Susan Lewis, State of the Union

This is Not a Movie

but now & then it feels like one, & often has the same symptoms. With this overload of blurred identities, it may be advisable to drag our feet through the conceptual mud, a necessity devoutly to be resisted. Unless it’s preferable to jump ship & sink on our merits, like grief-stricken elephants. Which is not to say you shouldn’t arrive at your reunion prepared with garters, buckshot, & dungarees, in case the situation goes south & you’re feeling puckish. The man in the moon may bring his husband. As acolytes they are dry, sometimes even down in the mouth, but never dead in the water. Come to mama is what they might think, if they weren’t too worn & weathered to fall for anything an order of magnitude more inviting than this insidiously tempting razor’s edge.

New York poet, editor and publisher Susan Lewis’ short collection of prose poems, State of the Union (New York NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2013) reminds me slightly of Mairéad Byrne’s Talk Poetry (Oxford OH: Miami University Press, 2007), or even Anne Carson’s Short Talks (London ON: Brick Books, 1992) for their collections of similarly-self-contained brevities, composing poems in a blur-state between prose-poem and lyric essay. Lewis’ short pieces blend the prose-poem, the lyric essay and short fiction, allowing each to flow into the other in a way that makes the boundaries indistinguishable. Her title, State of the Union, suggests a unified whole of scattered pieces, as well as a stock-taking address, wherein one also speaks of what one wishes to accomplish in the future. Where is Lewis headed, and where might we stand now? It’s a big question, and one that suggests far more than answers directly. There is a wonderful quality of quick composition to some of these pieces, jazz riffs that bounce across the page, taking nothing away from the quality of composition and the sharpness of thought. This is a short collection, made up of only twenty-five pieces, each no more than a page in length, and I wonder if this work exists solely as a self-contained unit, or if it might show up down the road as part of something much larger.

In the Heat Of

this moment or another. In which nothing is its own subject, & no one bothers to attend. Unless bitten more than chewed. Or eschew false premises. Empty promise leaking breadth like aliens sapped by law, attending dejected to the song of predator & prey (+ entertain another discourse). Nerve-tip unlabeled, frail as any fledgling, feigning strength when doubt concurs. Mocked by thunderbolts & floods. While time takes our weak minds hostage & pretends to give. Holding out as gods admonish, knowing them for what they’re not.

little red leaves textile editions: Sarah Mangold, Jimmy Lo + Mairéad Byrne

From Dawn Pendergast's Little Red Leaves in Texas come three more from her “textile editions” series, the chapbooks An Antenna Called the Body by Sarah Mangold, A Reduction by Jimmy Lo, and Lucky by Mairéad Byrne. With previous chapbooks by Beverly Dahlen and Jamie Townsend, the website writes of the series:

We love chapbooks and poets. We love little ones, little known. We love things that fit into trouser pockets. We love small pages, plush covers, uneven stitches and folds.

A project of little red leaves, the textile series takes the hand out of “hand-sewn chapbooks.” It’s real work in the age of mechanical reproduction. It’s the little sewing machine that could. It’s ironed and folded and sewn and pulled and the threads stick out.

All textile series chapbooks are 5.5″ by 4.25″ with fabric covers scavenged from old curtains, bedsheets and other textile remnants. We consider it a micro-revolution. A call to action against staples, tape and glue. Coming at you em-dashed, a little wrinkled, and needlessly obscure.

The author of the poetry collections Household Mechanics (New Issues, 2002) and the forthcoming Giraffes of Devotion (i.e. Press), Edmonds, Washington poet Sarah Mangold edited the print journal Bird Dog (2000-2009), and currently co-edits, with Maryrose Larkin, FLASH + CARD, “a chapbook and ephemera press.” Her An Antenna Called the Body, “lovingly sewn with a smattering of textile remnants,” is a mix of short poems and prose-poems writing the place where human and machine meet, in poems such as “Electrical Theories of Femininity,” “Every Man a Signal Tower” and “The Study of Individual Points.” With her references to the century before last, I wonder, is this a matter of steampunk concerns lightly disguised as lyric/language poetry?

An Antenna Called the Body

Around 1900 love's wholeness disintegrates. Where eyes had always seen only poetic wing mechanization takes control. Literal airships watching the paddle-streamer wheel. Their central nervous system always preceded them. Lethal bird flights. Mechanization takes commmand. Metaphysics of the heart. Everything from sound to light is a wave. Priest and victim of the apparatus. Perfectly alphabetized female readers.

What I love here is her language, the way her prose wraps around itself, in an unusual mix of thick and specific abstract, sweeping across the page. It makes me want to see what else she is doing, has done.

The Machine has not Destroyed the Promise

Around 1800, the costumed nightmare on the sofa. Dead brides and mountaineers. For me they are grammatical. Frontier cleaners. A circle of tickets this freckled body. But I should be untrue to science loitering among its wayside flowers. Pulled out and shut up like a telescope. Let us try to tell a story devoid of alphabetic redundancies. Immortality in technical positivity. If motion caused a disagreement of any kind we are regarding the same universe but have arranged it in different spaces. That is to be the understanding between us. Shall we set forth?

I'm intrigued by Atlanta, Georgia poet Jimmy Lo, a writer I hadn't previously heard of. His chapbook, the long poem A Reduction, is sprinkled with “microscopic images of mustard seeds, onions skins, twigs, banana stalk, tumeric, wildflower, string, and other items,” and, as the acknowledgments also tells, “lovingly sewn with recycled bedsheets and shower curtains.” The poem begins:

I wish to be microscopic. Not invisible, that, but microscopic—and anonymous, among the worms' paths and their soft castings, to be heading into the mite, their kin, next of their kin miles no meaning. Two dimensions.

This is an interesting and endearing prose-poem/essay on metaphysics, writing the small, smaller and smallest moments in prose. I'm intrigued by the smallness, and the thoughtful quick movements disguised as a single gesture, wondering where this poet might end up, where he might even go next. I'm intrigued by the smallness, but to Lo I would suggest, to explore other avenues of smallness, you should consider the poems of Nelson Ball and Mark Truscott, exploring smallnessess from entirely different angles, or the prose-poetry of Richard Froude.

The politics of the body would sing its injustice. Though it would smile too, it would smile on the great verve of its invective.

Mairéad Byrne [see her 12 or 20 questions here], an Irish ex-pat living in the United States, is the author of four previous collections, from Nelson & The Hurubury Bird (Wild Honey Press, 2003), Talk Poetry (Miami University Press, 2007), SOS Poetry (/ubu editions, 2007) and The Best of (What's Left of) Heaven (Publishing Genius, 2010), as well as “a host of chapbooks,” including this newest, Lucky, “lovingly sewn using recycled textile remains.” In what little I've seen of Byrne's previous work, she favours the prose-poem, exploring images and ideas in longer (often single-paragraph) pieces that remind slightly of the fictions of British Columbia author M.A.C. Farrant, or Hamilton, Ontario writer Gary Barwin. There are some strange and compelling surreal moments in these pieces, whether the first two pieces centred around centipedes, or writing her eyes falling out on the streets of Providence. How would you feel if your eyes were to fall out?

Floodlights

If you have an old house and it's not up to par with the houses of your friends and colleagues and you have been in it long enough to fix it up but you haven't fixed it up because you have no money or aren't able or just didn't get round to it yet but can't use the excuse of having just moved in anymore because you're in the house seven years and people don't invite you to dinner anymore because you never invite them back and anyway you feel bashful about accepting an invitation for the 4^th or 5^th time and want to, you know, start inviting people round yourself but don't want to expose the shortcomings of your living situation I have the solution for you: Floodlights! You can rent them fairly cheap or even invest in a set of your own if you intend to have a lot of dinner parties. You have to have high ceilings of course—did I mention I have an old house? Once installed you just blast that dinner table with 5,000 lumens and believe me, no-one's going to be commenting on the state of your house. It's like that Edgar Allen Poe story “The Purloined Letter”: You blind with light. The trick is, of course, to rein it in. You have to control the projection. You want the dining room ablaze but everything outside that shining space sheathed in velvety dark. You do not want the dust bunnies in the corner of the living-room—or on the corner of the living room of your neighbour across the street—to jump into horrifying relief. It's extremely atmospheric as you can imagine. Your guests will feel like film stars. And there are other benefits. It's not that you don't have furniture—it's that you moved it to make room for the lights. It's not that you don't have rugs—it's that you didn't want them torn up by the great claw feet of the floods so you rolled them away. And if your guests do stumble out of the magic circle to go to the bathroom or explore the territory, their retinas will be too dazzled to see anything but whirling disks and orbs. They'll have to feel their way with their hands and when they return the food on their plate will look too real for words. Not only have you restored appetite to the realm of personal responsibility where it rightly belongs you have also more or less determined the topic of conversation for the evening, that is if people can bear to look each other in the eye long enough to talk. You can also rent searchlights with high intensity beams each one of which has over six hundred million candlepower so your guests can easily find your house without GPS or Mapquest—the good old-fashioned way.

ongoing notes: some recent American poetry collections by Zawacki, Padgett, Young & Byrne

A whole bunch of things since getting back to my western desk; I’ve started posting more interviews for that 12 or 20 questions series (Peter Darbyshire even noticed); Amanda Earl, but today, posted a list of what some Ottawa writers are up to on their various poetry projects, and wrote a "best of" for 2007 (that was nice enough to include me). Pearl chimed in on Phil Jenkins' original article on potentially bringing back Ottawa laureates (with a follow-up letter or two in the Ottawa Citizen); here are some photos I recently posted from two Alberta adventures (Calgary extravaganza and the Olive Reading Series), and the Ottawa launch of the Peter F. Yacht Club #8. And did you see this strange little mention of a few Canadian poets, including John Newlove, Max Middle and Sharon Harris?

Athens GA: On the recommendation of expat nathalie stephens (currently in Chicago) [see her 12 or 20 questions here], I got in touch with American poet Andrew Zawacki (co-editor of Verse), who sent me a copy of his third poetry collection Anabranch (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), a follow-up to his previous By Reason of Breakings (2002) and Masquerade (2001).

2

snow today and through tomorrow
and through tomorrow night, in a stutter

the logic of dominos, music the method
of dice: northsouth and isterdriven

do not tarry, do not turn, because
the impartial, because because:

gigolo heat and the haze it chafes against
encrypted blue, a prayer for their sickness

that went, that went: the salt of x
is the psalm of x, encoded in apricot,

gunpowder tea, and given
to being given again and against:

I owe myself, I owe myself,
dancing in front of the doorway my debt,

dancing in front of it, open or shut (from “Viatica”)

There is something vaguely ghazal-like to Zawacki’s lines, pushing further his lines of thought through a series of accumulations. I like the slowness of his poems, in the four long poems that make up this collection; these four poems that stretch out as far as he can take them. Still, this book is (now) four years old; how long do we have to wait before we see another?

alone and in advance
over an unknown grave (from “Viatica”)

New York NY: It’s interesting the difference between confidence in Canadians and Americans, with the title of American poet Ron Padgett’s new poetry collection, How to Be Perfect (Minneapolis MN: Coffee House Press, 2007); the first thing it reminds me of is Charles Gordon’s non-fiction title How To Be Not Too Bad: A Canadian Guide to Superior Behaviour (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1994) (not that one has anything to do with the other). The author of roughly twenty books of poetry and prose over the years, the second generation New York School poet Padgett (check out this recent interview with Padgett) is capable of some fantastic and subtle wisdom in his poems, one that makes it more and more obvious how he could be a favourite of Toronto poet and fiction writer Stuart Ross (and also reminiscent of some recent George Bowering pieces) [see my recent review of Padgett’s book of collaborations, published by Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press].

History Lesson

I think that Geoffrey Chaucer did not move
the way a modern person moves.
He moved only an inch at a time, in what
we call stop action. Everyone in his day moved
like that, so they could be shot into a tapestry,
but also because time moved in short lurches
and was slightly jagged and had fewer colors
for them to be in. But that was good. Humanity
has to take it one step at a time.

Great Barrington MA: Despite ending his infamous press The Figures a few years ago (1975-2005), American poet and curator Geoffrey Young continues to produce collections of poetry through other publishers, most recently The Riot Act (Lowell, MA: Bootstrap Press, 2008).

THE 97TH KENTUCKY DERBY

She yelled
the horses are prancing through introductions
& I dropped the book of Job
hustled in
& heard we had six minutes til post-time.
She’d just put on short pants and a shirt
after taking a bath & was trying
to get a comb through her long tangled hair.

I said wait a minute
unsnapped her pants
pulled them down around her thighs
slid down her standing body
& buried my tongue in her moist bush.
I perfumed it, she said.
I can taste it, I said.

Pretty soon I was sitting on the floor
& she was sitting on me
riding me back and forth
yelling giddiup giddiup
way out ahead of those other horses
who hadn’t even arrived at the starting gate yet.
I heard a trumpet announce something & the crowd got excited.

& carefully I manoeuvered her until she was flat
on her back, head below the TV
and now I was riding her, rocking gently
not even racing now
as the announcer spoke of the Derby’s glorious history.

Arching her back, she looked upside down
at the horses on the screen
some in the starting gate
others glistening and edgy and powerful
about to enter
but we couldn’t wait for them
& in a beautiful homestretch
at least a minute before Cañonero II

won the 97th Kentucky Derby by three lengths
we kicked it all the way home.

I find it interesting just how far some of Young’s poems move through narrative (much like Canadians David W. McFadden and Stuart Ross, and American Padgett), yet he titles, perhaps ironically, perhaps not, a poem and the first section of the collection, “Why I Don’t Write Novels” (particularly reminiscent of the work of both Ross and Padgett).

WHY I DON’T WRITE NOVELS

A man approaches a closet,
opens the door, reaches in,
selects a shirt, slips it off
the hanger, replaces hanger

on rod, turns from closet
with shirt in hand,
and without shutting closet
door, walks into bathroom,

stands in front of mirror,
puts shirt on, watches
his hands buttoning it, loosens
his belt, tucks shirt into pants,

tightens belt, smiles at
the glass, leaves the room.

The first section, as well, starts with three quotes by other writers:

“To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance.” William Carlos Williams

“And could one make a sonnet of nothing but trees.” Clark Coolidge

“I am not a sonnet, you are not a sea urchin, and this is not a poetry contest, comrade.” Stephen Rodefer

That first quote is quite a challenge; where did Williams say this? I would be interested in finding out. I wonder what a poet such as Stephen Brockwell would make of such quotes?

Young also runs a summer art gallery down there in Great Barrington (the same town, incidentally, where Canadian ex-pat poet Jan Conn lives).

Providence RI: The author of a number of other poetry collections [see her 12 or 20 questions here], Irish ex-pat Mairéad Byrne’s most recent collection is Talk Poetry (Oxford OH: Miami University Press, 2007). Made out of a series of prose fragments [see also the short review by Rachel Loden on her own blog], almost as short essays/stories, they remind me a bit of George Bowering’s recent chapbook published through Edmonton’s Olive Reading Series [see my note on such here], except not as fiercely tight. Byrne’s pieces move through “life itself,” as referenced by the opening quote by Claes Oldenburg that reads “I am for an art…that is heavy and coarse and / blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.”

Global Hastening

I don’t know what happened to May. It disappeared in a blur of rain & grading. One minute it was May 1st. Now it’s May 19th. Everything’s whizzing by. When I was young summer lasted all year. It was like the ocean. Amber waves of grain rolling way off to the horizon. Now it’s like zzzpptt! As soon as it’s Monday it’s Friday. Months are like weekends. You make a note to do something & 3 years later it’s done. There’s no point in looking forward to anything. I understand that as you get older time speeds up. But this is surreal. Everyone’s hit. And it’s not just a horizontal thing. It’s vertical too. My daughter says I can’t BELIEVE freshman year is almost over. My 9-year old confides to her friends Time flies. Babies go bye bye bye bye. And they can’t even talk. What’s happening? The temporal caps are melting. This
one’s for Mr. President.

There are a number of these pieces working through temporal concerns, whether ageing or simpley the passage of time, almost the theme that runs its way through this collection. Byrne’s prose-poems read almost like floating entries, and drift and flow like water, like clouds along meandering lines that sometimes close, and other times, allow the reader to continue once the piece is done; a good poem stays with you, long after you’ve finished reading, and there were a number of pieces here that strayed, and even stayed.

Figures

I used to be 4 years younger than my husband then he left me with 2 children & I got 7 years older very quick. Two years went by. I was 11 years older by then. He stayed the same age, always 30, possibly even younger. In no time, I was 20 years older than him & hurtling towards old age. Even the children began to age. They were small & wrinkled, older than their own father. His skin was baby-smooth, his brown hair rising like a stack above their wilting heads—or like a vividly brushed dun & purple mountain ringing the horizon in the pan of which, somewhere, they tottered