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Category Archives: American Poetry

The Purpose of Things: Illuminating the Ordinary Poetry by Peter Serchuk Photographs by Pieter de Koninck (Regal House Publishing)

Posted on May 27, 2023 by tearsinthefence
The Purpose of Things: Illuminating the Ordinary Poetry by Peter Serchuk Photographs by Pieter de Koninck (Regal House Publishing)

            My friend Jane Edberg, who is a writer and visual artist, and I coined the term etymphrastic to describe visual arts that are created in direct reaction to poetry. It’s a counterpoint to ekphrastic, which describes poetry written in reaction to visual arts. I don’t know whether The Purpose of the Things: Illuminating the Ordinary is etymphrastic or ekphrastic because the photography by de Koninck and the poems by Serchuk work playfully together. My guess, however, is that whichever way it went this collection was probably done in a kind of joyful collaboration. I read this collection because of my admiration for Serchuk. I came to know his work through the New Voices Project, which will be publishing a book on April 18th. It is the work of dozens of writers and poets writing new work about the Holocaust. The hope is that we might understand it and keep learning new lessons from it. His work in this collection is painful, so I expected that same kind of thing here. Instead, what I read was joy. The Purpose of the Things: Illuminating the Ordinary is a playful collection that examines what things do for us and how they bring us joy; while I will be quoting the poetry in this article, the poetry is incomplete without the images that go with it, the image and poetry together forming the meaning of the book.

            This book of etymphrastic and ekphrastic work is innovative in its use of this approach, and its use of short measure as a poetic form. Short measure is a form defined by a quatrain of iambic verse using 6, 6, 8, 6 syllables in each line. The result of this is a bouncy, playful meter that is child-like without being childish. Serchuk’s poems stop after only two stanzas, so they are quick as well as being playful. However, it is the white space between poem and image that helps us to form meaning. For example, in The Purpose of Dirt,’ Serchuk writes, 

To bristle every broom.

To bury every war.

To wash the smirk off every face

that wears a righteous smile.

Asylum for the root.

Confetti for the dead.

To know the work in any man

by scouring his hands (45).

The image that accompanies the poem is a bin of dirt sitting in the middle of a cemetery. The seemingly happy and bouncing nature of the poetry, juxtaposed with the image of dirt presumably left over after being displaced by the dead, and also juxtaposed with discussion of war dead, creates a tension that is difficult and uncomfortable to sort out in the reader’s head. After all, the rhythm and the style draws us toward lightness and humor, but there is a level of guilt once we feel this emotion given the discourse of the photographer and poet. This tension is where this book often lives and helps us to get a more complex understanding of the things that inhabit our world.

            The Purpose of the Things: Illuminating the Ordinary is an interesting dive that plays with what poetry can do. I found myself breezing through the first reading because it is a quick read. But it stayed with me. Subsequent readings were slower, and I spent more time thinking about the tension of images and words. The two artists take on so many ideas and explore so many points of view that it’s a little dizzying. Each one though demands attention and reflection. Each one hides a power that can be understood only through some level of meditation.

John Brantingham 27th May 2023

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John Ashbery by Jess Cotton (Reaktion Books)

Posted on April 26, 2023 by tearsinthefence
John Ashbery by Jess Cotton (Reaktion Books)

Jess Cotton’s new volume in Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives series is a knockout. It follows John Ashbery’s life and work from childhood to death as well as his posthumous influence, thankfully concentrating on what Cotton in her introduction calls ‘Ashbery’s innovative, evasive, comic and confounding poetic forms’ which, she goes on to declare, ‘have reshaped […] the American poem as we know it.’

To be honest the forms Ashbery uses often seem less interesting than the reshaping, although we have him to thank for the Westernised haibun and furthering the possibilities of the prose poem. But it is the adoption of surrealist juxtaposition and collage, of parataxis, that helped reinvent ‘the American poem’, partly because of the acclaim and fame (if any poet can claim to be truly famous) that accompanied Ashbery’s work.

It wasn’t always so. Ashbery’s first two books of poems, Turandot and Some Trees, are pretty mainstream, somewhat ordinary products of the 1950s, but 1962’s The Tennis Court Oath evidenced a change in direction, of technique and content, and led the way to the acclaimed Three Poems a decade later, and then Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. In the creative mix are the influences of French prose-poets (especially Rimbaud, one of the first to write ‘poetic prose’), fine art painting and critical writing, and queer culture, the products, Cotton argues, from time spent in Paris and then New York.

Although Ashbery suggests that reading Auden allowed more contemporary references and casual language to enter his work, Cotton notes that he ‘was self-consciously thinking about the possibilities of a fragmentary, montage-like poetics, freed of the mythological and expansive historical references of his Modernist forebearers that overdetermined the meaning of the poem’. It is this ability to embrace the fact that the reader is as much the creator of a poem as the writer that marks Ashbery out as original and different. Unlike those who choose to grapple with Ezra Pound’s Cantos, there is no need for the reader to read Chinese and Sanskrit or to know Greek and Norse mythology to ‘get’ Ashbery’s poems, they can luxuriate in wordplay and the imagistic, disjointed moments of the text itself. The work itself makes clear there is no confessional subtext or over-arching message to be imposed or deduced; we are free to make of it what we will.

That doesn’t mean it is random or vague, and Ashbery didn’t use chance procedures to create his work; he carefully edited, revised, and reshaped his writing, often for years on end. (The posthumous Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works is a marvellous collection evidencing this.) He learnt to allow scenes and moments to imagistically speak for themselves; to embrace camp, high society, friendships and loves, literature and journalism, art, music and cinema: everything could be used to construct his poems. And often was.

Later on in life, Ashbery also allowed himself to write a lot, something he had originally resisted, and in the process gaining a reputation for overproduction. But one senses that is what he did, he was first and foremost a writer, despite by that time being a poetry professor (which became an honorary post towards the end of his life) busy undertaking readings and talks, and an acclaimed success. However, give him a grant or bursary and Ashbery would retreat from his Chelsea apartment to his Hudson house or take off on new travels for as long as possible. As for the ‘zaniness’ he was sometimes accused of in later work, to me it reads as simple mastery and control of his juxtapositions allied with a witty self-deprecation and an original sense of humour. I am sure I am not alone in realising, perhaps later than I should have, just how influential Ashbery’s work has been upon both me personally and the wider poetry world. 

That influence is somewhere in the politicized deconstruction and experiment of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the British poetry revival (specifically via Lee Harwood, who had a relationship with Ashbery), the surrealist comedy performances and writings of Luke Kennard, and the smartarse poetry of Dean Young, Martin Stannard and Bob Hicock, all busy taking language for long, disorienting walks. Even the mundane and populist poetry of writers such as Billy Collins might be the result of Ashbery, although I would not like to blame him directly.

Ashbery was adept at using others’ voices, disparate events and fictional (im)possibilities, whilst allowing his poems to interrupt themselves and wander off to where he hadn’t figured out yet. Cotton cites a moment of personal revelation for Ashbery, from his editor’s introduction to The Best American Poetry 1988, where he notes how he ‘was struck, perhaps for the first time, by the exciting diversity, the tremendous power it [poetry] could have for enriching our lives.’ What Cotton calls ‘Ashbery’s idiosyncratic talents’ are part of that enrichment, poems which ‘make the moment of communication a live act’. Anne Lauterbach notes that ‘when you read his work you are reading being alive.’ Apart from an informed critical introduction like this volume, what more could anyone ask for?

Rupert Loydell 26th April 2023

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Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) by Will Alexander (City Lights)

Posted on March 2, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) by Will Alexander (City Lights)

Like saxophonist John Coltrane, who this book is dedicated to, Will Alexander improvises his way through noise and chaos to explore the furthest reaches of his source material and thought process. And sometimes, although I love the late music of Coltrane, I can’t but help be reminded of Miles Davis’ retort in response to Coltrane’s extended soloing: ‘Why don’t you try taking the horn out of your mouth?’

The contradiction is that the lengthier poems here are the most successful, as they catch the reader up in extended riffs of ‘Language / as scaled erisma / as amplification that burns’ with energy, confusion and the ghost of incantatory poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Gil Scott Heron or The Last Poets whilst also drawing on the bewildering radical politics and mysticism of black artists such as Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton and Amiri Baraka.

Shorter poems, such as ‘Under Corporate Worship, reproduced here in its entirety, don’t cut it for me:

   Sunday
   being elliptically feigned
   tautological circumference

There’s not enough of it for it to establish a sound pattern or concept. The long works are often even more abstract (I hesitate to use that word, because of course, words always carry meaning[s], even when they are decontextualised or syntax is disrupted) but over a few pages one can start to grasp at ‘poetic current / not as inordinate savagery / but as refined alchemical emblem’ which works towards ‘mystical commencement’.

Alexander’s strength, beyond a clear freewheeling delight in language itself, is to reinvent or at least discuss spirituality by combining the vocabularies and ideas of cartography, science, nature and rhizomics, signs and symbols:

   I come not to ascribe or assassinate trans-regulation or intent
   but to subsist by vibration
   by hollow or vibrational design

   […]

   therefore
   I articulate through fog

with the aim ‘to burn away the drought within thinking’.

It is a strange read, that mostly I can only start to apprehend; these are poems that grasp at enlightenment and imagery outside my experience or imagination. What is ‘expanded helipause’? What is the meaning or symbolism of ‘suns appearing above suns / ignited via the blue fragmentation that is grace’? Does the poet really partake in the ‘Phantom Inter-Dimensional Activity’ which is the title of one of his texts?

Sun Ra’s Arkestra would often dress in sci-fi versions of Egyptian robes, and appropriate both gospel and mystical texts and tunes within their music; their leader himself claimed to have been born on Jupiter before travelling through time and space to Earth. Many critics argued then and now that this was a kind of diversion tactic: critics and audiences were so busy being mystified by the weirdness of the visuals and the music that they forgot the band were Afro-Americans intent on fighting racism and injustice. 

This mix of race, technology, and metaphysics is often known as Afrofuturism. Alexander’s mix of mystical aspiration and ability to ‘blaze as spectral reasoning’ sits squarely in this lineage, ‘being praxis that magically emanates and heightens the zero field’. It is a challenging and exciting read

   that insists on startling & consequential contour
   so higher emptiness concurs
   not unlike a rhetoric that swarms with declivitous capacity
   having an explosively strange assessment of itself

This is poetry as thought, as visionary experience, as stormy epiphany and epiphanic storm, ‘where power evinces the limitless / the arcane appellation of itself’, in ‘realms where the mind fails to match itself’. It is a generous, bewildering outpouring of language and ideas, an echo of possibilities, explanations and declamation: raw, militant, energising poetry, ‘perhaps a deafening colloquy by quarrel’.

Rupert Loydell 2nd March 2023

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Tears in the Fence 77 is out!

Posted on February 13, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 77 is out!

Tears in the Fence 77 is now available at https://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward and features poetry, prose poetry, translations, creative non-fiction and fiction by Lucy Ingrams, Jane Wheeler, Eliza O’Toole,  Steve Spence, Peter Larkin, David Miller, Beth Davyson, Benjamin Larner, Louise Buchler, Isobel Williams, Glenn Hubbard, Hanne Bramness translated by Anna Reckin, Daniela Esposito, Simon Collings, Poonam Jain, Giles Goodland, Michael Farrell, Richard Foreman, Cole Swenson, Lesley Burt, Jeremy Hilton, Greg Bright, Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana, John Freeman, Caroline Maldonado, Rosemarie Corlett, Robert Hamberger, Alicia Byrne Keane , Olivia Tuck, Penny Hope, Mary Leader, Christine Knight, Ann Pelletier-Topping, Jennie E. Owen, Natalie Crick, Sian Astor-Lewis, Laura Mullen, Gwen Sayers, Kevin Higgins and Graham Mort.

The critical section consists of the Editorial by David Caddy, Letters to the Editor by Andrew Duncan, Tim Allen, Jeremy Hilton and David Pollard, Peter Larkin on Rewilding the Expressive: a Poetic Strategy, Andrew Duncan on Peter Finch, David Pollard on Patricia McCarthy, Simon Collings on Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani,  Ben Philipps on Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Olivia Tuck on Linda Collins, Will Fleming on Maurice Scully, Louise Buchler on Caitlin Stobie, Mark Wilson on Sandeep Parmar, Simon Collings on Stephen Watts, Martin Stannard on Julia Rose Lewis & Nathan Hyland Walker, Barbara Bridger on Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana, Claire Booker on David Pollard, Gisele Parnall on Paul Eric Howlett, Louise Buchler on Rebecca May Johnson, Simon Jenner on Steve Spence and Andrew Martin, Andrew Duncan on Philip Pacey, Mandy Pannett on Seán Street, Morag Kiziewicz’s  Electric Blue 12 and Notes On Contributors. 

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Cauldron of Hisses by Penelope Moffet (Arroyo Seco Press)

Posted on January 18, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Cauldron of Hisses by Penelope Moffet (Arroyo Seco Press)

     Penelope Moffet’s Cauldron of Hisses from Arroyo Seco Press seems to me the perfect poetry chapbook to have come out of the pandemic and its lockdown. It is a unified collection of poems, linked by their opening and closing lines, about different kinds of cats. It is more than this though. Underlying every poem, it is about our need for connection and how we regained it through our connection with nonhuman friends, and perhaps more importantly how we used our dreamworld to get through that time.

The second poem of the collection ‘Leopards’ helps us to see the familial connection we have with the animals that populate our lives.

Breathe another’s breath? 

Only Emily’s. She plants 

herself in front of me, inserts 

her face into my thoughts. 

She is my family, 

Emily the golden leopard 

and her brother, 

Snowshoe Raku. (2)

It was easy for many of us before the pandemic to take for granted the connections we had to other beings in our worlds. Moffet clearly does not do that, and she shows us how important those connections are. She also shows us the importance of wildness because inside her cats is the same wildness that lives in the great cats of the wild.

     What follows are the dreams and memories that she has of cats, and with it the implication of how important those dreams and memories are. We have entered a new state, a new world, where we have been cut off from human connection. It is our job now to find a way to survive these new conditions in a way that preserves our sanity. Moffet’s dreams of the wild given physical reality in her cats do just that. In one of her ‘Mountain Lion’ poems, she writes:

So much depends on posturing 

in cats and humans. The way 

my own two felines sometimes 

walk stiff-legged, glaring, 

showing teeth. The way 

I sometimes turn myself 

into a cauldron 

full of hisses. (7)

So she understands herself a little better, and her animal reactions by understanding these animals. She dreams of them, meditates on them, understands them. Through them she, and we, can see what people are.

     This is, to some degree, a lonely collection, but it is not alienated. Instead, Moffet gives us a way to understand the loneliness of the new world without being consumed by it. This is a dreamy collection, and it is beautiful. It is about what the human mind can do to preserve us when allowed to bound through the jungles and savannah instead of simply dwelling on loneliness and pain.

John Brantingham 18th January 2023

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No Land In Sight by Charles Simic (Borzoi Books /Alfred A Knopp)

Posted on August 3, 2022 by tearsinthefence
No Land In Sight by Charles Simic (Borzoi Books /Alfred A Knopp)

I always think of Charles Wright, Mark Strand and Charles Simic as an American trinity of poetry. Although their work is very different from each other, and Strand died in 2014, they knew each other and occasionally addressed each other in their work. Wright and Strand shared a concern with – for want of a better term – the spiritual, addressed mostly through poems concerned with memory, life, death and loss; but Simic’s work seemed very different.

Born in Yugoslavia, Simic moved to the USA at the age of 16, and has been publishing books since 1967, mostly poetry but also a memoir and translations of other writers’ work. For a while his poetry seemed rooted in a kind of surrealism, juxtaposing things that have some sense of disconnect between them and offering a new way of seeing situations or events, sometimes by use of a strange point-of-view or tone, personification or an approximation to magic realism.

Elements of this still inform some of the poems in No Land in Sight. ‘The Mystery’ moves from ‘mutts barking in unison’ to burglary and murder, disquiet at the noise, to ‘a star calling it quits /After millions of years’, taking ‘a long dive out of sight.’ whilst ‘Come Spring’ quickly and unexpectedly moves from ‘the birdie in a tree’ to the return of the ‘wicked back from hell’, accompanied by Satan. I’m not sure how literally to take this poem’s warning about how they are ‘think[ing] up new evils’ or the fact that Satan’s ‘guile has no equal’.

Many more of the poems here are strange snapshots, isolated events, or moments, presumably designed to surprise us or make us think. Here is a complete poem:

   COULD THAT BE ME?

   An alarm clock
   With no hands
   Ticking loudly
   On the town dump.

Errr, yes? It is only with some reluctance and a sense of desperation I can force myself to make associations with extra time, unwanted time, wasted time, the nature of time, the relationship of humanity, machines and measured time. Mostly I shrug, as I do with the book’s brief opening poem, which for me is a real squib:

   FATE

   Everyone’s blind date.

Hmmm. I’m sorry but this is pseudo-profundity, a kind of (non-) riddle, a metaphor pretending to be a poem. It might have been something to work up to a poem, a starting point or notebook jotting, but not a whole three-word poem.

The majority of poems here rely on the supposed weight of words like stars, light, graves, night, and love acting on the reader, but it often doesn’t work. Take this poem about washing hanging on the line:

   WINDY DAY

   Two pairs of underwear,
   One white and the other pink,
   Flew up and down
   On the laundry line,
   Telling the whole world
   They are madly in love.

Are the two pairs of underwear in love? Are they speaking? Or is there a causal connection between neighbouring washing and their owners? Maybe the narrator knows something we don’t know? (Perhaps he could share that?) Does pink and white imply heterosexual norms or gendered clothing? Again, it’s a squib I’d like to see developed rather than simply written down as an image plus ‘poetic’ interpretation. (I’d also like to know why each line of Simic’s is capitalised, something I always question my students about. Mostly it’s because they haven’t looked at the preferences of their word processing software.)

I hate to be so negative, but this is a disappointing and slight volume from a poet I have previously admired and whose work I have very much enjoyed. What I am about to quote, the closing lines of ‘My Doubles’, a 13-line poem which – without using the term – is about doppelgängers or possibly past versions of ourselves, seems appropriate as a way of understanding what it feels like to try and engage with this new work:

   As for me, the last time someone saw me,
   I was reading the Bible on the subway,
   Shaking my head and chuckling to myself.

I can’t help but feel like a passenger on that train, wondering what the chap opposite is laughing about, or in this case what the author thinks he is saying, or is trying to achieve in these poems. Simic is adrift and, as the last two lines of the book announce, ‘There is no / Land in sight’. No poems either.

Rupert Loydell 3rd August 2022


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That Which I Touch Has No Name by Jennifer K Dick (Black Spring Press Group)

Posted on July 26, 2022 by tearsinthefence
That Which I Touch Has No Name by Jennifer K Dick (Black Spring Press Group)

The dialogic process of Jennifer Dick’s poems occurs in a multilingual context in which English, French and Italian interweave. The demolition of meaning and of naming provides space for a provisional reconstruction of language that evolves in sounds, alliteration and chains of words. They evoke each other in a multifaceted, polyphonic rhythm that envisages infinite possibilities. A Saussurian signifier and signified are proposed in a different perspective in which Derrida’s concept of the loss of the centre seems to be more relevant. Traditional forms are reviewed and opposed, giving way to multiple voices and different perceptions. These diverse interpretations are ‘off-the-centre’, as Derrida claims, as there is no centre, or any transcendental or universal entity to which we can refer or appeal. This concept of displacement opens the individual up to the construction of alternative views. 

     Dick’s poetry is a poetical journey that delves into philosophical and linguistic topics without an apparent logic and with no definite ending or goals. It is a wandering around, sometimes in circles and at other times in a winding path that emphasises the process rather than the conclusion. Fragments and echoes of everyday life and today’s society, such as political issues, shootings, women’s rights, scientific knowledge and the environment, are embedded in her discourse. In this way she explores language and therefore identity in a complex and comprehensive view of being human. Though we are strangers to ourselves, we take ‘another self […] into ourselves’ in an exchange that is promiscuous and generates intertextual connections. 

     References to Sappho, Erin Mouré’s A Frame of the  Book and the myth of Dibutades, the inventor of the art of modelling clay in Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis, trace constant intertextual routes throughout the collection and give direction to the narratives. It is a conversation that marks displacement and loss but also a constant attempt at replacement: 

her herding herself forward and again to go

forth into this bright afternoon unaccompanied 

by the whorls of the whims of another’s loss

                                                                      this body

unlatched

absence in

the reassertion of self

space/shame in

a presence of griefs          (‘The Body As Message’)

Quotations from Mouré are signalled in grey notes as titles interweaved into the poems. They flag up the inconsistency of our reasoning when we try to make sense of ourselves through language. Words can deceive, and the only strategy for finding a way through the labyrinth is to create alternative connections:

collect stones, shells, ants, the carcasses

    of bees, derelict homing predilections

    combing the convex codex for a hived

    intermezzo  /  in stance  /  stead

                     of intermission

    stand               and              re-geolocate     

the space          (distance)        place                (‘Figurative Blight /’)

The myth of Butades’ daughter (Dibutades in French) is thoroughly explored in the central section, ‘Afterlife’. It is the legend of the origin of drawing and painting in which the protagonist outlines her lover’s shadow, which is cast on a wall. He will leave soon, so she wishes to keep the memory of him in the drawing. However, ‘Butades’ daughter possesses no independent name./She is not in the story./She is not.’ She is therefore erased from history, ‘an illusion,/a recollection of,/ a line traced onto the wall.’ Sections in French alternate with those in English in a partial translation that is also a reworking of the story. 

The ‘process/of redefinition’ culminates in the final poems in an ‘assay’, that is, an attempt to create through memory. The poems are ‘inkling of emerging vocabularies, linguistic minefields of the forgotten, written over, re-emergent’ (‘Assay’). Space and ‘body/time/language’ are in constant movement and transformation, projecting the outline of their shadows onto our uncertain existence. The collection examines the complexity of these fundamental concepts with precision and depth.

Carla Scarano D’Antonio 26th July 2022

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There Are Angels Walking The Fields by Marlon Hacla translated by Kristine Ong Muslim (Broken Sleep Books)

Posted on July 23, 2022 by tearsinthefence
There Are Angels Walking The Fields by Marlon Hacla translated by Kristine Ong Muslim (Broken Sleep Books)

Let’s get the negative out of the way first: Tilde Acuña’s calligraphic and hand-drawn ‘Introduction’ is physically unreadable here, despite looking wonderful. It’s a shame, because Broken Sleep books have got better and better designed since the press started, because I’m sure she had something useful to say, and because this is a marvellous book.

Kristine Ong Muslim’s useful ‘Translator’s Note’ explains that this collection was originally published in the Philippines in 2010, and frames the book as a gathering of ekphrastic poems which ‘”manifest” real or imagined artworks through various poetic devices’. It’s not the kind of ekphrasis that the reader – or English readers – will recognise, as few sources or artists are mentioned. Instead we get intense and often disturbing snapshots along with captured moments, most often set in stark, desolate or abandoned settings and populated by nameless characters and personified objects.

The language is often voluptuous, the images engrossing, even when describing violence. ‘Diorama #26’ tells us ‘The fingers were like dragonflies / As they strangled her’, whilst ‘Serial Killer’ enters the mind of the subject:

   Now, about that man on the first page of the newspaper
   This morning, the one whose mouth has been slashed,

   Don’t worry.

   I let him scream
   Just a little.

   Always, knives are reasonable priced in the public market.

The titular angels appear in the final line of ‘Diorama #54’. They are the memories or ghosts of those already dead at the scene; the poem is about a grenade which ‘was useless at this point / Because there was no one else left to kill.’ Hacla’s landscapes are often populated by the unexpected: cicadas which ‘sound as if they are trying to tell him something’ (‘The Trysting Place’), a child’s ‘invisible friend’ (‘The Playground’) or ‘a being that was not yet an infant’ (‘Some Forsaken Things’).

Time and action are frozen here, where ‘Everything begins / With a long wait behind the window’ (‘5.26 p.m.’), a long wait that is shared by many others behind their own windows, all aware that ‘Everything ends with a long wait behind the window.’ Even the ‘White stones have been crushed / Into teardrop-shaped pieces’ (‘Still Life Moments after the Blast’) and ‘Suppressed moans can still be heard / Next door’ (‘The Starry Night, Vincent Van Gogh’). Only by remembering can the world be understood, and there be the possibility to forget.

Caught in this contradictory tension, the poet and reader are like the characters in the brief poem ‘The Room’ (reproduced here in its entirety):

   He led me inside the room
   Where she kept his past.
   Each day is like a corpse.
   Like sapphires devoid of luster
   Their open eyes.

   All night we stroked and closed
   Every eyelid.

By recognising and confronting the war-torn, abusive and violent world, Hacla animates and subverts the darkness, offering us an awkward exit point in ‘The Exchange’, the final poem here:

   Tell me everything you want to say
   Before the light silences us.

This is powerful, moving and lyrical poetry, and I hope to be able to read more of Marlon Hacla’s  astonishing writing in due course.

Rupert Loydell 23rd July 2022


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Conversations with Diana di Prima, ed. David Stephen Calonne (University of Mississippi Press)

Posted on July 16, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Conversations with Diana di Prima, ed. David Stephen Calonne (University of Mississippi Press)

Although recognised and remembered as a radical political and feminist poet, Diane di Prima (1934-2020) always questioned what was happening and chose what to engage with. Having read and reviewed a recent complete edition of her Revolutionary Letters I wanted to find out more about the author, and this new book offered just the opportunity. On the very first page of this book, in an interview from Grape, published by the Vancouver Community Press, we get this:

   ‘Grape: You mentioned earlier that you’ve stopped reading underground papers. Why is that?
   Diane: Because I find that level of information just isn’t giving me anything I can work with at this point. It’s not interesting to me. All that’s happening on that level is a kind of sick “history repeats itself” piece of nonsense as far as I can see.’

Which seems, in part anyway, a rational response to the popular and fashionable revolutionary discourse of the time, but is somewhat undermined by the writer’s statement later on that she goes ‘for information to things like astrology, things like . . . whatever . . . like the I Ching’, the first of which gives her ‘concepts of form, a feel of energy nodes, of vortexes and how they might interact’. She talks of stepping back and giving herself time ‘to find out about more of the things that were going down.’

What was going down, according to di Prima, is the fact that she thought there was ‘a lot more black magic involved in the manipulation of the planet that’s been going on.’ She chose different areas to investigate, including those mentioned above as well as homeopathy and self-awareness (rather than science), desiring ‘intuitional leaps’ rather than ‘slow understanding’.

This, of course, is as much of its time as what di Prima was questioning. She doesn’t have any answers that will mend society or heal the planet, but she states that what she is basically saying ‘is that we were all taken in by a bunch of bullshit.’ This includes the counterculture options of back-to-the-land farmers, reclaim-the-wilderness games, commune dwellers, the acid tests, the Diggers, and much else which – along with schooling, ‘food, television, fluorescent lights and the whole trip’ – is resulting in ‘[a]pathy and cynicism’, people who ‘don’t believe anything’.

It’s scary, depressing reading, both diagnosis and di Prima’s answers, and that’s only the first piece. She declares that people must be strong, physically and mentally, and find out how their bodies function, and then ‘find out as much as [they] can about what people used to know’ and start taking ‘things literally like myth and symbol. Just believe ’em.’

Myth and symbolism have informed much of di Prima’s poetry, most of which is not at all like Revolutionary Letters but more complex and difficult. She clearly continued her personal explorations and remained suspicious of much we take for granted, asking if the web actually reached people or facilitated informed learning and thinking. She’s right of course, but at times throughout this book, she seems inflexible and stubborn rather than wise. 

On various pages she buys into the ‘my work is my life’ shtick, and evidences her engagement with a pick’n’mix hodge-podge of new age beliefs, picking bits from magic, psychology, alchemy, Buddhism, occult texts, and meditation (etc. etc.) as suits her; but she also gets stuck into working with children and students to try and counter, indeed subvert, the educational norms of 20th century America. Although she repeatedly states that her poetry has no solutions, only ideas and information, she seems more obsessed with personal action and the content of her writing, rather than any engagement with radical poetry and poetics.

That is disappointing for this reader, but it’s good to be surprised. And if some statements annoy or seem naive, there are fascinating sections in here about di Prima’s surprising friendship with Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg’s Naropa Institute, small press publishing, 9/11, gender, feminism and political correctness, painters and painting, and – however critical – some great reminiscences about the alternative cultures and communities in San Francisco and New York. Contradictory, confused and questioning, di Prima is nevertheless revealed as a fascinating, opinionated interviewee, offering optimism and possibility, despite herself.

Rupert Loydell 16th July 2022


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Late Summer Ode by Olena Kalytiak Davis (Copper Canyon Press)

Posted on July 14, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Late Summer Ode by Olena Kalytiak Davis (Copper Canyon Press)

Olena Kalytiak Davis’ first book, And Her Soul out of Nothing, introduced a startling new poetic voice; her second, shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities, was even more exciting in the way it, well, shattered sonnets, without any nods to tradition or respect. Shakespeare got an invigorating kick up the backside, as did the sonnet form generally, and the (American) English language.

late summer ode includes a section of sonnets, too, and for me is the best part of the book. There’s something about the restraint and shaping undertaken that contains Davis’ wilder inclinations and tendency to ramble, repeat and drift. I’d forgotten how disappointed I’d been by her last book, The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems, and have struggled to find a way in to this one, to find any sense of structure in many of the poems.

There are plenty of intriguing ideas to spark the poems, ideas which are often used as titles: ‘The Benefit of a Hangover’ and ‘Today I Walked My Racism’ are intriguing concepts, but the language is tired and dull, the poems seem like first drafts, more akin to beatnik cliché than contemporary experiment. There’s also a tendency – perhaps inspired by engaging with the likes of Shakespeare and Rilke – to use archaisms such as ‘methought i saw’, ‘o sophisticatio / o lyric shame’, and ‘i have lived in wait of thy bright poesies’. I’ve come across a lot of this recently in poetry submissions to Stride from the USA, so she’s not alone, but it doesn’t work for me, especially when so many poems are full of popular slang and exclamations: ‘dude’, ‘shit’, ‘fucked’, ‘stupid fucking POEM’.

There are also several longer poems which repeat phrases, repeat phrases again, and occasionally subvert the phrases when repeated again (and again). I’m all for the idea that repetition changes things (because the repeat is affected by the original, etc etc) but this isn’t a Brian Eno CD and the phrases used are very ordinary narrative-driven sentences. Davis also seems to have bought into the confessional rather than distancing herself from her work; even if it’s ironic it doesn’t work for me:

   Here It Is

   the poem 
   that pretends it is suffering
   as much as you

   and truly, yay, truly
   it does not know what to say

So why say it then? The poem really doesn’t say anything, and ends with the egotistical narrator (let’s be kind: narrator not poet) asking

   (how) could they be as lost as in need of
   as me?

Dunno, sorry. And to be honest, don’t care.

Anyway, let’s end on a positive note, which means ignoring the awful six pages of prose, ‘Chekhov, Baby’ which closes the book, and focussing on the 36 sonnets which form a separate section of the book. They’re mostly numbered and use the first line in brackets as a title, use no punctuation and little capitalization, and generally adhere to 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 line stanzas. 

The archaic vocabulary and syntax is mostly reined in here, though I still find some lines awkward, such as this first verse from ‘iv.’:

   these selves divided from my selflessness
   defect with consummate animation
   go forth supreme superb superlative
   less me than my masterly aberration

not to mention the ending couplet:

   i math i count upon their countenance
   they my argument and m’acquiesence

It’s interesting to have math turned into a verb, and the pun using count, but it’s 2022 and I am not sure what poetry like this is doing in a contemporary book. It is more arresting when interrupted; ‘vi.’, for instance, closes with ‘sit down be humbled sit down bitch be HUMBLE’, which at least makes you notice a change in dynamic, tone and utterance.

By the time we get to the thirtieth sonnet (‘xxx.’ – keep up!) Davis is ready to abandon the 14 lines and subvert the form. ‘xxx.’ is a brief statement of poetics, a reflective aside:

   (the iambic and the anapest, the dac-
   tyl and the trochee, the right words in the
   right order by instinct if you’re lucky)

though personally I don’t think luck comes into creative writing. That’s the whole poem by the way, and this is the whole of the next:

   xxxi.

   i fucking glazed it; olena kaly-
   tiak davis from anchorage made this!

I guess it’s a kind of graffiti tag for the page, an effusive shout, but apart from raising a snigger why is it here? Better are the skinny one-word-a-line ‘erased sonnet’ and ‘sonnet for mark, joe, ted’ which follow, Ted presumably being Berrigan. The closing poem in this section/sequence is ‘airless sonnet’ which mentions ‘prodigious lack // of purpose . . .find myself making certain (marks) in it’, having previously declared ‘a moment of of, a small self portrait.’

The back cover blurb suggests that ‘Davis writes from a heightened state of ambivalence’, which might explain my ambivalent response, but also claims she is ‘a conductor of sound and meaning, precise to the syllable’, which I find harder to take. For me this work is mostly ramshackle, shapeless and unformed, too self-content and seemingly self-centred. Even the self-aware deprecation of a title such as ‘My Own Self Still Unconcerned’ doesn’t contradict the fact that these poems do seem to generally concern themselves with the self, constructed or confessional.

‘please. make fun of me(,) for how i suffer.’ reads that poem’s last line. I don’t want to make fun of any poet or their work, but this isn’t a great book. I’d really like to see less shattered sonnets, less importunity and more creativity and looking outward: to contemporary poetry and critical works, anywhere but the introverted self.

Rupert Loydell 14th July 2022


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