of the cosmic and eternal muse, reborn in Broken Glosa.’

Rupert Loydell 12th November 2023

Leave a comment

Posted in American Poetry, Books, Criticism, English Poetry and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

And And And by Cole Swensen (Shearsman Books)

Posted on October 24, 2023 by tearsinthefence
And And And by Cole Swensen (Shearsman Books)

Cole Swensen’s marvellous books have always been distinctive, each exploring a theme or concept, each adopting a form (or number of forms) best suited to their subjects, which have included art, hands, parks, garden design, views from a train, death, absence, memory and time. This new book is about poetry, about how language wanders, evokes, digresses and slips from both author’s and reader’s grasp; how language informs, perhaps rules and creates, our lives.

And And And mostly consists of prose poems, short lyrical texts at the top of each page, sometimes in brief sequences, sometimes circling back to earlier poems and ideas. The poems are inquisitive, exploratory, witty and impetuous, darting at language and words from all angles, never settling in one place, shifting and changing like the murmuration Swensen uses in ‘Language in Motion’ where she is thinking ‘of written language as a wave of migrating elements, swarming in different combinations through books, poems, newspapers, telegrams, etc.’, an idea she returns to a few pages later:

     Thinking of how alliteration and other consonant-based
     sound relationships stretch a text outward, ushering readers
     onward, through the poem and beyond, while vowel-based
     relationships, all forms of rhyme, off-rhyme, slant-rhyme
     assonance, etc. pull the text back in on itself, thus pulling
     readers back into the poem, sending them ricocheting around
     within it […]
               (from ‘Murmuration Again’ [force justified in original])

Swensen is well aware that nothing is fixed or final, that everything needs redefining. In her poem of the same name she asks ‘Can it be said that all definitions need constant adaptation, extension and reconsideration?’ I suspect so. In fact the whole book starts with the idea of ‘nuance’, likening it to a ship ‘slipping out of fog, and oddly more visible than a vessel less veiled.’ (‘The Ship’) She observes that for the watcher, the ship is ‘the shape of memory itself’, appears to remember itself, yet even as it becomes self-aware, the thought is deflected and the ship keeps coming towards us.

Fascinated by how language works, Swensen scratches away at the linguistic itches she finds, informed by her own reading, writing and creative practice, at one point revealing where she found her book’s title: in ‘And’ she is ‘Thinking about Deleuze & Guattari’s writings on and as a non-subordinating conjunction, allowing elements to be connected while also retaining complete relational equity and autonomy.’

This isn’t a book of academic philosophical linguistic discourse though; mostly it is rooted in the everyday. Yes, there are abstract questions, but they are linked to how we, or writers, use language, how we make or might make poems and texts, but other poems are rooted in the body and the world around us. ‘Thumb’ is about the physical odd finger, the animal-ness of the digit; ‘Clouds’ and ‘Wind’ discuss response, transience and the possibilities of form; ‘Shadows’ prompts discussion of translation and how writing may be ‘the shadow of that which cannot be said’.

My favourite poem in the book is ‘Connote’, which proposes an idea then explores it:

     I wonder if you can use words in such a way that only their
     connotations, and not their detonations, get activated. To
     connotate as one might cogitate or contemplate—a state
     chosen for its particular relation to thought—so that it’s not
     the definition (always restrictive) of the word that comes into
     play, but its fields of association, its overtones and undertones,
     those always expansive, radiating zones of suggestion and
     implication. […]
          (force justified in original)

In the second section of the poem, Swensen argues against herself, noting that adopting her proposed idea ‘might lead to a greatly restricted vocabulary’. This is a tactic several poems adopt, for instance noting that when we adopt the idea of fragmentation in poems, that still implies it is a fragment of something whole. This is slippery, open-ended discussion, although there are occasional declamations. I am especially keen on the notion that ‘There’s something about poetry that is always and necessarily anonymous, the one mode in which the stroke of the I serves only to sever’, although that may be a response to my students’ current assertions that poetry is about self-expression and emotion.

I could write more. Each time I dip into this book there is something new and thought-provoking, sometimes revelatory, other times quiet reflection: on why watching rain is soothing, about attention, landscape, wind, detective novels, ‘The privatization of memory’. It is a book of poetry and of poetics, a book of questions, possible answers, reflections and language, a way – as it says in ‘Winds’ – of ‘keeping every other possible option always in mind.’ It is challenging, informative and quietly provocative. And lots of other things too.

Rupert Loydell 24th October 2023

Leave a comment

Posted in American Poetry, Books and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Hearts Forged In Resistance by Chella Courington (Finishing Line Press)

Posted on August 21, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Hearts Forged In Resistance by Chella Courington (Finishing Line Press)

Chella Courington’s chapbook, Hearts Forged in Resistance, is available for preorder now from Finishing Line Press, and I highly recommend ordering it. I have long been a fan of Courington’s work for the power of its language and imagery. This collection does not disappoint. It was written in reaction to the war in Ukraine. When I contacted her, I asked her about the relationship of her title and her work’s theme, and she wrote, ‘At the time of entitling the collection, I was thinking about Ukraine and the heartfelt, strong way in which Ukrainians met life-threatening adversity. How they forged their passion for freedom and for their citizens into resistance where friction transforms feeling.’ This idea runs through the work; however, her work goes beyond this as she meditates on how resistance in people’s personal lives creates richness in their perspectives and humanity. 

     The title of the collection comes from a line from her poem, ‘Strength,’ and that is where the theme of the work grows out of:

7000 miles away         tanks roll across Ukrainian borders

trying to wipe them off the map

grandmothers  aunts    fathers sons

throw their bodies against bully armor

hearts forged   in resistance

The poet takes to heart the courage of those people she sees in the news not giving into Putin or his forces. This is a powerful moment for her and all of us who have watched the war. Many of course assumed that Russia would simply be too powerful, and it is surprising to see the strength of the resistance including in Zelensky’s response. She writes in another poem, ‘Zelensky takes off his suit         puts on battle fatigues / stands in the streets        talks with his troops.’ As the title suggests, it is the courage in resistance that creates character in the poet’s eyes.

     However, this collection is not simply about the war in Ukraine; it leads her to a larger meditation about the idea of dignity put to the test with pressure, how it has affected many of the people she has known and loved. In ‘Grief,’ she develops a vision of her father. This once powerful man who worked in steel plants is now old and weakened, and he misses his wife who has passed away.

. . . [His shoulders] began to sag after my mom fell

no moon out    and died while he slept           My dad saved the hair

from her brush            wrapped in Kleenex    stored in a wooden box

beside their bed           Every night he rubs strands against his cheek.

Through his loss of power and the loss of his wife, he has transformed from someone who once was merely strong to someone with a complex emotional life with compassion and love at its root. Throughout the collection we are given examples of how people react to the worst kind of pain. We are shown strength in its various ways.

     Hearts Forged in Resistance is a necessary book as we face new challenges. Of course, to be alive means facing pain and difficulties. Courington’s collection reminds me of Viktor Frankl’s idea of what it means to be worthy of one’s pain. Pain, if confronted correctly, can help us to see the more noble elements of our humanity. It can clarify what is beautiful inside of us.

John Brantingham 21st August 2023

1 Comment

Posted in American Poetry, Pamphlet and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Landscape with Missing River by Joni Wallace (Barrow Street Press)

Posted on August 15, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Landscape with Missing River by Joni Wallace (Barrow Street Press)

The river is not the only thing missing in Joni Wallace’s new book of poems. Her father is too, and although ‘It is difficult to see a ghost’, Wallace writes about the landscape of New Mexico where her father lived and worked, to produce elegies and nocturnes focussed on the absence and memories which grief produces.

This is not a nostalgic book though. Wallace has a keen eye for nature, sometimes filtered through science, as her father was a scientist at Los Alamos. Snow, clouds, storms, owls, wasps, crows and foxes are all here, as are atoms and ‘The Salt Composition of Tears’, all punctuated with suddenly triggered associative memories. ‘Elegy for Atoms’ starts with a list of things the narrator learnt indirectly from her father:

                           The way he kept things unsaid I thought
     made a language between us immaculate as space.
     An unseeable spell that held together the shimmering view.

That shimmering view is the stars at night, the constellations moving with a soundtrack of an unseen river, which prompts a brief fantasy of capturing what is gone:

     If I head due north, if I follow the river, I could still reach
     him, particles, a father in the sparking dark.

The reality of course is something different. ‘Traceless’, the following poem starts with the flat statement ‘I go on living. You don’t need anything.’, then goes on to list the activities of a normal day, punctuated by finds of her father’s shoes and jacket pin, before returning to find her yard littered with dead insects. Meanwhile, alternate lines are contrasting phrases, italicised and justified to the right, which offer a pseudo-commentary that turns into a discussion of colors and physics: ‘the red shift of a body, the visible spectrum’ then ‘after image, an I dissolved.’

This rational, somewhat reductive, approach to death is constantly interrogated, with Wallace, questioning herself and her father:

     Melancholy in a skein of geese, moans and honks corresponding
     waves. What is emotion, you say, but a series of electrical impulses? 
          (‘Punctum’)

and often reflecting upon how nature triggers grief, informed by memories along with the kind of childhood stories and familial episodes most of us have stored somewhere. So one of my favourite poems here, ‘Man on the Moon’, remembers the narrator and her father watching the moon landing (as I did with my Dad), but also imagines him stepping on to the moon with ‘a bubble’ around his head, and remembers the bedtime story she was told that night, about a ‘rabbit / made of rags’. Meanwhile in the next poem, ‘Aubade with Rabbit’, the father continues his moonwalk before producing a real pet rabbit, who ‘never was what I wished her to be’; and in ‘Sleight of Hand’, the poem which follows that, Wallace recalls that ‘Once, as a child, I dreamed the moon into my room.’

The narrator is aware however, of the subjectivity of experience and grief. Although her mother is asleep ‘in another room’, where ‘valium hums inside her brain’ (‘Still Life with Circles’), in ‘One of a Circle’ Wallace notes that her ‘daughter sees the landscape from another angle’. The same poem plays with themes of light, offering a metanarrative about itself and the whole book:

                                                                 To elegize is to make a light box,
     chasm to hold the dead and the living, the breathing

                                                                                            and the breathless

     This viewing chamber, ad infinitum.

Although we can never truly understand grief or what triggers our emotional responses to absence and change, books like this can help. Not because they are in any way self-help manuals which offer answers, nor because the experiences and poems may be ‘true’. Like all good poems they are elusive and allusive constructs of language, spinning off into unexpected places and ideas. In the end, the book turns death against itself, and it is the father who actively leaves in his own dying:

     When my father turns back to look

                          he sees              the end of seeing

Both father and daughter must move on; as the poem title says, must ‘Let Gone Things Get Behind Me’. Nature, science and people persist, even as they change and adapt. This book of ghosts, constructed from poetic explorations and conjectures, immersion in physical and mental landscapes, will haunt any reader. As Wallace says in ‘The Salt Composition of Tears’:

                                                     There is no science to it. It is like this
     and then it is like this some more.


Rupert Loydell 15th August 2023

1 Comment

Posted in American Poetry, Books and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Tears in the Fence 78 is out!

Posted on August 7, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 78 is out!

Tears in the Fence 78 is now available at https://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward and features poetry, prose poetry, visual poetry, translations and fiction by Mark Dickinson, Ian Seed, Eliza O’Toole, Lisa Pasold, Robert Sheppard, Lizzi Linklater, Mark Goodwin, Blossom Hibbert, Morag Kiziewicz, Kate Noakes, Kenny Knight, Matthew Carbery, Pratibha Castle, Lesley Burt, David Ball, Toon Tellegen translated by Judith Wilkinson, Chrissie Gittins, Carla Scarano D’Antonio, Siân Thomas, PQR Anderson, Elizabeth Wilson Davies, benjamin cusden, Basil King, Janet Hancock, Melissa Buckheit, Benjamin Larner, David Miller, Steve Spence, Amber Rollinson, Beth Davyson, Claire Watt, David Harmer, Sue Johns ,Kathleen McPhilemy, Robin Walter, Michael Henry, Elizabeth Parker, Alice Tarbuck, Joanna Nissel, Sarah Watkinson, Mandy Pannett, Charles Wilkinson, Valerie Bridge, Jane Wheeler, Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana and Naoise Gale,

The critical section consists of the Editorial by Richard Foreman, Letters to the Editor, Robert Hampson on Karenjit Sandhu, Jeremy Hilton on Kenneth Rexroth, Alan Baker on Yiannas Ritsos, Guy Russell on Denise Riley, Steve Spence on Ralph Hawkins, Sarah Watkinson on Katherine Towers, Andrew Duncan on Daniel zur Höhe translated by Anthony Mellors, Mandy Pannett on Mary Leader, Gisele Parnall on Kelvin Corcoran & Alan Halsey, Lesley Sharpe on Living with other people, Greg Bright on The Broken Word, Mandy Pannett on Andrea Moorhead, Peter Larkin on Mark Dickinson, Steve Spence on Luke Roberts, Deborah Harvey on Alexandra Fössinger,  Clare Morris on Carla Scarano D’Antonio, Kimmo Rosenthal on Marcel Proust, Steve Spence – An Update on the Poetry Scene in Plymouth, Barbara Bridger on Geraldine Clarkson, Morag Kiziewicz – Electric Blue 13 and Notes on Contributors.

David Caddy 7th August 2023

4 Comments

Posted in American Poetry, Books, English Fiction, English Poetry, Essays, Literary Magazine, Visual Poetry and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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

4 Comments

Posted in American Poetry, Books and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
← Older Posts
→