Wanda Coleman, Bathwater Wine
(Black Sparrow Press, 1998)

Coleman’s seventh book with Black Sparrow is an encyclopedic, moment-by-moment accounting of rage, witness and transcendence that moves agilely from a tragic but comedic resignation — a seductive blues or be-bop style — through fecund rambling hijinks that show off her verbal acuity, through postmodern collage and pastiche mimicking of traditional genres (such as the newspaper account), on to direct, sixties- and rap-inspired in-your-face declarations of resistance and anger. The strong opening sequence, “Dreamwalk,” is a poignant, quasi-confessional, free associative account of the author’s adolescence: “ugly and more ugly. you are a card carrying / member of the FBI (Fat Black Idiots) and you arrest and / jail them in your mind for crimes against your heart.” Later in the sequence, the need to escape inspires a fecund, but suspicious, alternate reality for the young poet: “you become a shadow in pursuit of shadows. you / smoke imaginary imported German fags while sipping / imaginary English sherry barely clad in blood red / silken fantasies while straddling a rattan chair on / the balcony of a Cuban bordello.” Primarily a collection of disparate shorter poems, the volume is punctuated by longer sequences. “The Ron Narrative Reconstructions” wavers between poetry and prose, and between modes of rhapsody, philosophical discourse, fiction and documentary, demonstrating in microcosm the range of Coleman’s style. It opens with a pastoral couplet — “a half hour before the advance of sun / the red-winged sparrow begins its song” — that invokes an ideal “poetic” setting, but, as if to emphasize the absence of such an organic unity of nature in her native Los Angeles (and in the mode of the pastoral itself), it jarringly cuts to a haunting, very contemporary, set of images: “helicopters whirl around, claim this lesser heaven, wolf-eyed pilots with an infrared snoop, scope for / a collar. coal-colored mountains of thunderhead, gather. there’s rumbling in the recesses of distant western / panorama.” Matching, and hence countering, the power of the panoptic gaze of the police helicopter (and other forms of technological control, including that of normative syntax), “The Ron Narrative Reconstructions,” with their vignettes (“in the midcity laundromat, we two-step to a piped-in salsa…”), wry theoretical musings (a digression on “poetoerotic rape”: “the plundering and transmogrification of another’s form… a physical release akin to sexual orgasm”), and reliance on the eternal powers of language and the basic need everyone has to be a part of another’s life, succeeds in mapping the activity of a poet’s mind where the less generous and attentive have failed. The poem is emblematic of the best qualities of this large, somewhat sprawling, formally diverse yet occasionally loose, book of poetry.

Kenward Elmslie, Routine Disruptions
(Coffee House Press, 1998)

A selection of poems, prose poems and songs from a writer who started in theatre — his musical “The Glass Harp” was headed for Broadway at the time his first book of poems, “Album,” was published in 1969 — Routine Disruptions is a various, campy, never-tiring display of verbal skyrockets and sweet, soap opera dilemmas. Elmslie, the “baby poet” of the New York School of writers that included John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, employs the all-embracing urbane surrealism of the former along with the spontaneity and wit and of the latter to create poems infused with the flux of bourgeois vacuity, social marginality, and merciless sexual ambitions: “Twister Bea’s asparagus wobble suffused the maw of August dusk, / rancid from wetsuits, yahoos in spa pools dunked./ […] Formulaic, yeah, / but the promised porn classics got born again last Ozzie & Harriet day / as virgin surf foam, components a-swirl…” (from “Panopticon for Calamity Winifred”). Other poems attempt a meditational stance, like the title poem which ends “hole, plummet into it, / new universe / exiting freshness and strangeness / the strains don’t apply here / accidentally reborn / head home” suggesting the hurt depths beneath the play. However, Elmslie’s skill lies in his near-paranoic verbal inventiveness — intrusive in some of the “serious” poems — which he is able to let rip in the formally loose songs from his plays, as when he has the character Lavinia Clone sing (from “Schlock ‘n’ Sleaze R&B”): “I’m terrible at games, / Always lose at Parchesi. / Stupid at names. / Saint _Who_ of Assissi?” Few poets are able to deserve the attention they crave as Elmslie — he gives narcissism a good name — and few manage to sustain the excess, scale and abundance while remaining so thoroughly poised.

Robert Fitterman, Metropolis 1 — 15
(Sun & Moon Press, 1997)

Fitterman mates a certain classic “Objectivist” style (in the manner of George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky) with a hip, contemporary sensibility which borders on the techno-ambient, thus sacrificing some of the angstier concerns of his modernist predecessors for an interest in pure, accessible verbal pleasure. Metropolis, an on-going work which should reach 24 sections when completed, is very much a New York poem, filled with the chatter of that city’s highly social scene with the everyday weirdness of an often nomadic life lived deep in the shadows of skyscrapers. The first section, despite its cross-cutting collage style, nearly recalls Breton’s Surrealist masterpiece Nadja (itself an homage to a city, Paris) in its roving eye view and the heady, decentered feeling of its urban phantasmagoria: “But grander than that / L’Hotel actually happened / scaffolding in some circles / gone twilight & Lex essences / sipped down subdeveloper more (bestial, residual, / festive red clay livery / homespun depot some yellow western atmospheric glib hog / I was there / but there was no espresso bar / did you _time_ this? the connection / between us is sheerly residential / minus crossed our paths are starred / in an awkward upper west side hey-day” (10). Part of the beauty of Fitterman’s style is that it lets him drop odd, potentially dull stock phrases that one remembers from somewhere (“we got / a situation here” from the police radio in a b-movie, or “lighting fixtures the last word in / chrome” from interior decorator parlance) and puts them in contact with more purely poetic ones (“a lay sky plurals dusk about us,” or the last lines of section 1: “the dead lose / their defenses” followed by the zinger: “that’s been my experience”) hence creating a strange floating sensation that elevates the individual units of the cliche — the chrome, the situation — while not letting the classically poetic moments get precious or sententious. Section 7 is a sort of fake dictionary utilizing many of the formal devices — quotes from literature, dates, abbreviations, etymologies — to create a difficult but familiar surface in which the humor of not quite knowing what a word means combines with a quasi-expose on the mystical nature of words that dictionaries, with their lexical depth psychology, suggest. Like a series of brief portraits of the dreamlife of spoonerisms (later in Metropolis he writes “My favorite opera is Il Trattoria”), section 7 pushes the limit between poetry and goulash syntax: “Fade -[~]^^^ I. droop, whither, a company of hunters, any sawed-off weapon that has lost taste to corrupt, weaken. 1303 _Syn._ neuer gres, ne neuer sall, bot euermore be.. falow, and fade. 2. barber’s term, Life began to vade. 3. shrink. Lit. and _Fig._ OE. _fadian_., Wger. ORG. *_fadia_. 4. v.3. _dial_. to dance around from town to country. 5. _Spec. Cornish. A passel of maidens… begin’d for… to fade so friskis._” (60) Section 8 is a “libretto” in which several landmark buildings — the World Trade Center, the Flatiron, Rockefeller Center — take part in an orderly but disjunctive choral crown: “FLATIRON: Open up / your heart / and see it / the other way. / What makes / a hat felt?” (70) Other sections use odd word breaks (“loo / ming sud / den a mall / all ang / el & la // ttice at aw / ning’s va / se & sparkl / es pill / ars lewd ac / cusa”) to shimmy grammar back and forth in a flotsam/jetsam manner, and reduced forms like the three word poem (“Life / long / fishcakes”) or other manners of verbal dislocation to create stucco-like surfaces over which the eye roves for meaning, getting hooked there and being let loose elsewhere. It is perhaps useful to compare Fitterman’s technique (which relies very much on arrangement on the page) to that of an abstract painter, like Robert Ryman or Cy Twombly, who deals with single colors (in this case, white) over long stretches of canvas to highlight sculptural surface play; in such works, the “white space” becomes more than a unit of composition and dominates the terms of engagement, such that attention is turned to the minor things — paint flecks, the chiaroscuro effects of small shadows — so that the art is both “busy” and calming, but in any case not making huge, impenetrable philosophical gestures. Fitterman’s sensual relationship to words — in both sound and color — and his light touch makes reading Metropolis a uniquely satisfying aesthetic experience.

Barbara Jordan, Trace Elements
(Penguin, 1998)

Barbara Jordan’s Trace Elements is an often beautiful, often frustrating book of poems. Winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize with her first book of poems, Channel (Beacon, 1990), Jordan constructs shimmering, translucent lyrics that proceed with an even pace through a rhetoric that is neither stentorian, nor entirely distant from the more grandiose tones of one of her predecessors, Wallace Stevens. Her affinities with Stevens are many — “two sparrows / in a lilac bush: my consciousness / a replica of what I see, / my silence, an usher’s,” she writes in “Common Ephemeral,” suggesting both the permutations of his famous mental aviary and the Barnum-esque, ringleader quality of his authorial self-positioning. However, Jordan keeps word-play at a minimum, choosing a more unproblematic relationship to language. Consequently, this renders her various theories of the self as “reflections” or “a replica” problematic, and her tours through the world of objects — she loves lists, but many of them seem the products of equations rather than the randomness she hopes to suggest — walks down well-known streets. In “Threshold,” an otherwise beautiful landscape poem that begins “How the day turns in the angular woods. / Not a gust. / A gold, fastidious light slides waist-deep / and ascends…” she loses the reader’s confidence with a rather cliched (and Stevensian) philosophical maxim: “I think our minds hold nothing but this world / reflected.” In this way her transcendentalism seems ornamental, a feature added on to give spark to her gift for description. Her failure to appreciate her strengths as a writer mars a poem like “Urban Setting,” which contains strong lines (“Bacon’s portrait of Blake, / his features drawn like silk over pearskin, / the petulance of his death mask, composed / in a sea of black”), but generally lacks body, and ends with a sentimentalized anguish that is just strong enough to sink the ship: “and pain is far away, it is my satellite.” There are several poems in Trace Elements that are beyond reproach: an ars poetica called “This Poem,” the short lyric “Bud,” and the long final poem called “Ammonites,” in the third part of which both imagistic detail and historical consciousness attain a thematic unity like nowhere else in the book. Yet one wonders if Jordan’s hitch with the trandscendental, both in theme and vocabulary (which includes a flirtation with semiotic jargon — language theory lite) is more trendiness than an overflow of mystical enlightenment.

Myung Mi Kim, Dura
(Chax, 1998)

Kim’s third collection — Under Flag (1992) and The Bounty (1996) are her previous two — continues her passionate, formally investigative cataloguing of the pervasive effects of colonialism, war, and rampant capital in the domestic and public spheres. While foregoing the genres of fiction and journalism to record this morally arid landscape, she engages the reader in the act of re-witnessing these chains of insights that render one without a narrative of rebellion, but which create a forum in which meaning, being reformed by the reader him- or herself, empowers and doesn’t — like television or the newspaper — distract. The long middle section, “Thirty and Five Books,” composed of short paragraphs of no longer than a few sentences each, is the most forceful in this engagement: gleanings of horror (“And the unremarkable become the stuff of dust.”), of theorized imaginings of the interconnectivity of politics and economy (“Deployments to the assigned parallel. Sheer volume of river traffic. Ascension, declination and distance of the measured body”), of subverted pastoral lyricism (“When we stayed together working the fields and went home at dusk and ate together. Mangy birds sing ornate songs”), even extending its reach to a brief liturgy based on a death in the Los Angeles riots of 1993 (“Percussive / In the _LA Times_ the picture was in color / Body moving in circle be fire / What looked like black in the Korean newspaper was my son’s blood / Body moving in circle be fire”). Each sentence resonates with a story: “Unrecognized she went about the city”, a complete paragraph, suggests the alienation themes of early modernism, and it is revised for postcolonial content in the later “______ arrived in America. Bare to trouble and foresworn. Aliens aboard three ships off the coast. ______ and ______ clash. Police move in.” Like Whitman, Kim has a panoptic generosity, so that she finds a way to extend her very personal relationship to issues of immigration and cultural severing to include all who have correlative experiences. As she writes in a later section of the book, inspecting the canvas on which she works: “Call ancestry lost / Collapse and valence / Brevity and gesture / House with rooms cut of various sizes / An America as big it is.”

Sianne Ngai, Criteria
(O Books, 1998)

“An epigram delays / its form of destination” writes Ngai in “chrono/paradise,” and the poems of Criteria, most of which are linked sequences of elliptical, highly alluring philosophical junkets, maintain an aura of millennial catastrophe amidst the suspended silence of unnegotiated guilt. Through such fractured glances at both the totality of a world view and the totality of the sentence, Ngai creates something of a survival guide in the twentieth century’s panoptic technological gaze, and doesn’t fail to amuse with her dry-witted narrativizations of our need to be fragments amidst the observation: “Safety abounds here / blue cars are parked here / optimism still abounds / in chunks / of the globe [the first / year in a year / of testing // whiff then / waft // your mother’s maiden / name is the code.” Her plays on the commonplaces of literary discourse are emboldened by a sharp sense of enjambment: “Meaning collapses on the other side of the all / terrain vehicle…,” she writes, veering from the preciousness that such a linguistically investigative poetics can lead to. Sometimes she seems to turn the lens back on her role as writer attempting to subvert meanings while in the role of determining them, casting herself as the tyrant of dreams: “Lazy large world-compeller / whose prosperity was likely to develop a red crease / in imitation of the superseded / telling children of the dangers of being trapped in anything that closes.” If Ngai sees politics and society as largely a fractured spectacle of clanking existential comedies, the final prose section “My Novel,” with its looping recurring images from Wilkie Collins, turns the “epigrammatic” nature of the first parts into an interior experience, demonstrating by contrast the very meanings that are contained in the prose form even when the sentences are torqued beyond easy assimilation. Liberated discursivity gives her an almost Stevensian feel when describing the nuances of experience: “A flow can be the object of one or several axioms. To prove a poem: a trajectory of the bird’s flight through the yellow forest. Crumbs marking the coordinates at which the name would descend from under a wing.” Criteria contains all the excitement of a first utopaic reading of theory and philosophy while maintaining a level of fun that gives it a youthful, almost pop edge despite the weight of its learning, and is extraordinary in its restraint, its subtle tonal shifts and its devotion to a fairly extreme mode of poetry.

Claudia Rankine, End of the Alphabet
(Grove Press, 1998)

Rankine’s second collection represents a shift from the transparent social concerns of many of the poems in her first award-winning volume Nothing in Nature is Private. While Nothing deftly explored a community on the outside of “”America”” through formally conservative modes (poems which, nonetheless, recorded in politicized ways the distinct speech patterns of her native Jamaica), The End of the Alphabet contains twelve poem sequences that are more open in construct and narratively indeterminate, and yet, in their detailed mingling of tones and observations, no less precise in their effects and meanings. Like many women poets of her generation, such as Ann Lauterbach and Jorie Graham (though far less hieratic in tone), Rankine has found that the most true form for a poetry of witness is one that questions the very genre of documentary, recognizing text as an untrustworthy window onto reality: “”Door opening to green bowl of narcissus […] she is dreaming the story of recurring commas, / the one that gossips of simple equations, complicated, / solution obstructed — / or hers is a wake claiming delay, piling blemish onto finery?”” she writes in “”Dirtied Up.”” But in this poem the private — “”Though you thought you heard, so sure you heard / _sweetheart”” — takes on the tone of the public in its winding down to the issues of choice and agency, translating the feminist concerns of a poet like Adrienne Rich to the level of the micropolitical: “”(suspecting only illusion (some vindictive act of mind / even before voice / depressed the edge of the bed, pulling shadow / from beneath / memory spoke from its crushed / throat / corrupting neutrality…”” A radical self-detachment combined with narrative skill gives parts of “”Hunger to the Table”” a unique philosophic cogency (reminiscent of the early poems of Creeley): “”A turned ankle is its own consequence. She hops about, / then caught on the sofa waiting for the swelling to go down / is reminded we move among others to fall from ourselves, / windswept, having a liking for laughter / but the / ridiculousness / of falling off one’s own heels. What / was being viewed from up there?”” Yet even this poem ends on note of social urgency, though the play of words doesn’t cease: “”Don’t ask to be told x to y in time or eternity. / Passage bleeds between the hammering / breath and flesh. Sweetness mumbled / is the voice nice. Just as the lips open open the eyes.”” With a resonant ear and a light imagistic touch — “”Faced with its staggering number of runny noses / the day begins…”” — along with a rigorous concern for language’s material betrayals — “”I arrived unprepared for the lobed, dark- / grayed matter of “”wearisome”” and cannot weep…”” — The End of the Alphabet is sure to be as recognized as her first collection and to acquire this young poet a larger audience.

Ed Roberson, Just In: Word of Navigational Challenges: New and Selected Work
(Talisman House, 1998)

Covering work from Roberson’s first book, 1970’s When Thy King Is A Boy, to the recent “work in progress,” this volume, as its title suggests, progresses through several modes of poetic address, the early work containing such Prufrockian lines as “and in the countryside the circumstance / adds a spoon of dull explosion to the tea”, the middle work spiritual in tone and centered around choruses and iconic drawings (“turn ambiguity / into separation / separation into repetition / repetition into chant / turn / turn” he writes in “Formula for the Poem Dance”) and the later work narrative tracings of an chthonic world that lies just below standard, mostly urban, realities. What links Roberson’s project together is a persistent belief in the reaches of the meditating mind coupled with a serious critique of political realities, qualities which link him to the main project of Talisman House, which is to uncover poets, like Roberson and previously Stephan Jonas and Gustaf Sobin, who write from an agonistic center that is aware of its social marginality, and who use poetics mostly derived from the Beats and Projective Verse. While Roberson can also be linked to poets like Nathaniel Mackey and Will Alexander in what is an important sub-tradition of African American literature — a sort of maximal, mythic turning-over of social binaries that forgoes an activist rhetoric for musically organized poems and sound-structures, often centered around considerations of art and music — his writing is often lacking in material for the reader to grasp on to, and longer sequences such as the “Aerialist Narrative” don’t offer much in terms of ideation, especially when the sentences break into fragments that, in themselves, are ambiguous. The visionary quality is unmistakable and compelling in itself, but meaning remains vague, as the poet suggests it should: “All these voices come out to meet us in this / ancient seeing in the end of distances / this fearing: / the glow of the coming city / on the horizon / is it burning; is this music or screaming / all these voices cast out to talk us in?” The later poems are the most successful, and he returns to the careful sound play and full sentences, using a line suggesting Williams of “Asphodel” to pace his musings. “Flamenco Goyasques” is a perfect short poem: “We all have / women we were born of / We all were dragged out & / lined up against the sky / Know that / Somebody here stood beside you / You put up your hands and you die.” “Atmosphere Conditions” anchors Roberson’s millenial ramblings to concrete realities, such as the graffitti in subways which he reads as “the great prophecies… / grumbles written on great weakenings / crayon / on great endings / the earth / the rainbow’s crash.” Without question the epitomy of the “outsider” poet, Roberson has much to offer but perhaps only to the reader that is predisposed to mysteries that he writes of, as he doesn’t, until his work of the nineties, quite achieve the artistry necessary to evoke them.

Kit Robinson, Democracy Boulevard
(Roof Books, 1998)

Synthesizing influences ranging form the Creeley-esque minimalist lyric (and minimalist art in general) to the experimental poetry of Robinson’s main associates, the Language poets, and from the expansiveness of John Ashbery’s skids through middle-class consciousness to the dance around the “void” of the French lyric, Democracy Boulevard powers through eight sections of poetical investigations into the paradoxes of a radically standard lifestyle (“My normal state / wide grin / mild chagrin / effervescent / way to go / keep it vanilla” he writes in “Stunned Silence”) observed from the heights of a postmodern sensibility informed by “High Technology” and “Media Studies”, not to mention “The Messianic Trees.” The opening prose poem “The Person” introduces the empty vessel of the narrative consciousness that is lurks behind the rest of the book: “The person is, as cliché-ridden isomorph, a creature of habit. One has certain convictions, obsessions, eccentricities, stylistic features, indications that set one apart. All this is begging the question, a delay tactic…” This is followed by the meditative poems of “Sense Data”, with such playful pieces as “Distribution”, a fugal poem lassoed back to its title word once in each line creating a surfaces that critiques as it acquires the depth it is structured to elude. The final poem attains an impressive scale with its collage of humanist terminology with subversions of individual “agency.” “The alternating blind alleys of tooting your own horn / and lapsing into dark humors may be avoided by going / straight to the light available in escalating syntax / pronounceable only through sound…” Robinson’s skill lies, however, not in the Wagnerian sense overload so much in the water-clear resonance of words in sustained relationship to each other, a skill which comes clear in the later, center-justified poems of the rest of the book. “Nothing gets lost / but stays with us like the fingerprint of a world view” her writes in “Win/ Loss Report” and the extended clashing surface of “You have a flair for / crystal gazing / insufferable / three sheets to the wind / mid-Victorian taco junket / rank lyricism / weasel word at the read…” (“The Messianic Trees”). It is Robinson’s ability to put these highly complex syntactical surfaces in contrast to the simplest phrases that distinguishes this book from the writing of his contemporaries, and by this technique he illustrates the shell of capital as it revolves around the suburban life. Though the book suffers from a dulling ticker-tape like rhythm at times, even this rhythm, in the defter moments, substantiates a stable field for Democracy Boulevard’s troubled meanings. “Baked society / the interstitials / apprehension of the world / bound / in the loose confederation / sweating love beads / of the poem.”

Lewis Ellingham, Kevin Killian, Authors, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance
(Wesleyan, 1998)

Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance presents the story of one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century, a poet who has yet to achieve the attention due to him. As this readable and detailed biography makes clear, this obscurity was due to many prominent idiosyncrasies of Spicer’s character. He didn’t permit his books to be sold outside of San Francisco, for example — especially not in New York, where the poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery (author of “Thumb Twees” in Spicer’s mocking tongue) reigned. He violently alienated any of his peers who even thought of corrupting their art for fame — which could be achieved in the era of the Beats — and once picketed the premiere of a friend’s play when it was turned into a popular musical. Robert Duncan, whom Spicer considered “better” than himself but who had, in his mind, compromised his art for the thrill of power, was a constant source of agony, not least because of Duncan’s own psychic — the Berkeley poets would have termed it “magic” — manipulations. Like much of his circle, Spicer was homosexual, and in time his alcoholism, anxieties about his sexuality, blunt criticisms of life and politics, not to mention certain acts like refusing to sign the Loyalty Oath in 1955, got him fired from the sinecures that he needed to provide him stability. Once describing himself as a “dancing ape” (in a poem many consider his most beautiful) Spicer was involved in many love affairs, and the book is enriched with biographical details of these men — the hooligan Tony Aste, the crazed painter Russell Mackenzie, the talented but unfortunately straight Ron Primack. His death came suddenly, but dramatically. Just weeks before leaving California to live in Vancouver, where he had a job as a teacher and an adoring poetry community, he participated in the famous Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965, giving readings and, as was standard with him, getting very drunk while doing so to ease the tension. Ten day after the conference, he collapsed in the elevator of his apartment building, and died three weeks later. Poet Be Like God is also the portrait of a community, including detailed accounts of the lives of many poets who are not household names — Helen Adams, George Stanley, Larry Fagin — but all of whom led colorful, deep lives that were overshadowed by the well-publicized exploits of their Beat peers and, later, the influx of the “flower power” movement into Berkeley. The book’s only fault is its scanty analysis of the development of Spicer from a writer of sophisticated, nearly formal lyrics to the innovator of the book-length “serial poem” — Billy The Kid, The Holy Grail — for which is best known. But this lack of “critical” writing is probably what gives this book its realness, never stopping to engage in the sort of disembodied, academic textual analysis that Spicer himself thought superfluous to the understanding of the life of poetry.

Susan Wheeler, Smokes
(Four Way, 1998)

Wheeler’s second book signifies an important, if not entirely unanticipated, rapprochement of the indeterminate, militantly ironic stance of the postmodern with the comforting, bourgeois closures of the sentimental lyric. _Smoke_ is infused not only with the play of signifiers — often a dance of malapropism, jarring surrealist and pop imagery, violent (and violating) pastiches and merciless non-sequiturs — but also with the play of sound, placing her somewhere between Ashbery/Bernstein axis of hoch-schtick appropriation and the baroque strains of a 17th century English metaphysical. It opens with a cheeky homage to Robert Frost in the form of an overture to the reader, but as is the case with her poems, the invitation is to the text, not to the nurturing interiors of the poet: “The girls are drifting in their ponytails / and their pig iron boat. So much for Sunday. / The dodo birds are making a racket / to beat the band. You could have come too.” Arbitrary word-replacement, often for the sake of clunky, but tempered, alliteration, often seems to be a tactic of hers, and at times it strikes with alarming _presence_, as when she writes in “Fractured Fairy Tale”: “Beforehand the birds / settle in for a roost, and the shiny clock hands / start to rattle. The frog prince bewails / his casaba schnozz.” Wheeler’s work often places somewhere within the realm of po-mo fiction, as in “The View from There” which seems to tell the story of an employee’s desperate (X-Kafkian) leap from vacuity at the office — “The old boss was surprised when you ran into her / on the street. Behind her eyelashes a model TV / hummed a sports coach and a car. The old boss / said…” However, the poem, while remaining within the scale of reference (boss, car, work) soon appears more concerned with the “e” sound in the first verse — “lazy”, “invisbly”, “trees”, and “library” all make their appearance at metrically foregrounded moments — and the “o” sound in the second verse. The poem ends: “Herr Arbeit showed me the desk by / appliances: eleven more forms to blot with dry / snow, seven mock beavers to stuff. Then show. / My work cut out to a tee.” Such obsessive repetitions suggest a subtext of hysteria, strangely linking the poem to Plath’s “Daddy” with its pounding “oo”s (“Daddy, you bastard, I’m through”), but Wheeler, while not offering a humanist vision of a adjusted psyche, is far from the expressionist heroine of adolescent angst — her confessions are, in anything at all, halls of erors. While the poems are occasionally marred by a sort of tunnel-vision — some of the poems seem based more on the academic argument for a postmodern poetry rather than the mundane, but felt, need for poetry, the play more a statement of intent rather than the attention to play — the book’s desire to astound, contort, pervert and yet sing at all turns makes it a singular delight.

Wang Ping, Leonard Schwartz, Editors, New Chinese Poetry
(Talisman, 1998)

This very readable, important new anthology presents poems by twenty-four poets writing in the wake of the Tiannammen Square massacre, an event which doesn’t so much cloud the poetry as much as provide a deep, nostalgic tone that makes these poems, even in translation, distinctively resonant. This is the generation of poets directly following the “Misty School,” best represented by Bei Dao in the States, and most of these writers were born in the early sixties, hence yet in mid-career. While the introduction by John Yau tends to foreground the negativity of their writing, mentioning how some of these writers are both critical of a Chinese tradition while attempting a connection between their poetics and that of writers like Williams and Spicer, the preface by editor Wang Ping — herself a poet of this generation, represented accordingly — delves into the nexus of the spiritual and political, noting how the Communist Party, in an attempt to revalorize itself in the minds of the citizens, “undertook a strategy that has more or less continued until today, launching one ‘socialist spiritual civilization’ movement after another to stave off ‘bourgeois liberalization’.” The paradoxes of such a plan are well documented by these poets, most all of whom express a yearning for a new day while emitting signs of the exhaustion of being at the head of a centuries-old civilization. “Oh humans, why are you so greedy? / Give me a day,” writes Liu Manliu, getting at the timeless nature of his demands, the crux being that he has fallen out of time: “One day is enough / Give me one day of eternity. / No need to get excited about middle or end: / Measure does not exist.”(78) The opening poem by Che Qianzi, “Hand-Copied Paperback,” is a beautiful examination on the theme of writing amidst the flux of memory and politics, passing imagistically through several Asian countries such as Burma and Vietnam and attempting a reconciliation of text and the ephemerality of vision: “Burmese child / shy Burma / 9-year old adult / strict monastery rules / […] truth / lies / […] take photos to keep the image, record words to keep the sound, read books to keep the mind.” (39) Perhaps the most successfully translated poem here is Yan Li’s “Serial Poetic,” each line of which intrigues with a imperative philosophical conundrum: “The artist often leans out, stretched / between two extremes / shouting for help with exquisite slogans.” He can strike hard at the open wound of his country’s stagnation: “I love freedom / but the cage is always too big for me.” (And later, suggesting the emphasis often placed on technology by Western journalists writing of Tiannamen: “Ever since freedom got the fax number for my soul, / a piece of white paper has been arriving every day.” (163) There is a strong feminist voice in this anthology, with Zhai Yongming’s flaneur-esque “Café Song” and the powerful poems of Jia Wei, which takes the word “father” to mean both parent and State (indeed, her irony and fatalism in a male-dominated world is not unlike Plath’s): “My education / has made me what I am […] / I must open all the bedroom windows, / must either become mean / or torture myself. / I hope my education / will lead me beyond this dangerous edge.” (63) All of the translations were done by poets such as David Shapiro, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman (and many more less well-known) in collaboration with Ping, and while they are uneven, the breadth of the work is impressive, and the essential humanity of the writing — in what is an increasingly cynical Western literature — is both and smart and attractive, and feels necessary.

John Kinsella, Collected Poems and The Hunt
(Bloodaxe Books, 1998)

John Kinsella is the celebrated wunderkind of postmodern Australia, having published numerous distinctive award-winning volumes by his mid-thirties, an opus that has garnered him praise from the critic Harold Bloom to avant-garde American poets such as Lyn Hejinian even before his first stateside book publication. Poems 1980-1994 collects much of Kinsella’s work since the start of his career — notable exceptions are the long poem The Silo: a pastoral symphony and most of the experimental Erratum / Frame(d), but also shorter sequences such as Graphology — and it displays the formally various, yet tonally consistent writing that has become his trademark. The volume is divided into their separate books (the first part being “Uncollected Verse”), the common thread among their varied thematic concerns the classic, eternally staged battle of mankind with fate, nature and the human condition. The book “Zimmerman”, for example, involves the account by Heinrich Zimmerman of Captain Cook’s final voyage in the Pacific — “Disease-thick, these islands / drink adamantine fires / the hot god under the mountain, / the fear written into the face / of every sailor…”. This poem ends with a contradictory hook, however: “… though if Zimmerman / thought the god Cook / cruel & ruthless / he also held him / a model to all.” Even in art poems, such one about a sculpture of Giacometti’s, Kinsella is able to attain an impressive tone of the emptiness of historical time: “…holding itself well, / a stretched body / standing up / to the decay / of a damask rose / in miniature vase — / a Giacometti / on the mantelpiece — / an earthbound figurehead, / a vessel without sails.” Even the most ingenious acts of man don’t have a chance against nature: “The science / we have learnt to mistrust / lurks smugly behind steel-plated doors, / our safety resting surreally / in its neo-classical arms, / while a bomber with a swollen stomach / approaches at low altitude…” (“The Dam Busters”), a misgiving about technology and futurity that lends the experimental work “Syzygy” a particular tension that is lacking in much avant-garde writing. The short poem “Fume” for instance, is not able to sacrifice this theme to its linguistic play: “Soil tactless infuses / dust-cradles * objectifies / black frost on breathing land / fuming. anger military / pro fuse Ion deficient / upper upper flight / developing a dislike / for ‘us’: the bulldozers / have sweet tooths & fume.” The Hunt, Kinsella’s newest collection, continues this exploration while moving his focus to the “surreal” Australian countryside and its community, including everything from stories about children drowning in grain silos and dogs being attacked by kangaroos to a beautiful, strange sestina about a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses working the outbacks — “High overhead / A flock of cockatoos rolled ramshackle towards the fence, / Their pink underbellies counterpointing the Bible’s dark lights…” While Kinsella’s poems sometimes seem a little loose and occasionally too slight for inclusion in a book, the cumulative effect is that one is witnessing an Australian epic in the making, albeit piece by piece.

Jerome Rothenberg, Pierre Joris, Editors, Poems from the Millennium, Vol. 2
(University of California Press, 1998)

Like its predecessor, “From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude,” this volume presents a truly astonishing amount of poetry, freely crossing national and aesthetic boundaries to include work ranging from the Scottish concrete poet and garden designer Ian Hamilton Finlay to poems by the famed African novelist Chinua Achebe, and from William Burroughs to excerpts from _Dictee_, the only major writing project by the Korean American filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. While the book appears, initially, to be a democratic celebration of the fecundity of avant-garde production of the last half of the century, its contents and structure, not to mention the introduction, betray other agendas. As the editors write, the period began in a “mid-century of molten cities and scorched earth,” and the brief biographies appended to each poet’s selection suggest that it is through poetry that 20th century humanity can achieve its liberation from global suffering, often outlining a shamanistic, or mythopoetic role for the writer — a carry-over from classic modernism that many of the poets of the volume might shun. The contents also heavily lean toward English language poets, and begins with a selection of mostly American Modernists — Williams, Stein, Pound, H.D. Zukofsky — who, along with Breton, Neruda and others, are offered as “continuities” with the present volume. However, no one could complain that the volume does not, in some way, cover the world: there are sections devoted to the “The Vienna Group” (Friederike Mayrocker, Ernst Jandl), the Arabic “Tammuzi Poets,” another German group called “Cobra,” the international Concrete Poetry movement (Finlay, Eugene Gomringer, Seiichi Nikuni), the American Beat Poets and the later “Language Poets,” and a number of other movements that either occurred within national boundaries (the Chinese “Misty Poets”) or are presently occurring internationally — “Toward a Cyberpoetics” reads the final sub-section. The author list is daunting: [ … ]No single poet is very well represented — the volume is also a celebration of the fragment, and the art of literary juxtaposition — and yet the value of Poems from the Millenium: Volume II as both an introduction to the many avant-gardes of the second half of the century, and as a revision of current thinking about canonization — the “what’s in” and “what’s out” of the mainstream anthologies — cannot be underestimated.

Lisa Jarnot, Leonard Schwartz, Chris Stroffolino, Editors, New (American) Poets
(Talisman House, 1998)

An Anthology of New (American) Poets, edited by Lisa Jarnot, Leonard Schwartz, and Christ Stroffolino, offers selections from 35 younger poets working in the various alternative or “experimental” traditions. Yet another anthology that seeks to shape a future for a generation of poets still reeling after the significant linguistic investigations and problematic over-production of the “Language” school, its contents fail to make an argument for a succeeding “experimental” poetics. This is because most of the poets included have tended to write in the most acceptable mode of alternative poetry, that being the Ashberian/New York school of sophisticated wit, mellifluous line, coy use of abstractions and ambiguous politics. Nonetheless, the need for such an anthology is apparent, given the wide range of talents presented, many of whom, though very young, are well on their way toward establishing distinct literary voices. Jennifer Moxley’s passionate, yet humorous, thwartings and revisionings of the lyric “I” amidst the currents of a destabilized identity have already won her a cult audience. “While we’ve been talking / they’ve lined up along the border towns / heavy with wistfulness, so if ever lip service / might save the planet let’s hope it’s now,” she writes in “Fin De Siecle Go-Betweens.” Yuri (Riq) Hospodar, Lisa Jarnot, Judith Goldman, Peter Gizzi and Chris Stroffolino all make strong contributions along this line, the latter writing: “I hold my tongue until sanity goes on strike / and stinks up the place with saints / that threaten to dub you satan.” Goldman’s “proprioceptive commands” is a tour de force of icy perceptions amidst an airy rhythmic sense and informed levity: “still / attend me, / I doff counsel sotto / voce, but sustained / I only mutilate what has already been repressed.” Significant departures from this central mode of stand-up autobiography is the poetry of Rod Smith, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Juliana Spahr, all of whom come nearest to writing (formally) dangerously while at the same time convincing the reader of the efficacy of their projects. The least successful writers tend to be those working along line of orphic/ ontological investigation, creating poems that are hopelessly mired in abstractions, elliptical phrasing, grandiose allusions and static rhythms, though Beth Anderson and Elizabeth Willis, each in their own way, create vibrant work out of elements of this tendency. New (American) Poets will be a treat for any young reader trying to find an alternative to the mainstream poetries that are often the only option when entering a university creative writing program. Otherwise — unlike Donald Allen’s landmark 1960 anthology New American Poetry — it won’t signal any major subversive shifts in the general understanding of poetry today, though it casts an audible vote for one direction it can take.

George Bradley, Editor, Yale Younger Poets Anthology
(Yale University Press, 1998)

In it’s 78-year history, the Yale Younger Poets series has gone through as many permutations as there have been literary fashions, though it has only periodically been able to reflect the tendencies of the times while maintaining high standards of quality. Started in 1919 as a way to exhibit the poetic talents of Yale students, the series remained a venue for late-nineteenth century neoclassicism until 1933, when the able Stephen Vincent Benet took the helm as judge. James Agee, Muriel Rukeyser and Margeret Walker were all published by Yale during his tenure, the latter having won the year she decided not to submit, when Benet, dissatisfied with his choices, personally requested her manuscript. As the informative, highly readable introduction by the anthology’s editor George Bradley describes, each of the judges carried out their duties with their own styles, from the distant and difficult Archibald MacLeish (44-46), the eccentric classicist Dudley Fitts (60-69, who selected James Tate and George Starbuck), to its most famous and successful, though no less idiosyncratic, judge, W.H. Auden (47-59). Auden, who had the series skip years when he could find no submission he liked, also requested work from poets whom he knew had book-length manuscripts, the most famous of these being John Ashbery. The Yale Younger Poets Anthology is bolstered in quality mostly by the poems included by Ashbery (“The Instruction Manual” from Some Trees), early formal work by Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin (A Mask for Janus), John Hollander and James Wright (The Green Wall), all of whom were picked by Auden. Stanley Kunitz, Richard Hugo, and James Merrill were among Auden’s successors, and the anthology includes selections from well-known poets picked during their tenures such as Alan Dugan, Jean Valentine, Carolyn Forche (A Gathering of Tribes), Robert Hass (Field Guide), and Cathy Song (Picture Bride). There is some surprisingly good work from two little-known poets whose single volumes were from the series, Joan Murray (who died at twenty-five), and Robert Horan, both chosen by Auden; there is also some embarrassing work that, ironically, is mostly taken from volumes that were among the series’ bestsellers. Of course, part of the fun of this various but sometimes claustrophobic volume is to try to determine who will “make it” from the contest’s last judge, the late James Dickey.