John Ashbery, Girls on the Run: A Poem
(Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999)

This beautiful long poem presents Ashbery at his most contradictory: it is both his most Homeric and “narrative” long poem, yet at the same time his most juvenile, collage-based work in years. Lovers of the range of this poet’s work will revel in its flirtatious relationship with many of his best earlier poems. Like “Self Portrait of a Convex Mirror,” the poem is ecphrastic in that it borrows from the imagery of the artist Henry Darger (1892-1972), an “outsider” — Ashbery has had a special interest in eccentric art dating back to his Art News editorship — who devoted decades to a mammoth illustrated novel about the plight of the fictional “Vivian” girls. As the poem involves the adventures of dozens of characters with names like Pliable, Talkative, Bunny, Uncle Margaret, and Fred, it harkens back to such poems as the sestina “Farm Implements and Rudabegas in a Landscape,” in which the entire cast of the Popeye cartoon cavorted around according to some hidden, mystical system. The even earlier “The Instruction Manuel,” which involved an imaginary trip to “dim Guadelahara / city I most wanted to see, and didn’t see, in Mexico,” is suggested in the role that imagination — with its abilities to see behind all corners — plays in torquing the role of the omnipresent narrator. His play with the epic tradition is most apparent in his pseudo-stentorian mode when laying down the most bland of similes: “Just as the good pianist will adjust the piano stool / before his recital, by turning the knobs on either side of it / until he feels he is at a proper distance from the keyboard, / so did our friends plan their day.” As this poem is mostly a fiction, and perhaps “aimed” — like Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives — at “juvenile adults,” the sentences are often short, somewhat “off” (“Trevor his dog came, half jumping.”), and set up the most unusual narrative situations: “Hold it, I have an idea, Fred groaned. Now some of you, five at least, must go over in that little shack. / I’ll follow with the tidal waves, and see what happens next.” Classic Surrealism breaks through frequently in well-timed eruptions: “The tame suburban landscape excited him. / He had met his match. / Dimples replaced the mollusk with shoe-therapy.” This is quite different from his rhapsodic, Proustian-autobiographical style as best seen in the recent Can You Hear, Bird or the long poem Flow Chart, yet at moments the calm, universal Ashberian persona breaks through with a note of apt sophistication and terrible relevance: “The oblique flute sounded its note of resin. / In time, he said, we call go under the fluted covers / of this great world, with its spiral dissonances, / and then we can see, on the other side, / what the rascals are up to.” The poem is closer to memory than to dream — the memory of constant companionship, of “fun,” in a land that was never boring and whose physical environment, while hinting danger, was as safe as the womb. All names were mythological then.

Charles Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems
(University Of Chicago Press, 1999)

“What is a poet-critic, or critic-poet, or professor-poet-critic?; which comes first and how can you tell?” asks Bernstein early in _My Way_. Turning his always playful — but never less than informed and precise — poetical eye on the new elements of the constantly-shifting literary landscape, his collection is eclectic both in its forms of expression (scholarly essays, interviews, encomiums to poets like Charles Reznikoff, Larry Eigner, Hannah Weiner and Susan Howe, quirky poems, and forms that are hybrids of all of these) and in its range of interests. One of the key theorists of the now-adequately historicized Language poets, Bernstein’s purview has expanded greatly past the formal concerns of that group to take in issues of multiculuralism, “standard” vs. “non-standard” forms of language usage, the ossified conservative agenda of literary institutions in the United States, poetry in performance (both on the page and on “stage”), and graduate-level pedagogical practices (“Frame Lock”). Nonetheless, the many slips and holes permitted by the many forms in this book grant one peeks beneath the surface of Bernstein’s discourse — a long autobiographical interview with Loss Glazier, for instance, covers the poet’s attitudes toward Harvard where he was educated, his sense of being (in Isaac Deutscher’s phrase) a “non-Jewish Jew”, and his maturity during the sixties; while poems such as “A Test of Poetry” — deceptively “accessible” in its surface — uncover some of the traumas foreign-language poets have had translating Bernstein’s poetry, pulling the sheets from over that in-between language that Benjamin wrote is the space of translation, but which had never-before been so giddily problematized. “Water Images of The New Yorker” is a fine little investigative piece, discovering that 86% of the poems over a 16 week period contained images of water, while “Dear Mr. Fanelli,” a poem in skinny Schuyleresque lines, takes the language of a subway administrator’s “request for comments” literally, highlighting how even bureaucratic language is vexed with double-meanings. “Pound and the Poetry of Today” is an important follow-up to his essay “Pounding Fascism” in his last book of essays,_A Poetics_, investigating the contradiction of Pound’s overdetermined politics in the light of his collage poetics, while “Poetics of the Americas” creates an important bridge between the ethnically marginalized practices of poets like Claude McKay and Paul Lawrence Dunbar and more self-consciously “avant-garde” writers like Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting and the Language poets themselves. This book, for all of its centrifugal activity, is a singular yet globally relevant perspective on the literary arts and their institutions, an engagement that is both in good faith yet just cranky and poignant enough to not be easily ignored.

Edmund Berrigan, Disarming Matter
(Owl Press, 1999)

“I have a desire to transcend conscious speech / not to the exclusion of words or letters, / it is not a scholarly wish, must be removed / from the present past future inclusive everything / beyond understanding,” writes Berrigan in “The Orbit Room” (76). While not always so heady, the underlining feature to this debut volume — ranging in tone from the beat goofiness of a Gregory Corso to the Symbolist-tinged collages of early Ashbery, from the rich dailiness of a Bernadette Mayer to the more heated “boheme” of Rimbaud — is a negotiation between the dream-like irrealities of daily life, a polyvalent sexuality that is not out of tune with much Gen X flirtation with extremes, and a figure called “God” who occasionally drops in as something like a placeholder for the channel to the “other world.” The beautiful long sonnet sequence “Cross House” is a mysterious affair, like a traipse through a virtual haunted mansion, with figures of love and desire teaming among the threat of limitless possibility: “The persons I have seen in patterns / were so torn as to be absolute traips / […] She had never seen him trusted above all / earthly things. They were leaning on the / screen before the fire. ‘You bear your / wrongs more gently than I can bear / mine.’ He bent over the group / in a caressing way, with renewed violence.” (54) The quiet surety of Berrigan’s meters are perfect for the wavering between “violence” and the “caress,” and he resembles a 17th century methaphysical — Herbert the closest — in his decorous rhetoric, which he dons most strongly when asking the “big questions”: “I have something, a major contribution / to the record of life, in a world winter-obscene, that / works with fingers peel back a series of inventions / for mortality. Armchair comfortable for those who desire it. / Absence from the physical being as strong a security as any.” (34) These are big issues for such a poet in his mid-twenties, one who, consequently, doesn’t take him too seriously, and is as pop-sensible, funny and crazily improvisatory as any grunge lyricist: “I am a heartfelt bulging crotch / when I take on the swiss initiative / […] I made love to Nico a lot, I dug her a lot / it was like hanging out with a guy except / she had girl pants.” (16) This combination of addresses to the higher powers with a mischievous running-with-the-disaffected-youths of the present makes Berrigan a true Hamet-like figure for the nineties, not the highbrow of Eliot, but a thoughtful, late-century rebel engaged in his deep, “irrational” discourse with Yorick while the world only dreams.

Charles Borkhuis, Alpha Ruins
(Bucknell University Press, 1999)

Borkhuis’ poems pick up somewhere where the fifth section of the “Waste Land” left off, describing deserted contemporary landscapes in which the dead and living intermingle with a chilling ease: “details drain / little lights into people / now and at the hour of our recycling / rain grows upwards / in trails of transparent veins / that cool and cluster into floating cities / the earth shadowed by thoughts / thoughts shadowed by people / people shadowed by machines” (“Close Up and Far Away,” 37) . With an even paced tone reminiscent of Robert Duncan or Michael Palmer, though without their formally variety, the poems of Alpha Ruins insinuate themselves into the breathy alleys of the city, the between moments of thinking, and the fissures of being: “(inside a sideways glance) / passage to the outside / as if this… / tunnel were a switch / drifting through matter / where the big thoughts roam” (“The Gaze,” 31). The poems are most effective when the surreal tone is anchored by recognizable imagery from life and an occasional sense of humor, as in the dark but playful “Slice of Life”: “to open the cover of a book to find / a miniature author inside / asleep in his coffin / dressed as a ghost / carries a rubber hatchet / […] the cop teaches his club a new twist / the irate customer clicks his remote control / the doctor depresses your tongue with a stick / […] you could have fooled / my camera” (60) Borkhuis seems outside any recognizable American tradition, but like Charles Henri Ford could be considered a standard bearer for a type of surreal style that is often dismissed for being overly earnest, too “Jungian” or archetypal in its imagery, and generally “mystical” &em; the blueprint for a permanent misfit. Times have changed, though, with poets like Will Alexander and, occasionally, Palmer to recall those heady modernist times; indeed, with the rise of neo-noir stylistics and cyber-culture, along with “schizo” proliferation of images that digital technology has brought to the movie screen, poetry like Borkhuis’ may have finally found its moment. At times, the poems move somewhat near William Gibson’s hallucinogenic (or “virtual”) melancholy style (“lost secrets live echoes / particle-currents in the veins / whispers while you write // moist earth buried in the body / of answers say circular ruins / peeling back the skin // or turning a page / landscape with friends standing / on a hill of yellow leaves”, 61); at others it actively recalls high surreal tradition &em; it is drenched in urban phantasmagoria a la Breton’s Nadja, not to mention a few direct references to “shooting into the crowd,” (21, 35) Breton’s infamous anarchistic trope for the cracking of the veils of reality &em; hence never becoming too slick or too antiquated. Though Alpha Ruins doesn’t often escape its closed cycle of images and preoccupations, indulging in words like “infinity” and “monads” a bit recklessly, when it hones in on a resonant chain of images and a less “dreamlike” tone &em; as in “Close Up and Far Away” and Francis Bacon-like “The Surgeon’s Glove” (“blaze of hair / SPLICED / into footage of a golden carp sliding / off the dissecting table”) &em; it is beautiful in a distinctive, contemporary way.

Michael Collier, Stanley Plumly, Editors, The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry
(Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, 1999)

This anthology represents the middle-ground of major American contemporary poetry, passing by such writers as John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, or Jorie Graham who, in comparison, are just too “out there,” and going nowhere near New American Poets &em; such as Robert Creeley or Gary Snyder &em; the “Language” poets, performance poets, nor much that could be taken for “new Formalism” (Jacqueline Osherow is the exception) . For this reason, it is a convenient book, since it gives one a clear way to assess what has happened to the academic/confessional line of Lowell, Plath, and Berryman, the group that replaced, for a certain type of literature, the expat dream of the 20’s with that of angst-ridden domestic “responsibility”, but which was too old for the Beats once they hit the scene (though some tried to latch on) . Initially, one could say that it has simply devolved: the narcissism is still there, with most of these poems being too long about anxieties, “deep sensibilities,” distrust of the world, adultery, pleasant afternoons and vacations, etc., but the formal mastery of the Lowell generation &em; with its ties to Eliot’s modernism, Auden’s precosity, Williams’ directness and prosody, along with Lowell’s background in Latin and Berryman’s syntactical experiments based on readings of Shakespeare, etc. &em; are gone. While most of this work is not “confessional” in the strict sense, it is disheartening how few poems rise above the basic frame of the unescapable self in the world, or how, when a different theme is adopted, it is still tied to basic formal tricks &em; the piling up of redundant detail as a baroque display of knowledge is one of them &em; which renders the work repetitive and mundane. Consequently, even when formal meters are adopted &em; as a way out of the too free, often just prosaic, verse meters &em; nothing like the sparkle of the Elizabethans (those to whom Eliot paid homage) breaks through. One hundred poets were invited to select from their own work, eighty-two of whom responded: include several well-known names, such as: Marvin Bell, Stephen Berg, Frank Bidart, Lucille Clifton, editors Michael Collier and Stanley Plumly, Alfred Corn, Deborah Digges, Stuart Dischell, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Cornelius Eady, Tess Gallagher, Louise Gluck, Linda Gregerson, Maralyn Hacker, Michael S. Harper, Brenda Hillman, Mark Jarman, Galway Kinnell, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, the late William Matthews, W.S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Alberto Rios, David St. John, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, James Tate, C. K. Williams and C.D. Wright. Most all of them are either university professors (most of those for whom job status is blank in the brief bios are also professors) or editors of such journals as the Virginia Quarterly or The American Poetry Review. The most interesting pages are probably provided by Louse Gluck &em; though not her best work, there is enough of her Rilkean purity of expression and her various lineation to satisfy –and Linda Gregerson, who’s tight lines in irregular, Williams-esque tercets often achieve a microtonal variety that lifts them above the pedestrian: “It had almost nothing to do with sex. / The boy / in his corset and farthingale, his head- / voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin / was not / and never had been simply in our pay. Or / was it some lost logic the regional accent / restores?” (95, “Eyes Like Leeks”) Mark Strand’s “I Will Love the Twenty-First Century” is quite masterful, with it’s quiet, Prufrockian ending &em; after the narrator has a Cooleridgean wedding-guest type encounter with a man who foresees a ghostly double for himself in the next century, the poem finds a rich muteness in: “‘Oh,” I said, putting on my hat, ‘Oh’.” William Matthews has probably the two most easily dislikable lines in the book &em; “I’ve ended three marriages by divorce / as a man shoots a broken legged horse” (190) , a real derailing of whatever charm Berryman might have possessed &em; but triumphs with “Bit Tongue,” with it’s polyglot mish-mash of tonalities and languages, confined within a persona that is pathetic but mildly attractive. Several poets &em; like Tate and St. John &em; have written much better elsewhere, and look mediocre here; other bits and pieces, such as the first section of Yusef Komunyakaa’s meditation on Whitman and slavery, “Kosmos” &em; are quite beautiful. In any case, this is not a book that reflects a “commitment to the future of the nation’s poetry” as its editors profess, so much as a tombstone for its glorious past &em; or one of them, at least. It is the type of writing that the writing workshops are modeled after, which is why this type of poetry is on a downward spiral.

Garrett Caples, The Garrett Caples Reader
Black Square Editions, 1999

Caples is part of a younger generation of writers reinvigorating contemporary poetry by combining the expressionism of methods such as surrealism with the sheer enthusiasm and lustiness of adolescence, taking back from the formalist methods of, say, the Language poets the fun, sometimes pure shock value, of this French cadre of seeming anarchists (they were in fact mostly communists). If this sounds like a self-conscious “”project””, and hence a betrayal of the “”automatic”” and pure lyric poetry, don’t worry: the performative is much alive in this work, as he can be as arrogant and “”shock rock”” as you would want any younger poet to be. The dedication to an alternative world, one in which love and eroticism mix in never inelegant dances with the “”things”” of a virtual dream-space &em; “”A can opener found in Brooklyn meets the tailfins of Alabama,”” he writes in Resonant Cylinder (73) &em; is stated quite frankly in the second poet of the collection, the “”First National Anthem,”” which begins: “” an homage to places I’ve never been: / to the skies I haven’t seen unroll red saddle blankets / and tuck in for the evening / and the birches whose teeth I’ve never brushed / and the buildings whose looms have never woven shadows into nets”” (4). Caples love poems, of which there are many, step out into the open from what might be a psychedlic core, straddling the line between Syd Barrett stream-of-sweet-nothings and bachelor-machine eroticism of Duchamp: “”Mr. Baritone-Man, tell my love of me, and do it in a way she’ll be impressed. Paint me on her eyes in your dark, rich tones, and ignore the fact she’s not too craxy about the saxaphone. There’s a tendency to take these things personally, believe me I know, but you’re my last resort, your deep craters of sound, the prod of your twisted horn. Gouge her with your bull-like strength, as you chop your meaty way through innuendo and crescendo like red Hungarian wine. Show her brochures made from glossy squalls, depicting the castle we’ll occupy on the banks of the Tigris…”” (Opera Buffa, 38). A salient of this work is the turn toward an anthropomorphic center, or in other terms a “”pop star”” cult-de-moi, for the lyrical subject; i.e. though there are “”process”” poems (the words of one of which is entirely alphabetical: “”A basic concern demands extreme finesse, generating hollow increments, jealously knocking low minds…”” [81]), most of them are clearly celebrations of will and vigor in a somewhat demoralized, but not entirely hostile America. This is accentuated by the cover image, which is a full head-shot of the author though heavily tinted by am orange electric fog (the combination of the image and the title of the book suggests that this is a posthumous work, hence elevating the living poet to dead-poet cult status). That Caples is conscious of his stance toward the impersonality of contemporary poetics comes through most clearly in “”Humped by Barrett Watten,”” a quasi-essay that accuses the Language poets of being “”Victorian”” in their attitudes toward sex (hence the over-the-top vulgarity of the title). Like in another poem considering Rene Char’s awe at a pair of lace panties (for which he receives no drubbing as, after all, he’s honestly enraptured), in which Caples is countered with imaginary statements from W. S. Merwin (“”No!, it is his hushed awe in the face of women’s mystery!””), he rather deftly uses the dialogic technique of presenting counter-arguments regarding Watten’s work: “”Don’t you get it? Watten’s text was an ironic, postmodern take on the erotic, which was not constrained by the illusionary and arbitrary requirement that it _be_ erotic. And the erotic is an ideologic construction anyway, imposed on us by an oppressive society”” (76). Caples says “”Maybe so,”” but provides, throughout this reader, what he clearly regards as an alternative to this irony which is itself oppressive: a “”song of the self”” that revels in the possibilities of dreams, of thought (many of these poems are discursive), of literature (homages abound) and, indeed, of language itself.

Catalina Cariaga, Cultural Evidence
(Subpress, 1999)

This is a vital first collection by California-native Cariaga, a deep consideration of issues of nation and self, belonging and exile, continuity and discontinuities. The epitaph to section one is quote from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s seminal avant-garde visual/literary work Dictee, and Cariaga, like Cha, strikes the reader with a various salvo &em; polyglot prose, “Language” style fragmentation, disembodied dialogue (taken, it appears, from a real or imagined Ilocano / English primer), and quotation such as a sequence of passages from the Bible, or uncorrected transcriptions of her arthritic fathers commentary on her poems: “All along you had good humor, but your / last sentence is the real trougth. That / makes an ending or conclusion.” (64) Her lyricism runs from the direct, formally uncomplicated &em; a short poem runs “Of course / They didn’t eat dogs. / They didn’t have dogs. / If they had dogs / they would have eaten them” (12) &em; to more sophisticated structures that suggest Projective-verse’s atonality, such as the charming, but haunting, poem about the mating of the strange fish the grunion, a delicacy for one culture but tourist show for another: “cold panic / sweet fear, / a proverb / of coming up ‘empty handed’ / the few morsels swimming well within the grasp of my two flat palms. / But that si how the grunion run. / They white people appear merely for the spectacle, but we / bend and stoop, enamored of ritual.” (38) Other passages strike with the authority of a survivor, such as this from “No Mercy”: “Post partem depression / of the military industrial complex / as anger unprecedented / wanting to say / wanting to ask / Father, conspicuously absent / now, the three women, attendant / as anger unmitigated / wanting to tell / wanting to explain.” (21) The long poem “No Tasaday” is a fascinating account of National Geographic’s story on the “Tasaday” people, who, in some accounts, are merely a hoax &em; “the easiest way to visit the Tasaday is not in the caves, but in the Saturday markets” states one epitaph &em; or a “joke, riddle, epic / (g)God(s) / what we call nation / indivisible.” The poem becomes, under the aegis of documentary filmmaker Trinh Mihn Ha, a deconstruction of myths about anthropology’s objectivety, and “culture” as defined in different cultures are often incompatible: “on real people, the name of ‘the tribe’ invented, / imposed, then, disposed of / sibling teased the youngest child; little brown girl in the Magazine / looks a lot like me &em; could be cousins.” (51) This fear that an essentialism of self is reliant on an essentialist understanding of time, nation, place or language underlies the serious but approachable surfaces of Catalina’s passionate investigations.

Steven Farmer, Medieval
(Krupskaya, 1999)

Contrary to the middle ages, in which the sky was mistakenly thought of as a star-encrusted shell, Steve Farmer’s Medieval spreads across his native California sky sacrificing closure but not detail all the way: “town, a cold vantage / surprised by the heat / Narcotics is one / zoning board, theater another / evocative decomp / storefront treadmill / ideas touch all apparel, hours.” While many of the poems run into each other in terms of subject and method &em; the poems are like shorthand notes, but suspended in an air of historic phantasmagoria and friendly, oppositional critique &em; occasional bursts of rhetorical and lyrical certitude punctuate it, such as the final poem, a pantoum-like pretzel: “the people will neither read nor write / going onto one knee with a spoon / inheriting seemingly ghost-like qualities / going onto one knee with a spoon // going onto one knee by sedition /[…] a world lit only by fire / the destruction of letters by fire.” (127) Some of the individual two-line poems are very funny, in a manner that is peculiar to books that extend to the sparest uses of language (can the Language poets have invented a new form of humor?), such as: “the populism of Nashville / the exchange of tortured madrigals.” (98). Not a book for everyone &em; like ambient music, its pleasures are only gotten if a lotus-like nullity can be achieved while the braincap still hums (as Farmer himself suggests: “beautifully typewritten exegesis trance” [68]) &em; Medieval is nonetheless an interesting, thoughtful, hermetic contribution to the avant-garde ethics and aesthetics.

Dan Farrell, Last Instance
(Krupskaya, 1999)

Each of the twelve longish prose poems of Last Instance, by Canadian-born poet Dan Farrell, is an exploration into the dilemmas of agency amidst a world dominated by routine, the ubiquitous plays of technology and other narrowing systems (even the innocent one of the days of week), and the failure of memory to fully relive one’s past to create one’s present. While maintaining close ties to the linguistic explorations of the Language poets, Farrell’s work departs strongly in that his surfaces are backed by the cold drama of an existentially hindered subjectivity which bobs its head and breaks the pure play of syntax and grammar, such that even in its most heavily-reduced moments, the poetry creates an atmosphere reminiscent of Beckett in his novels, and Kafka in its ever-recursive replays of alienating social formulas. Indeed, the poem “K” resembles fiction in that it centers around the narrator’s “phone tag” relationship with the ever-ambiguous “K”: “So K would call, begin to leave as though a message, then get me. Would K’s roommate pass on this message, any? For the while, exchanging mail seemed a way. Letter, number, letter; number, letter, number. Letters add up to nothing.” (15) Even the paratactic “Avail,” composed entirely of sentences from questionnaire-answers with people about their health, builds by Oulipo-inspired excessive repetition into a deadpan, sometimes Stephen-Wrightish character that just can’t determine what the hell he means: “My current level of physical fitness is very pleasing to me. I have positive feelings about the way I approach my own physical health. Whether I recover from an illness depends in large part on what I myself do. My feelings of anger do not interfere with my work. In order to have good health, I have to act in a pleasing way to other more powerful individuals.” (27) “My Recognizance” is a wonderfully rich, possibly autobiographical (but most likely as constructed as “Avail”) skitter through Joycean sentence constructs and surface play, a sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that never gets past the childhood stage to maturity “And around geared Tom Swift, grasping for switches to toggle, tactics to jettison. Somewhere sprawled. Then to flood with haggard drops the reminder of an awkward cough, syrup or sticky camphor, resin to excessive phlegm. While outside in crowed cards of skilled hockey players I saw my own reeling life clasped and slipped to clipping spokes.” (33) This sort of neologistic wordplay &em; he later describes himself as “Pufferbluffing like a blowfish in a chowder” &em; seems as effortless as the excessive flatness of “Avail” and the last poem in the collection, “366, 1998,” whose main niodus operandi is the linear recounting of the days of the week, such that the cumulative effect is one of a rich desperation among the passage of time. The sameness of “366, 1998” makes even minor linguistic and narrative events oases of suggestion: “[…] Saturday, floor sawing, Sunday, dust making, Monday, thrust frump and center, Tuesday, Wednesday, last and relived, Thursday, flutes on backward, try again, flukes on forward […]“ (59), it continues for five jammed pages. Last Instance is a confident trek into both language’s capacity for creating boredom and anxiety &em; a parody of the most domestic version of late-capitalist life &em; and its potential for explosive, neologistic self-creation –approaching utopian drive of the most radical Modernists &em; whose cumulative effect is one of an careful essay on poetry, one that is fun as it is responsible, elegant and classical as it is &em; like punk rock or a slacker’s stoicism &em; gleefully nihilistic.

Elizabeth Fodaski, Fracas
(Krupskaya, 1999)

“It’s not the question of a different drummer, it’s that I just don’t march,” (14) writes Liz Fodaski in her stunning first collection fracas. The long poem “Anatomy of Associative Thought” ranges from the pure, self-identifying defiance of this line to the aesthetic “glass / in a language of multitudes / the can’t change but they / change” of a later section, wandering through other modes such as the epistolary (a series of letters to the mysterious dead-or-not-dead “B.”) to the anthemic or elegiac: “like so many Lucky Pierres, we had had such a bouyant sense of life in our midst / and then our emotions became something discrete from our culture, / the grief suddenly whelming us like a bad stench.” (9) The humor is never indulgent, tapering around the axis of the personal / political, the “reality of knowledge,” offering us “the cerebral advantage / not the thing itself but ideas about the thing.” (19). As if capitalism were something like a love affair with the world, requiring both decorum and the respect a partner demands, Fodaski is aware of how the emotions &em; particularly the testosterone-motivated male brand– can do double damage, both in and out of the home (“we join the superpowers when we exploit”), and she gives voice to these demands. The sequence “ETYMOLOGIES” moves through several pomo lyric registers in its irreverent, deep definition of terms, slyly taking in some recent poetical history as well: “They in the 80’s / liked the visual page / […] everyone in / the nineties / adores the @ / reminds of a register / ringing.” (55) Like many poets of her generation, Fodaski is finding a unique voice for herself in what has become, suspiciously, an era of the “authorless” as hero, while not sacrificing the utopian pinings and agonic urgencies of the postmodern’s dalliance with social-meets-formal radicality.

Barbara Guest, Rocks on a Platter
(Wesleyan, 1999)

Rocks on a Platter is a book-length work by a poet who has, over the past decade or more, increasingly come to be seen as a major force in innovative poetics. Guest is often associated with the “New York School” of poets (Ashbery, O’Hara, Schuyler) but is traditionally overlooked by chauvanistic scholars preferring a homogenized version of the literary/art nexus of activity in Manhattan in the 50’s and 60’s &em; notably David Lehman in his recent history The Last of the Avant Garde. It appears that she may have the “last laugh,” as the yet-living poets of that group have retreated into blase irony and, occasionally, the poetic equivalent “pot-boilers,” while Guest has forged onward with her near-flawless ear and synaesthetic eye for word values, in the process breaking down her syle into a more spare, but never less than rich, idiom, for which she has come to be praised. As if echoing Ashbery, the poem starts: “Ideas. As they find themselves. In trees?” but nonetheless moves on to a declaration of intent peculiar to herself, finding “Dreams set by / typography. A companionship with crewlessness…” Though the figure of Rimbaud doesn’t appear in this work &em; Shelly, Byron, H.D., Ovid, and Eliot are among the figures inescapably alluded to &em; Guest displays a “taste only for stones, and rock, and air,” as her carved jewels of word-clusters illuminate the white space: “Pockets jingle highly responsive place in the shelter / of those rocks at last the jingle of your pockets / HEARD ON THE PAGE.” Time, presence, the ability of the eye to create time out of word patterns, are perhaps the central subjects here &em; though she writes blankly “suspicious / of fragmentation” this poem is highly “fragmented,” though joined symphonically in the play/space of the page as “score” &em; a concern that exhibits itself in what can be read as commentary on the poem itself, making this an essay in poetics as much as an epistomological cat-and-mouse. “Without shyness or formality /// ‘a gesture of allowing oneself time’” she writes (the immense white space between these spaces, where this gesture occurs, cannot be reproduced here), and later: “‘flotsam of the world of appearances’ / drifting by and out of the picture,” pointing to a Herecletian, but also defiantly feminine (i.e. non-determinate both rhetorically and ideolectically) poetics. This is a very approachable book by a poet who is bound to show you something you didn’t know was possible in American poetry, though the French may have been trying to tell us this for some time: that the silence page can speak.

Carla Harryman, The Words After Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre
(O Books, 1999)

Harryman’s The Words is a radical, perhaps even “bold” deconstruction of the novel or memoir forms, but while inspired by the nouveau roman of Wittig and Robbe-Grillet, it is more scattershot in its targets, and doesn’t appear to point to any secure set of themes. Moments of lucidity are interpersed with wrench-in-the-machinery doggerel that makes reading the book a task &em; an intellectually challenging one perhaps, but occasionally disheartening as the form is so clearly indebted to Modernist models that, more than a century old, seem to have outlived their usefulness (as models, that is). Somewhere between a Rimbaud decimating the snoring Verlaine and Lautreamont swimming with the sharks, Harryman screams the birth of a new female consciousness, one that, indeed, goes a long way in subverting the previous century’s conception of female passivity: “After childhood, for many days running I studied people’s asses with the slowness of one who has discovered the crucial element in a universal tragedy. I slept too long. I could reach over in bed and ffeel European history, its density, course through the bloodstream of my adolescent mate. While he slept and breathed equations of collective effort and heroic self-sacrifice, I speread myself across the bed and concentrated on this recurring fantasy: a particle of fog burnt off at midday by the north coast sun.” [12] Though Harryman is often considered part of the Language generation of writing, one thinks that she develops a line quite directly from English Futurist-inflected writers like Mina Loy and Wyndham Lewis, and like them shares a penchant for larger-than-life secular mythological, or Zarathustrean, figures; the lead in The Words, for example, is a character named “Woemess,” which seems a pun both on the word “woman” and the image of afterbirth (or perhaps the aborted fetus, tying her sense of subjectivity in with that of Baudelaire’s in “Benediction,” in which his mother asked to give birth to a brood of vapors rather than to a poet). Woemess fades in and out of the narrative like a figure in a house of mirrors &em; “Woemess baked in the sade plains. She was as unreal as a discovery made elsewhere” starts one chapter &em; but occasionally is given to excitable, oracular vaporings: “Woemess put the hat on her head and continued her speech as if she had played all the parts, ‘In the recess of the cryptic world, where my arm sings to transcendental wampum, there are emergency vocabularies waiting in the wings to take over when we are failed by categories. If I wanted to, right now, I could paint the picture of the picture, show you the cryptic world, the song, and the wampum. Or a dreary series of irregular rectangles, a repetitious dirge, and money. But if I take you there, we will be gone.” [57] There is much philosophical terminology in here, as well as many plays towards fable-like forms and Steinian word-centered writing, but the most salient feature seems to be that of the a new voice of feminine power, albeit one centered around opacity, or moments of overwhelming presence, than master narrative: “Feminity can’t be narrated. A theory develops that only what can be ignored can be narrated. Cactus, can it be ignored?” [52] However, though the general texture of the writing is quite animated, at times it is repetitive and uncontrolled, and the content, ironically, fails because it is not self-centered enough &em; it’s the recreation of the struggles of the ego confined more than the hapless enactment of it. In this way it comes off as a bit academic, artsy, and not philosophical in that unmediated Nietzschean sense that it aspires to. Nonetheless, a pretty good read, and possibly an interesting anthem for feminism.

R. L. Rutsky, High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman
(University Of Minnesota Press, 1999)

Rutsky provides a fairly comprehensive, though sometimes unnervingly fluid, overview of the development of the “”aesthetic of technology”” starting from the time of Baudelaire’s confrontation with the specter of art photography to the present age of mirror shades, Pentium-envy and ambient dance tracks. Stating early on that that “”unlike modern technology, high tech can no longer be defined _solely_ in terms of its instrumentality or function &em; as simply a tool or means to an end,”” (4) Rutsky procedes on a quasi-mystical cultural studies track of showing how technology, once a clearly defined “”other”” in the material world, has found habitation in the very minds of the present day, perhaps replacing religion and psychology for sources of metaphors on how the mind (and soul) works. He cites, in an often interesting if not entirely unexpected fashion, a range of modern philosophers and thinkers ranging from Heidegger and Duchamp to the inevitable William Gibson and the doyen of cyber-aesthetics, Donna Haraway, though unfortunately seems to give only passing notice to some of their ideas &em; such as Haraway’s &em; which may have rendered his argument more cogent. The German founder of “”theory”” Walter Benjamin, whose conception of the art object as having an “”aura”” &em; that the object of art “”looks back at you”” as you look at it &em; is most taken to task by the advance of immaterial information-based aesthetics. Rutsky’s finds that high tech art and aesthetics, being founded on the the idea of infinite reproduction &em; a Borgesian cathedral of ever-evolving content &em; acquires, conversely, an “”aura”” as it becomes embodied in a system of “”partiality, contingency, hybridity, mixture”” (149), for “”through the emergence of this aesthetic complexity that high tech has increasingly come to be seen as having &em; like the artistic or fetish ‘object’ &em; an autonomy, a life, of its own.”” (142) He even suggests that the entire field of the aesthetic superhighway creates a double of the Freudian subconscious, for “”Freud’s unconscious is itself a complex, unsettling process that, although repressed, goes on largely autonomous of the coscious will.”” (153) A detailed section on Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis elaborates a series of metaphors concerning the dichotomy of the Freudian “”uncanny”” imagination which resurfaces after the oppression of “”rational”” technological thinking, defined by such binaries (Rutsky &em; not a post-structuralist and opting for a lucid prose style &em; loves binaries as rhetorical strategies) as the organic and the mechanic international style architecture in that film, or the play of gender (the feminine heart versus the masculine rationality). After a detour into a theory of Nazism and the Hitler fascination as a fetishism of the androgynous leader &em; the one who collapses gender binaries between the masculine/rational and the feminine/irrational &em; he reaches the conclusion that the aesthetics, or cyborgian quality, of high techne accomplishes a similar collapsing, though doesn’t enter deeply into the political implications of this. The book covers a lot of ground &em; Shelley’s Frankenstein, the constructivist films of Vertov, a reading of William Gibson via Frederic Jameson, etc. &em; but falters when it comes to contemporary art and cultural practices, where some field work would have been most helpful (a new novelist would have been welcome), or, again, in scratching the surface of the themes that he introduces from other writers. Like George Landow’s paeon to cyber-cultur, Hypertext, it seems most excited about how _thinking_ about technology helps resolve certain Western philosophical issues that have plagued the West, indeed providing the ground for a total unified field theory. The fact that the final chapter starts with allusions to Mondo and Wired magazines &em; the two glossy portals that have provided numerous outsiders with a sense of knowledge about the subject of techno-culture &em; and yet never scratches the surface of what is, in fact, a culture that retains a strong, partly ideological attachment to its “”grass-roots”” beginnings, marks this book as something of an academic excercise. As Rutsky is taking the “”cultural studies”” stance by discussing, it is a little disappointing that most of the book is concerned with modernist themes and acknowledged classics in the field, rather than getting its history soiled by dipping into the inchoate activities &em; that street-level technology have created for a wide range of people, as his peers Andrew Ross and others have already done. Perhaps it’s not Rutsky’s fault that culture moves faster than the publishing industry, but then again the industry has caught up with some of the information sifted through here years ago.

David Ignatow, Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems
(BOA Editions, 1999)

Ignatow, who died in 1997 at the age of 83, lead a distinguished if not particularly meteoric career as a man of letters, having been poet-in-residence at the University of Kentucky and Vassar, a professor at Columbia University and poetry editor for The Nation, not to mention having won several awards including the Bollingen and two Gugghenheims, fine work for a man who started in his father’s bookbinding business in depression-era Brooklyn. As the title to this posthumous volume suggests, Ignatow was engaged in a philosophical search in his last years for the meaning of “living” in a time when death was immanent, and the reader discovers some curious answers in these often understated, at times sparely elegant, but always accessible poems. The tone is almost from beyond the grave itself, as the surety of death &em; these are no vague paranoias, presentiments, or vain strivings for immortality &em; give voice to the poems with a startling confidence: “Patient we wait / so that / once dead / we’ll know perhaps just who we were, / with others thinking back on us.” (“All Living is Lying”, 12) The first poem, “Along with our illusion,” states the theme even more bluntly: “The irony is that without death / there could be no life.” (10) Sometimes the poems risk indulgence, as if the poet &em; perhaps with an ear to the simplicity of William Carlos Williams, whose tone he occasionally adopts, or Robert Creeley, whom he suggests with his Elizabethan overtones &em; didn’t have the time to give the poems the craft one would think they deserved, and as a result, reading the poems straight through creates a fair monotony of tone and a dissatisfaction with their individual forms. As he didn’t make this selection himself &em; written in 1996, the year before the his death, the poems were edited by Virginia Terris, Jeanette Hopkins and Yaedi Ignatow [his wife or daughter?] &em; and as he was no doubt depressed more than elated by his rendevous with history, this is not surprising. The thought of death seems to have subtracted from him any sense that life itself was what defined one, as if life and death traded places and it was the distinctive moment of death, which was raging with substance, that contained elements of the “positive” &em; the bright side of the yin and yang, not the dark. As he asks himself: “Was I born and raised / without a life of my own?” (44) and, later, more violently: “Ways to die: by slashing your throat, cutting your wrists / hanging the body by the neck, stabbing, shooting, choking, car / crashing, drowning yourself. There are many more, but don’t bother, being busy otherwise. // One more is to be a poet.” (70) It seemed the bookends of birth and death were subsuming the book, and yet the poet is still capable of praise, and finds pleasure in knowing more about his place in the universe, as the short but perfect “Make of me its purpose,” with its subtle internal rhyme providing a baroque lilt, states: “Let the sun be the creative one / and make of me its purpose / of which I know nothing / except its aging me / as if I knew that being creative / is its aim, that is, / if the sun knows, if at all.” (48) Ignatow finds the “creative” lacking in both death and life, but gives it some exercise in what was, for him in the closing poem “Circling the silence”, the paradox of poetry: “I write to awaken silence, / to acknowledge I have nothing to say, / and it is satisfying / as if having written the poem.” (76)

P. Inman, At. Least.
(Krupskaya, 1999)

P. Inman’s at. least. continues this poet’s investigations into the word-centered/lyric nexus, replete with streams of meditations which, while fragmentary &em; his signature style involves the use of periods or commas in between each word, and often breaking a word in half for unique enjambments &em; are literary equivalents to serialist sound-clusters: “properties, into, / expressions, / ness, tatter, of, / one, unbroken // smallness, polks.” The poem “Mel;nick’s.”, inspired by David Melnick’s book Pcoet, is the extreme of this form &em; “mesa. comma. / ermines. / i’d. pages. ticking. / mape/ glimpse,” &em; but the suggestiveness of the words is heightened by the occasional break into ideological and historical particularity, such as “Maoism. insofar. / as. a. sender. / st. keast. animist.”, suggesting the poet as alien in world which, for all the fogs of capital, can only be seen in glimpses, but hard-coded with referentiality at that. “lieu / instead.” sacrifices the commas and periods for a fluid idiom, and is the most approachable work in the book: “temperature / vanillas. / to think w.out / statistician upon hills / how / a synonym to more land.” For his attention to the resonances of the single-letter, the syllable in isolation, and Mallarméan “white space,” Inman is an important, but underrecognized, writer of the Language group, bringing a unique, human-scaled tone to the entire project.

Andrew Klobucar, Michael Barnholden, Editors, Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology
(New Star Books, 1999)

The KSW was, and continues to be, a grassroots organization in all senses of the word; shunning any sort of professionalism and codification of attitudes, and opting instead for an “anarcho-syndicalist” model of community, this group of experimental &em; and highly political &em; poets has formed something of the the underskin to Vancouver aeshetic radicalism since the mid-1980s. As the informative introduction by the editors states, the school surfaced as a response to the closing by British Columbia’s right-wing Social Credit government of the David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, a small city that had, since the 19th-century (when the Doukhobors, a Russian radical spiritualist sect, settled there) a reputation for progressive, even utopian, attitudes. Started by writers such as Gary Whitehead, Calvin Wharton and Jeff Derksen (who has since become an important Canadian critic as well as poet), the school forged early, however troubled, ties with radical labor movements in Vancouver, most notably with the Wobblies. The writers themselves found inspiration in the New American poetics of the sixties (channeled through the Tish school of Canadian poets), but later made a turn toward “Language writing” techniques, though always maintaining a distinctive refusal to assimilate into any sort of literary or academic culture. Indeed, the “class” of this book’s title leans more toward this forging of identity against the mainstream &em; as a self-conscious “class” of writers &em; than anything to do with “workshops” and preparations to fame. Such fruitful, long-term community radicalism is rare; indeed, testament to the anti-authoritarian nature of the group is the sub-group, “The Giantesses,” formed by women writers &em; such as Lisa Robertson and Catriana Strang &em; who were troubled by the KSW’s male hegemony. This anthology doesn’t include theoretical or descriptive statements by the poets, which is unfortunate, though little theory, in fact, was produced; the members felt that published “discourse,” even manifestos, played into the norms of class rule. The poetry, however, by relative unknowns such as Gerald Greene (a intricate, long poem called “Resume” [i.e. the document with your work history on it, not the verb]), Peter Culley (elegant social-pastorals such as “Winterreise”), Kevin Davies (the bracket-within-brackets section of his book Pause Button), Kathryn Mcleod (technically hardcore and dazzling work, like “The Infatuation”), Dan Farrell’s entire “Thimking of You” (long out of print) and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk’s sand-blasting “Oral Tragedy,” along with excellent work by Robertson and Derksen, are bound to pique interest in this distinctly West Coast phenomenon. The question, of course, is if the language of an activist, radical, at times abrasive, group is taken out of the contingencies of its immediate situation, can the poems achieve the effects intended, that of rearticulating and rendering visible the toxicities of class relations, or will they retreat into the history of literature, as the secret hobbies of a learned social strata? Writing Class doesn’t answer this question, but nonetheless it is a call-to-arms in the wilds of contemporary times in which commerce has superceded community as our main “moral” interest, both on this continent and abroad. This book, more than any anthology of “avant-garde” American poetry produced in the States recently, fulfills the promise of Donald Allen’s seminal New American Poetry, bringing as it does a truly secret, unacknowledged and often masterful group of subversive works into the light.

David Lee, A Legacy of Shadows: Selected Poems and News From Down to the Cafe (Copper Canyon Press, 1999)

Lee’s first book, The Porcine Legacy (1974), delineated the themes and style that he would investigate for his poetic career, right up to his latest volume News from Down to the Cafe. The style is loose, not without formal elegance, and mostly derived from the spoken speech patterns of the rural townfolk of Utah, many of whom, as the title to his first book suggests, work in raising farm animals. The first poem of his selected edition, “Loading a Boar,” is Lee’s ars poetica, showing the young writer at a loss for themes until an all-important conversation with the ubiquitous “John,” a figure who appears in several poems through the years (one wonders, also, if “John” is also an allusion to Robert Creeley’s “John” in his poem “I Knew A Man,” also the Virgil to his Dante). In the poem, beginning “We were loading a boar,” John advises: “…young feller… if you wanna by god write pomes you gotta write pomes about what you know and not about the rest and you can write about pigs and that boar and Jan and me and the rest and there aint no way you’re gonna quit.” (5) Lee has stuck to this idea, perhaps too hard, though at the same time taking pains to give variety to his approach, such as the “Jubilate Agno, 1975)”, a play on Christopher Smart’s madhouse poem about his cat Jeffrey. Lee, of course, writes of his “black sow Blackula,” occasionally with invention: “For we feed her red beets to watch her smile. / For she is humble when well-fed. / For she makes her point well when she is hungry. / For there is nothing swifter than a sow breaking fence whne she desires.” (9) Lee’s irreverence is not as winning as, say, James Tate’s, whom he sometimes resembles in his half-ironic, but never cynical, view of life, and he has none of Tate’s formal ability. Quite often, he seems like a second-rate fiction writer who has hit on something that could identify him to the market &em; pigs, his cast of locals, the “flavor” of the rural &em; and rarely seems bothered that the very long poems of his several volumes rarely have the content to justify them. Nonetheless, he has adopted some of the tones and mystery of Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, or Americans interested in small town vignettes such as Frost or Edgar Lee Masters, as in the short but effective “Idyll,” about “Charley Baker’s idiot girl / […] picking dandelions/ […] mind empty as sky,” which ends: “No bother / wind rooting her curls / she was happy in the flowers / waving half-acre handfuls / of gold coins / to the cars going by.” Not unlike James Wright, Lee has a fondness for long titles, and his poem “What Happened When Bobby Jack Cockrum Tried To Bring Home A Pit Bulldog, or, What His Daddy Said To Him That Day,” is worthy of Wright with the suddenness of its ending, writing that a grizzly bear had once given “a final exam / he couldn’t help / but pass.” (419) The poem “Phone Call” is an effective vignette of community politics, as the protagonist, Lee, attempts to tell a Mr. Williamson that her cow is about to give birth, having first to break through several layers of suspicion &em; “Is this about selling Amway?” &em; before finally breaking through, earning Williamson’s gratitude, a metaphor, one supposes, for the general suspicion of poetry as an art &em; a utile art, in this case &em; and an imagination of how it would be appreciated once it’s given an ear. Lee’s work is refreshingly unpretentious, open and generous to his surroundings, and the lineation and innovations in dialectic language is convincing and smart, but the poems often pile up detail and observation without any aura of great meaning &em; he’s no Faulkner or Joyce &em; not the worst crime, but finally belittling of the possibilities of poetry.

Lisa Lubasch, How Many More of Them Are You?
(Avec Books, 1999)

A poet in her mid-twenties, Lubasch writes with the intensity of a poet witnessing the “birth of consciousness” in the classic late-nineteenth century sense, and, indeed, of the echoes that resound in her debut volume, those of the most angsty, defiant and uber-menschlish Europeans –Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Lautreamont, or the ironist Laforgue &em; are the most apparent. The book is broken into six sections, each of which is a poem augmented by lengthier “Notes” and “Leprosarium,” these last of which comprise eighty or so percent of the work. The writing is about half “prose” &em; in paragraphs of one or so sentences, at times even less –and half prosily-metered, quieter meditative verse. The prose sections are mostly apostrophic, with direct addresses to the reader or the powers that be, addressing this issue of being and consciousness with the fury of a new Promethean: “0 vile and sophisticated burglars of the night. These are all my incantations! / Of the sun that searches out its prey, then buries it, I say ‘Deceptive sunlight! Implacable sidewalk! (Barren amour) . ‘“ Her use of the asterisk to separate these sentence paragraphs works to great effect, putting her at the crossroads of a valorization of the fragment and of accessing the continuities of lyrical declamation: “0 primitive cattle. Turned inside your pimpled hides. When will we come out and cry ‘God save us and the horses!’ * No more. Throw heroic deeds into the dirty den of ‘progress.’ Empiricism goes to the * prostitute of the decade! Mefie toi!” (74) There are many quotable lines, mostly centering around this theme of the identity shaken of its philosophical surety, hence collapsed into the mundane, a-spiritual materiality of existence which counters all easy idealism (“progress”) , the point at which true consciousness &em; certainly of the poet &em; begins. Thus, How Many… strikes one as a speaking-out-of-the-dark of singular being into the free connectivities of language, as when she describes herself as “a dried up prune in a Cartesian universe” and that: “A beautiful error invents me. That of my own fist.” Echoing the Rimbaud’s “Season in Hell” directly, she asks, “Is I its own imperative?” and reaches that same point of world-weariness which drove the French poet to Africa: “No, love resembles all great forms of torpor, writing its one page endlessly.” More ethereal, less psychologically performative considerations, whether of the epistimological quandaries of seeing or of being-in-the-world, are provided, hence moving her into realms resembling contemporary French poetry or that of “Language” writers such as Lyn Hejinian: “You didn’t understand the terms. / The thin vamp of that fog, another / language which keeps on…” (39) But it is the bright irony and earnestness of the prose passages that gives this book it’s tone, finding predecessors in America perhaps only in Williams’ hysterical, existential yet domestic Kora in Hell (“So what of the redhead in the supermarket? Shouldn’t we put our carrots in the basket first?” she writes) or Frank OHara’s early “maudit” writing such as the prose sequence “Oranges” and the surrealist lava-gush “Easter”. It’s a fraught ride that Lubasch (oddly enough, a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop) provides, and one looks forward to what her future, already fore-warned as a mine-field of possibilities, holds.

Jacqueline Osherow, Dead Men’s Praise
(Grove Press, 1999)

Osherow is not afraid to show off her easy mastery of the terza rima — Dante’s line of choice in the Divine Comedy — nor her significant abilities in other forms such as the sonnet and villanelle, in this, her fourth collection. But while the ur-“new Formalist” poet, Anthony Hecht, would include self-consciously mundane “20th century” materials in his poems, he rarely sacrificed a aristocratic pace to accommodate the present day’s taste for kitch, democratic accessibility, or the dropped domestic fourth-wall. Osherow, however, with a fine ear attuned to the best qualities of Jewish humor — the mating of metaphysical concerns with those of daily living, the ability to spin off on seemingly endless tangents, the playful direct addresses to a mensch-like God — utilizes the meter brilliantly, at times suggesting Auden’s mastery of Byron’s Don Juan stanza in his own “Letter to Lord Byron”: “Besides, I’m not sure God much cares for piety; / my guess is &em; since David was his favorite &em; / That He’s partial to passion, sponteneity, // And likes a little genuine regret. / True, David lost his ill-begotten child &em; / But what did the pious ever get?” (“Views of La Leggenda della Vera Croce”, 11) The central themes of the book may, at first glance, not seem unusual: poems about looking at Rennaissance art and desiring an equal verbal language, poems asking where is God in the world, and how could He have let the Holocaust happen and did faith survive in the camps, etc. However, the combination of working in these meters &em; she calls terza rima her “camouflage” in the last line of the book &em; while, at the same time, including such vignettes as her chancing upon the site of the oldest synagogue in Europe (recently been discovered near Rome), or considering the Yiddish language and the invisibility of Jewish poet Benjamin Peret in the footnotes of a diary of Anna Ahkmatova &em; make this a drama of the negotion of cultures on a grand scale. None of the poems in this highly formal book are mere excercises, nor is the content ever forced; each addresses, or gets around to addressing (after making sure you’re listening), issues that are close to Osherow, and tied into her faith, such as the funny “Science Psalm” (one of her sequence of rewrites of the Psalms): “[…] And I like picturing myself among the ancients, / This English of mine a language safely dead, / And schoolchildren uncertain whether Xerxes, El Cid, / Or Jimmy Carter fought the Trojan Wars, / Giggling, no doubt, at the ridiculous lengths of time / It took our crude machines to get to Saturn… / Relativety, if not utterly forsaken / Evolved into a simple grade-school theorem.” (85) It’s hard to get over the feeling, when reading Osherow, that perhaps these meters are better suited to a more earnest tone, and that her ruminations, which are often brilliant, could be edged into more innovative philosophical realms if she sacrificed her need to be speech-like, chattty. Her sonnet and some of the “psalms,” whick lack the verbosity of her funnier material don’t impress enough formally, seem unaccomplished, and seem from a book by a less-facile, less-interesting thinker &em; these are, often, her more purely devotional work. However, she is an attractive presence on the literary scene, and this book is tremendously enjoyable, and it would be hard to criticize such a good natured, obviously talented, poet.

Jena Osman, The Character
(Beacon Press, 1999)

Winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, Osman presents a complete portrait of the interests of postmodern aesthetic theory, ranging from the rarified take on Brecht’s alienation effect that keeps its metaphysics while discarding its directness, to such techniques as the “page-as-score,” the legibility of non-linguistic signs, the use of disjunctive footnotes (some of which are footnotes to footnotes), collage texts (and its natural biproduct, surrealism), and the cancelling plays of multiple identities. She also engages popular themes such as the epistomology of vision (“What I thought was a sudden chop in / the metal was actually a drop of / water one foot in front of the / metal, my eye joining the two in a / simple surgery” from “The Agrarian” [p.50]) and actively blurs the genre differences between poetry, essay, fiction and drama, an old chestnut of the postmodern slant on the modernisms of everyone from Stein to Joyce. As Hejinian writes in her introduction, this is all combined in the term of the “character,” which at times can mean the elements of the alphabet, the “moral fiber” of an individual, the unique figure as found in novels and plays (“Performance requires the person who is the actor (i.e., already a character) to be in character, and this, in turn, cannot occur without performance,” Hejinian writes [p. xii]), and the mark of difference in identities: “she’s such a character.” At times the writing is very compelling, creating a range of interests that circulate around specific themes, as in the long poem “Authorities (A Lecture)”, a rumination on power and evil which circles around the figure of Iago in Othello (“The presence of Iago questions the flawed system. He goes beyond the stance of necessary evil, a tool for ultimately attaining (through his discard) a cathartic utopian state for the spectator. He is, in fact, part of that ‘utopian’ state.” [p. 65]) with a concurrent strand of discourse around experimental poetics, defending its ties to methods of chance to the “nature of judgement itself” [p. 64] being grounded in chance. The poem ends with a re-editing of transcripts from a session of the Supreme Court which reads like a conversation among the gods of a dangerously enfeebled Parnassus, as Sandra Day O’Conner asks: “Does a reasonable person know how to read?” The excerpt from “The Periodic Table as Assembled by Dr. Zhivago, Oculist,” a hypertext poem that, once on-line, would allow the user to create new compounds from the poems provided, rewrites the abbreviations of this table according to subjective or aleatoric laws, such that “hydrogen” becomes “harness,” and is listed under the “elements that contribute to sight” [p. 27]. While in its static state on the page the poem is doesn’t add up to much more than often engaging juxtapositions of words, a section from “Rayguns to Radium” explicates how this scrambling of the foundational glyph of modern science expands to take on social mores: “Madame Curie discovered us in the pitchblende / and no subject since has so interested the mind / of the general public. Next in line was the discovery / of a radius of light, generic weaponry for all.” Osman can sink into a mannered academic auto-pilot mode with already conventional attempts at density that only throw the reader off in her prose poems, and the ones broken into lines often lack any rhythmal drive. Despite this, the poems thrive on the compelling promise of depth without ever sacrificing their complete contents, which is, one supposes, what a “character” in its many manifestations invariably does.

Richard Caddel, Peter Quartermain, Editors, Other: British and Irish Poetry Since 1970
(Wesleyan, 1999)

Though England has seen a spate of recent anthologies of alternative U.K. poetry, this collection marks the first published in the States in over two decades. Editors Caddel, a noted poet, and Quartermain, a prominent critic of postmodern poetry, collect a diverse and exciting range of work that is evenly balanced between such trends as Caribbean dub poetry, the mellifluous, baroque lyric as it has been developed in Cambridge, London-based performance and concrete poetry, and “outsider” figures such as Bill Griffiths (an independent Anglo-Saxon scholar) and Tom Raworth, who first found appreciation in the States. The compelling introduction traces a nation’s literary history that has had to come to terms with a number of factors: the troubled importation of globally dominant American poetic theories, post-colonialism and the subversions of normative English by dialects or Caribbean “nation languages,” and — perhaps foremost — the fact of an experimental English tradition that pre-dated twentieth century modernism, and which “stretches back to Claire, Blake, Smart, and the two Vaughans, Henry and Thomas.” The result has been a “fair field of folk” in contemporary British culture, which the editors see as “packed with chaotic overlays of cultures” — certainly a different impression than conservative poets such as Larkin, Hughes, Hill or Heaney would ever have us believe. The selections from the 55 poets are brief yet excellent. Barry McSweeney, a self-styled Rimbaudian, is represented by a number of terse, direct poems that flaunt provocative language in a way that suggests his model (“Small / crawling piety, you deserve / many bombs / & / guns. // I ate your Christian fish.”), while Denise Riley’s subtle, tradition-conscious ear helps surface lines that are unexpectedly comforting (“Rain lyrics. Yes, then the rain lyrics fall. / I don’t want absence to be this beautiful. / It shouldn’t be; in fact I know it wasn’t…”). Tom Raworth’s “That More Simple Natural Time Tone Distortion,” a sonic joy-ride of one-to-three word lines, is a contrast to his traditional lyric “Out of a Sudden”: “the alphabet wonders / what it should do / paper feels useless / colours lose hue // while all musical notes / perform only in blue”), while Tom Leonard’s Glasgow Scots, not unlike John Agard’s Guyanese-inflected idiom, brings to eye and ear a sweet, alien yet confident music that is unlike anything in the States. Leonard’s portrait of lower middle class apathy is vulnerable and concrete in a way suggesting Williams: “yi surta / keep trynti avoid it that’s / thi difficulty bitty it // jist / no keep findn yirsell / sitn / wotchn thi telly ur / lookn oot thi windy / […] wiv nay / cookn oil nwi need / potatoes.” Veronica Forrest-Thomson, a poet and critic who died at 28, cheekily mixes the linguistic investigations of Wittgenstein, the stagey learning of Eliot and the languor of Keats, to create monologues that entertain as they dally with subversion: “Though my deserted frying pans lie around me / I do not want to make it cohere. / Hung up to dry for fishing lines on the side of grey wharf of Lethe. / Old, we love each other and know more.” Chris Cheek, Maggie O’Sullivan and concrete poet Bob Cobbing are all well represented, as well as important figures responsible for the influx of New American poetry to the islands, Eric Mottram, Roy Fisher and Andrew Crozier. This is an important sourcebook to a literature that is probably more marked by the postcolonial condition than that of the United States, with fewer heroes but with, perhaps, more fruitful divergences from the main modernist line.

Bob Perelman, Ten to One: Selected Poems
(Wesleyan, 1999)

Perelman has distinguished himself from his Language peers by moving recently into academic respectibility, publishing two books of criticism, the second of which, The Marginalizaton of Poetry, was about the Language movement itself. Tempermentally more congenial than poets such as Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten, who have often opted for theoretic density or outright opacity in both poetry and prose, Perelman is often considered the most “accessible” or even “lyrical” Language poet, but one can also say he is the most rational, as his poetry sacrifices common aspects of aesthetic affect &em; such as the angst-ridden dialectic between personal expression and the integrity of form &em; for a sort of plain-spoken irony in a tradition that can be traced back to the Enlightenment, or which can be linked to more recent concerns with the stasis of “entropy”. An early poem such as “An Autobiography” is a play on the type of minimal French novelette, and Perelman is quite apt at satirizing the more indulgent, but perhaps also un-American, aspects of this genre, such as the disclosure of repressed sensibility amidst the traumas of a confessional statement: “I wanted to cover my mother with kisses, and for her to have no clothes on. It was qutie usual to feel one side of the face getting sunburned, while the other was being frozen. A journey of this kind is no joke. […] I always wanted to give them to her on her bosom. Be so good as to remember that I lost her, in childbed, when I was barely seven.” Of his “father,” he writes, with metaphysical, Catholic overtones (murder striking at the heart): “I abhorred my father. He brought with him memories of how it feels to be intensely, fiercely hungry. He came and interrupted our kisses.” [p. 2] Oddly, Perelman’s poetry is very atypical of Language writing in that it’s distrust in the referent is disclosed discursively rather than by example; that is, more like a Barthes than a Bernstein, he appears less concerned with deterritorializing language such as to the push its “presence” as the explain, casually, perhaps reductively, the links between syntax and other ontological phenomemon: “No place exists even once. Even before / Birth, earlier made up syntax / Could tell you apart / From a thing or two, nothing waiting / In the wind, spiritual placebo plus / The actual problem of dying.” [“Statement, p. 53] However, like Bernstein, he can be deathly funny, and uses bathos quite well, as in the poem “Oedipus Rex,” which could have been out of Mel Brooke’s History of the World Part I: “What news, ancient uncle, from the transcendental desktop? / KREON: The people, hemmed in by liberal playgrounds / and rightwing communicatons systems, are dead / or dying. No one’s complaining, mind you, but with the inauguration just hours away the sky seems to be crumbling, and the decibel level in some stadiums is below that of Mallarme’s tomb. / God thought you should know.” [p. 70] Included in the volume is the poem made famous by Frederic Jameson, “China,” which in hindsight is witty still, but nonetheless a toned down, less masterful version of something from Ashbery’s The Tennis Coart Oath. Perelman can be frequently faulted for not really achieving enough effects in his poems, as many of them &em; including the 6-word-to-a-line poems which intend, conceptually, to play on the arbitrariness of form &em; are rhythmically unvaried or unexciting, or at least lack the sort of decisions that, when made well, inspires the reader’s interest in the meter and sound patterning, and by extension the content. The poems work well as “assays” into topical issues &em; Chomsky would be happy with such poetry, as it offers no delusions, and yet is pleasant enough to read &em; but one asks “Is it art?” Perelman, with a nod to Duchamp’s subversions of the retina, would delight in the question.

J. H. Prynne, Poems
(Bloodaxe Books, 1999)

The publication of Poems, Prynne’s collected books from “Kitchen Poems” (1968) to “For the Monogram” (1997) is a literary event that will probably be unparalleled for some time. For several decades, Prynne has been the major figure of what has been dubbed, often inaccurately, the “Cambridge” group of poets, mostly because of the strong influence of his early books, such as “Kitchen Poems” and “White Stones,” on young English poets in the seventies, such as John Wilkinson and Denise Riley, who attended Cambridge University where he still taught and still teaches. That his influence would have a peculiarly local cast is not accidental: Prynne decided early on that his books &em; each of which would usually contain one twenty or so page sequence &em; would only be published in small editions, partly as a response to the instant absorption of experimental poetics into academic parlance &em; a parallel to capitalism’s instant aborption of all opposition and singularity &em; and partly to honor their quiet, hermetic quality. Hence, his poems rarely, if ever, had distribution in the States, or even far outside of Cambridge. Nonetheless, he has acquired a reputation, deservedly, as one of the major English poets of his time, a position drenched with ethical significance as he’s never caved in to the calls of celebrity or other forms of “selling out” &em; his verse, if anything, has gotten less commodifiable over the years. For a first window on to the underside of the “Hill, Hughes, Heaney axis” of English poetry, look no further. Prynne’s early work departed mostly, so history says, from his reading of Olson and an interest in science, particularly metallurgy, but have a heightened rhetoric that never strays into the indulgently eccentric manner of the American, and contain a political earnestness and subtle rationality (not to mention wit) that keeps them tethered to the matter at hand: “And don’t let some / wise and quick-faced historical rat tell us about / the industrial north and its misery, since every / songbird since then (& with _no_ honorable / exception for D.H. Lawrence) has carolled [sic] about / that beautiful black colour as if / this were the great rot in the heart.” (“Die a Millionaire,” 15) The work in “Kitchen Poems” introduced what has since become a staple formal feature of Prynne’s work, which is the use of contrasting meters &em; usually an iambic based line versus a two-beat, syncopated balladic line &em; within a single poem, the latter set off by indents and occurring in sets, giving the appearance of the poem a cascading effect. Given that, he also engages in a much freer line in other early work such as “Day Light Songs”, a work that is steeped in praise for life and nature not unlike another English poet which whom Prynne shares qualities and contradictions, Gerard Manley Hopkins: “And so when it does / rain & will glide / down our necks like / glances into / the soul, drop / lets work their / way forward the sinus / is truly the scent / of the earth, upraised” (27). There is no way to reduce the over 400 pages of work presented here to simple phrases; the long view shows that the pattern of production seems to be from dense, large canvas exercises interspersed with lighter, lyrical sequences &em; overtly “political works” contrasted with spare “private” ones &em; but that says little. Many of the poems just strike one as “major” and demand attention, such as “The Bee Target on his Shoulder” (1971), which moves through several registers in its 3-pages (the model, perhaps, being William Carlos Williams’ decidedly non-collage _The Desert Music_), a sort of Proustian ramble of recollection, but with mythological resonances, as if a paean to the lost anthropomorphism of the gods: “Gratefully they evade the halflight / rising for me […] / Be gentle with his streamy locks until he gets the wrapper off. / Strip pieces of flesh from the animals lying dead in the streets. / Love him, in _le silence des nuits, l’horreur des cimetieres_; / otherwise the trendy book will slide / into the bath and linger there.” (152) Later sequences like “Not-You” (1993) seem to offer no basal metrical figure to use for guidance &em; the forms range from three-line stanzas to staggered, “fragmentary” lines that work like tone clusters whose aural figure isn’t discernible until the sounding of the final lines: “Her pan click / elb / second fix / for them / pencil / breather park / over / talk at small to.” (392) Another later sequence, “Her Wild Weasels Returning,” (1994) is made of dense 24-line poems in which traces of a meditating persona are mostly erased, though linger still as the supporting narrative structure. It is as metrically consistent as “Not-You” appears not to be: “I saw / her wings in speedy strip like a shadow in the sand / or in growth like natural reason, her heart so vast / as justly to make cause with the fiery fountain sealed / on track right across _terra nullius_ overhead” (416). Prynne seems at once the most “avant-garde” of later-century English poets &em; his word-play borders on the recursivity of Stein or the _over_-determinacy underlying the mosaic surfaces of Finnegans Wake, and seems to have resolved certain problems involving lyrical subjectivity that were glossed over by the Language poets &em; and yet the most convincingly traditional, in that his formal grace, his skill with “numbers” &em; he is as metrically competent and deliberate as his Cambridge precursor, Thomas Gray &em; is closest to a “classical” sensibility for these democratic times than the sickly ironies the “Movement” poets, who didn’t know their time.

Lytle Shaw, Cable Factory 20
(Atelos, 1999)

Shaw’s book-length poem &em; part faux-documentary, part pastoral meditation on landscapes both mental and post-industrial, and something of a novel &em; spins centrifugally from an investigation of the conceptual artist Robert Smithson, best known for his “”earthwork”” Spiral Jetty which once extended into Utah’s Great Salt Lake. But this is not homage to the artist or his work, but rather an imaginative reconstruction of Smithson’s idiosyncratic topics and methods of research and the anti-humanist, near ascetic set of values he took into artistic creation. Cable Factory 20’s nearest literary anaolog (outside of Smithson’s writing itself) is the Surrealist novel-of-epiphanies, most particularly Breton’s Nadja, though in this case the flaneur is not within the obvious social centers of his chosen city &em; the coffee shops and hotels, parks and sidewalks &em; but on its peripheries, where the debris of industry forces one into a new chronological scale in which one greets self-estrangement in an sublime though microscopic set of non-anthropocentric values: “”Each city is actually a twin / with the city of ‘Environs,’ where / motion propels into a phrase / universe whose quality of surrounding […] / allows suffixes, abrasion. / And from here, the twin evils: / (disbelief in substance, / the body as final container) / appear as so many programmatic / whiffs.”” (24) Developing upon the much “”language-centered”” writing’s concern with the “”word/world”” axis (the site of the self in constant exchange with the “”things”” of society’s dream), most particularly the careful rhythms of Barrett Watten and Lyn Hejinian, the book nonetheless occasionally takes on more familiar tones, as a “”narrator”” &em; more like a mischievous guide to the funhouse of the mind &em; will provide the pellucid facts and cryptic commentary: “”In 1936 ferry service stopped / and the pier fell into disrepair. / One’s mind and the earth / are in a constant state of erosion. / I claim a drone about elements / as memory begins to assert, / to squat in: / organizing, now, a geography / of blimps, sailboats. / Mental rivers wear away / abstract banks, / brain waves / undermind cliffs of thought, / barely visible industry.”” (71) Though sacrificing the named protagonists of a Nadja or Olson’s Maximus, Shaw nonetheless weaves a “”story””: someone is investigating something specific, somewhere specific, needs knowledgable guides, finds things and discards them (according to what hierarchy of values?), there is time to spend and time to lose, fortuitous incidents, unforeseen set-backs, and so on &em; the plays on the tropes of fiction are many. The cumulative effect is like all the essential essences of noir stripped of its cage of plot and narrative &em; like meeting Welles’ “”third man”” over and over again: “”Could he–then, could I?– / rush the approach, stroll into / a parking lot and find it // there, / ostentation in gumbo mud. To rush / took on a new enthusiasm– / the return to the city: cords trailing, zigzagged for / kneaded mounds &em; down to / scale and ascent, where / a dislocation point / widens.”” (25) Perhaps the double, in this instance, is Smithson himself, as the book ends on with a sequence derived from Smithson’s writing in which he writes of seeing “”Mud Salt Crystals Rock Water”” from the twenty views possible from within the sprial jetty. Shaw’s book never escapes that repetition either, as the very notion of “”progress”” is rendered inane in entropic teleology of his poetics. “”So hagiography / deposits / yields in shallow water, / sinking to place / toward stalked markers. // This way / analog delay / grows digital, / lodging specimens / in fantasies / of collapse never ours…”” (16). Perhaps Ashbery and his constant state of “”in medias res,”” or, on another limb, Nathniel Mackey’s ghostly echoings of synchronic Africa culture come to mind here. But with Shaw, the page itself becomes the archeological site &em; not just a metaphor, but component of the same type of project &em; as each is bordered with images purposelly decayed through photocopy repoduction, mostly of maps, dinosaurs, machines, and often repeating in patterns to create a sort of “”filmic”” experience, hence making the presence of words on the page one more example of the “”trace”” that corrupts as it transforms and decays. This is one of the most interesting books of the year, and certainly a terrific first book.

Rod Smith, Protective Immediacy
(Roof Books, 1999)

Smith is part of an exciting DC-based community of poets who, for all their devotion to formal experimentation and a critical social vision, are generally very amusing, coupling a knack for stand-up “slacker-comedy with sheer lyric elegance. This new book is a honed display in five sections of all the virtues of Smith’s writing, including his complete mix-and-mastery of several strands of American poetics, ranging through Projective Verse, Berrigan-esque collage (more intellectual, but still with a Lower East Side “tune-in drop-out” dopiness), the clipped line of Williams, and the provocative opacities of the Language School. As the epitaph to the first section, “The Boy Poems,” states, “Humor is a process. Depression / a useful first step,” and this synthesis of comedy/melancholy is what distinguishes the often intellectual verse of Smith from the pack: “Speaker: Agon means / that ache you can / really see, right? / non-speaker: in some / x, the gross national / awkward. Oh hell, / Speaker: “Prove it” &em; “ (14) . The page arrangement of “The Boy Poems” &em; each with titles like “Boris,” “Bert,” “The Buddha,” and “John Fitzgerald” &em; are like word-sculptures, somehow beautiful to see in their stasis on the page despite the heady, fluid meanings of the poems themselves. “Simon” theorizes this condition: “The implicit is / Arrival, approach / impasse &em; a hand issuing from a grasp &em; / These alternatives cannot be harmonized. /1 But harmony sucks anyway.” (17) Human liberation is to be at stake in these poems written from the country’s capitol, as the fixity of corporate systems upon the mushy human emotions is part of the drama inherent in Smith’s colliding discourses: “This is the heart of all living / systems &em; The workshop mode flows formatively / across the morphogenic light-born attractor / at the focal point of time and reemerges as / the Diet Coke stain on Bert’s disintegrating / mostly purple tie-dye.” (“Bert,” 22) . Because Smith is so comfortable living among grand thoughts &em; he he has a natural “visionary” bent suggestive of mild-mannered Blake or a human-scale Pynchon &em; his idiom has a worldliness which belies a mistrust in naive acceptance of political dialectics or theoretical superstructures. But it is when these two elements meet &em; the mistrust anchoring the “vision” &em; that the humor of human” bathos arises (he pokes fun at his theory-minded brethren, here, too) : “A Nestea before the sex show / & a full length sofa bed / to teach the Cantos from &em; / this represents the temporal / hidden within the temporal. / The grapes though expensive / need impaling.” (35) Smith’s ear is infallible &em; he can mix, in a single poem, verbatim quotes from Bob Dylan with polysyllabic science words, ballad-like strains, “plain speech” prose and weird word-lists, such as: “schierkase schmo / schmoose / schmooze / schmuck / Schnabel” (64) , sheer nonsense which tells, in the meantime, the whole story of the New York painter’s fall from avant-garde grace. Through all these dada-esque hijincks, however, he always keeps the question of basic freedom versus the (failed) social contract in focus: “the sum tottle seems to ink us out / sheepish science dealing & important / — neither Spain nor Plain &em; / a health-related basic thing that people matter more than money.” (71) “What’s that little plan / you live in?” the poem “John Fitzgerald” asks, and Smith offers no answers, but no plans, either.

Anne Tardos, Uxudo
(O Books, 1999)

The foreword by poet Caroline Bergvall states that Uxudo &em; written in spliced together bits of Hungarian, German, French, English and made-up languages, as well as pronunciation keys and other linguistic graphs &em; is a “multilingual text,” a form of first language itself which “throws up the xenophobic asymmetries of difference.” (8). Indeed, the writing begins to take on a life of its own, inviting the reader into a world of semantic and phonologic echoes, an effect furthered by the inclusion of several of Tardos’s video images, many of which themselves repeat with different digital effects. As an art piece, one thinks of a much-less elegant Christian Boltanski and his out-of-focus black and white portrait photos arranged as alters, shadows in silent deference to, and communication with, the lives lost in the Holocaust. As many of the texts of Uxudo are either Fluxus-inspired doggerel, sing-songy chants, or simply candid bits from everyday life, the wafts of Europe’s lost innocence are hard to ignore. As visual poems, they resemble the French Lettrism, which to American eyes tend to look ugly &em; most of the technology employed here is low end, and not very slick, the fonts clashing and the margins loose –but whose chaos becomes endearing once divined. The first line, “Aller Sunden Katzen zusammengefasst,” finds its echo on the facing page: “All sins of cats rolled into one / Where do we come from and where do we go? / Images, mon ami, ich smoke nicht mehr. / Gem would I do.” (19) The contrast of the fairytale line with the most basic question of the cultural exile, followed by two mixed-language sentences that make sense despite their word replacement, leads one immediately into this interstitial area that could very well be the road from Kosovo, Bosnia, or other war-torn European nation state &em; a margin at the heart of the center. Later, a flurry of equal signs leads the reader on a heady joy-ride of mistranslation: “quake = tremblement = Beben = renges” (22) for example, or “uxudo uxudo = uxudo = uxudo = uxudo = uxudo” (42) as if parodying the mind’s inability to make sense out of the solipsistic word. After looking at this book for a fair amount of time, one is not sure if the Zaum-like neologisms are not, in fact, Hungarian, as Tardos’s unreliable witness has already acquired a reputation for slipping away when apparently most needed. In contrast to the recently-in-vogue multimedia Dictee by the late Korean American artist Theresa Cha &em; a text which relates, however obliquely, the story of Korea’s annexation by Japan- Uxudo (the title itself comes from a word that appeared in the text after a computer malfunction) exists no where more than in the mind, where words, in the act of improvisation, have to be created out of air as the linguistic environment: “multiplicatering = multiplikatern.” Page 30 playfully contains the pronunciation guide and definition of the foreign words on page 31, but even after that, meaning is quite elusive: Hochgeduld after nine from a fountain / Gekreuzung vielmehr, which is how it’s done / Neighboryly jolie bete / Give it time, haromvaros.” (31) The words following this bit, “Afterimage = Nachbild,” sums up the project of Uxudo: it is a collection of resonances, shadows, scraps and funky constructs, mixed with the fading light of the nihilistic, playful response to this disillusionment that characterized avant-garde art of the early century. It’s modernism and the nostalgia for modernism.

Merv Taylor, The Goat
(Junction Press, 1999)

This follow-up to his critically acclaimed An Island of His Own is a terse, dense collection of imagistic poems that ponder, without gloom nor intellectual dispassion, the chaos of a world in which nature and instinct have been corrupted by the movement of a colonizing, industrializing society. “On the Ave.”, the opening poem, sets the stage, taking place in “one of those nights / when the intersection is crazy / with cars,” moving swiftly through casual, but angst-tinged observation &em; “that guy spinning / in his wheelchair , the one / whom the paramedics / don gloves to handle” &em; finally landing on the overwhelming question: “There’s a red moon to go / with his craziness / and a gun salute from a rooftop. / Can we be seen with the lights on? / Are they firing at the moon?” (15) Most of the poems are portraits of people on society’s fringes, those who most suffer from culture’s incoherence, from the “Old Soldier in the Park” (“his white hair flying / against the green, / a bird out of formation”) to the pathetic (in the uncorrupted sense) story of “Sleepy,” about a mother who spots her son’s face on a wanted poster: “Imagine how she looks / like she’s not looking, / but she knows that eye, / lazy like hers.” (18) The shared physiological trait binds mother and son in what the photographer Diane Arbus would call the “aristocracy of the freak,” and yet even the neighborhood’s society even operates against her, in that her friends know where he is, but “Not one will tell, / not even the one / who gave him the name / Sleepy.” (18) Sometimes Taylor’s touch is lighter and pastoral, as in the lines “the snow has no philosophy / but to fall for two days straight,” (23) but he can also stray into bathetic overstatement, as in his poem “A Witness,” dedicated to the then-Unites States poet laureate, Robert Hass: “He had undertaken the job as caretaker / to his country’s eloquence, in charge / of its rhymes, its supersititions / in the year of the most stars pitched.” (52) But these last are rare moments, and his careful attention to detail and sentences structure, pay off in minor masterpieces of concision such as the opening verse of “Sighting”: “Along the edge of the marsh / appears a body, making / the woman on her patio / scream so loudly / voices from a late picnic / rise next door” (77), which moves, with a butterfly’s agility, filmically from frame to frame, bringing the first frame closer into focus while never dispelling its aura, mystery, or sense of danger. Like Williams, with whom he shares the capacity to create art out of the minutest surprises, he can presents deep contradiction that others may have missed &em; such as how the event of death is often an positive force, a funeral therapeutic &em; but with truthful understatement: “The man stretched out / in the parlor has brought / us together // […] I never noticed before that / Verni has dark, pretty eyes / and Uncle Cassey’s hands / are as smooth as putty.” (78) Taylor’s New York poems are, not unlike like Lorca’s, a virtuostic series of apocalyptic yet domestic vignettes, finding the pain in all desire, the beauty in decay, as when the poet, who can’t write from wrist pain, observes: “Then the girl on the blue bike / rode between us, and a desire / to pluck the harpstrings // caused the tendonitis / to flare up again.” (28) Finding no easy answers, yet never letting his lyrical and painterly gift spiral off into irrelevance, Taylor remains true to his desire to get his world on paper, and because he feels himself “global” and of a class with the mentors he names, Allen Ginsberg and Josheph Brodsky, he renders his world with a moral authority that is true to the particular.

Rodrigo Toscano, Partisans
(O Books, 1999)

Toscano’s Partisans injects a startling new breath of urgency in contemporary poetics, one that skates awfully close to such politically activated texts as Bruce Andrews’ I Don ‘t Have Any Paper So Shut Up or Myung Mi Kim’s Dura, but which doesn’t lose its very specific questioning of political agency beneath its cross-cut surface. The twelve parts of this book-length work each consider a specific moment in thinking about progressive politics — “unveil[ing] the conjoined agency of human labor and grammatical component” in Barrett Watten’ s phrase from the book jacket — with such titles as “Present Perfect Progressive” and “Simple Past” identifying the perspective taken amidst the historical flux, pointing to concepts of closed historical determinacies and never ironic ideas of utopias to-be. Its short, tight lines, which move through several modes of rhetoric from the direct address, the declamatory, the lyric and the quasi-hermetic, never lose steam as Toscano plows through his manic considerations of aesthetics and society. The following is near-Poundian razzling of activist poetics, condemning as it is precise: “Flouting history, rambling spleen’d / <a sign of Banality> II Spouting ethics, shunning touch / <a sign of Celebrity> II Sorting concepts, draping needs / <a sign of Obscurity> (9). Toscano’s “wordwork” — the poem is obsessed with the nature of poetry as “labor” in an poetic economy that is, even at its margins, compromised by the exigencies of the “market” — is always tempered by his quest for the “collective” revolutionary consciousness, such that even the short time it takes to bring the poem to the print drops it from its immediate social moment: “By the time this all gets sketched, typed / circulated, confiscated, allocated / celebrated, denigrated, reiterated / obfuscated, recuperated, activated I/it will have lost its gain / so to speak / will have had to begin / again / between” (12) he writes, mourning, perhaps, the lost of his address to the confines of the white page and the bookshelf Partisans takes a stance against “beauty” &em; it is as pared and honed as Brecht’s later poetry — and certainly against the idea of a beautiful soul, but consequently avoids the pessimism and turn toward the ironic that much latter-day lyricism possesses in the face of disappointment with the revolutionary moment: “So back to irony-ville / petty bourgeois-ville II round and round / eclectic hectic and peptic” (20). His metaphysics of social “Agent(cy)” seems to center around the idea of a “social surplus” which can be engaged for social transformation for “Doing” — a surplus created in the margins of the bourgeois self and which, to this time, has been the static, inactive area from which most avant-garde American poetries have surfaced. “And why not / partisans II So so democratic / postmodern muzzling /1 Having been fitted / having been summoned by it I/In the present (but of the past) / the subject II We ‘ye, as a has been / or stand in — for// Now? A muffled yet pressing now “(41), he asks, bringing to light the necessity of a singular, staunch view amongst the calls for plurality and untranslatability that have become catchwords of late-progressive literary and political theory. However, even Toscano realizes that, in this case at least, his verbal assay may not be more than a tone mourning the loss of collective action and will in the later 20th century, an urge toward “the dazzling brightness / of realism,” the “tattered / fettered / committed.” Poetry may very well be the unsatisfactory vehicle, as he writes toward the end, imagining himself before a crowd: “So I’m facing faces / as I recite this / as I’m looked at II quizzically?” (47) But this line is followed by “toward yourselves too”, throwing the ball back in the court where he has, fairly and unpretentiously, returned it, into the minds and hearts of the readers who are being challenged by this extraordinary, difficult, but noble and ennobling text. “Readers / as agents” (49)

Jose Garcia Villa, The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings
(Kaya, 1999)

Kaya Production continues its innovative line of Asian American poetry with this selected edition of the writing of Filipino American Jose Garcia Villa. As the famous 1948 photograph from the Gotham Book Mart reception of Dame Edith Sitwell suggests &em; in which he appeared with the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore Schwartz, Gore Vidal, W. H. Auden and other luminaries &em; Villa was something of an anomaly, in that he was a writer coming from a colonial property of the United States who was created a poetics that was as unquestioning of the premises of high modernism as he himself was unquestioning of his abilities and preternatural calling as a poet. The excellent essays appended to this collection by important writers such as Nick Joaquin, E. San Juan, Jr., and Luis H. Francia, along with the introduction by novelist/poet Jessica Hagedorn, present the man in a variety of guises, from the imposing, learned, often didactic, never passive literary mentor that he was to several Filipino writers in New York, to the provocateur in the Philippines who never failed to cause a scandal with his tart tongue and demanding aesthetic tastes (he was, nonetheless, put on the government’s payroll, and had a troubled but intimate relationship to the Marcos). As if testament to his chosen tradition of late symbolist poetics, Villa &em; like Valery, Rilke and Rimbaud &em; reached a points in his life when he felt that he had “said all he had to say” and let silence reign &em; in fact, he gave up writing poems after the early sixties, though he often spoke of an enormous work on aesthetics which he had been preparing. The poems that he did leave behind foreground a set of values that might strike one today as antique, and yet they are surprisingly fresh, and when focused, very powerful. The echoes one hears are from writers as diverse as Hopkins, Dickinson, Blake and Cummings, and his various innovations &em; his idea of “Reverse Consonance” and the later idea of putting commas between every word (which he linked to “Seurat’s architectonic and measured pointillism,” and which, dismissed for many years as a laughable eccentricity, has resurfaced in practices by poets such as P. Inman) &em; seem minor in retrospect compared to those of Williams or Pound, but attest to the care for the small event in poems that only surfaces upon a very close reading of the language. The purity of his approach leaves one nostalgic for a time before deconstruction and the politics of the referent had converted the aporias of language into the ironizing of essences and the critique of public values (which is to say, “before Auschwitz”): “Silence is Thought converging / Unprecipitate, like / Dancer on tight wire balancing, / Transitive, budlike, / Till &em; her act finished &em; in / One lovely jump skips / She to the floor, bending / To make her bows, dips / Herself in bright applause &em; / Then silence is / No more. Not it is the rose / Called Speech.” (15) The comma poems challenge the reader to break apart and reform meanings, as if to dissuade the imposition of final interpretation that eventually weigh on many poems: “As,much,as,I,perceive,the,Future, / Lo: the,Future,perceives,me: / A,Mutuality,of,Eyes.” (45) (This suggests Karl Kraus’s famous assertion, as cited in Benjamin: “The more you stare at language, the more it stares back.”) His later syllabic approach to the stanza resembles, mostly, that of Marianne Moore’s, but unlike Moore, he attempted poems that were not merely assemblages of “found texts” but which were based on a single sentence of a single text, hence testing the integrities of syntax. One based on a sentence from Andre Gide, for instance, permits him to escape the more fiery, messianic tones of his earlier poems and yet access the integrity of his personality which he cherished so much: “Night and sleep alone / Permit metamorphoses. Without / Oblivion in the / Chrysalis the caterpillar / Could not / Become a butterfly: The / Hope of awaking someone else / Urges me to let / The man I am to sink in- / to sleep.” (83) As some of the essays in the end argue, Villa stands at the crossroads of many discourses, specifically those of postcolonialism and the transition from modernism to a postmodernism informed by the West’s imposition of values on non-Western peoples. But Villa seems an unlikely candidate for this position &em; he seems to ignore these issues all together. However, by his unflinching devotion to his notions of craft and calling, he becomes a diamond in the rough &em; the diamond he hoped his syntax would find in language &em; and it is this diamond that serves, by its aspirations to integrity and wholeness, to aggravate and permit growth to a number of concepts that swirl around the political/aesthetic nexus, each end of the axis threatening the other. Besides all that, this book, excellently edited by Eileen Tabios (who also edited the seminal Black Lightning published by the Asian American Writers Workshop), is a study in how a relatively small contribution to two nations’ literatures could serve to transform an entire discourse, once the discourse if forced open by the contradictions of poetry, and a poet’s life.

John Wilkinson, Oort’s Cloud
(Subpress, 1999)

Oort’s Cloud collects the early poetry of major British poet John Wilkinson, and it may very well be his first full-length books widely available in the United States. While Wilkinson’s early work is cleary indebted to his teacher at Cambridge University, the poet J.H. Prynne &em; each shares a polyglot sense of reference and complex rhythms, creating a near-forbidding surface densitym, all in a “free” verse that spiral around and underlying formal structure &em; the younger poet departs in his occasional use of pop cultural references, a more directly emotive form of political commentary, and the occasional autobiographical poem. In this earlier work, he is also less of a lyricist than Prynne, or at least a colorist &em; some of these poems can only be understood as “sculptural” in the most brutal of British traditions. It’s not surprising that one of the poems, “pneumatic drill,” seems to make reference, via the phrase “rock drill,” to the sculpture by that name by Jacob Epstein, one of the inspirations for the Vorticists. (“Rock Drill” was a piece that utilized an actual drill in it, and became the name of one of Ezra Pound’s series of Cantos.) The material and rational word become a matter of hard physics, and hard lessons, in Wilkinson’s harsh narrative gaze: “And it’s mainly a business of nerve / Finding out the outline of the body / By an accident By the fate of light / And skirting your frozen chamber / They are giants of indifference Ack! Ack! / Like and aching tooth.” (Pneumatic Drill, 51) The influence of George Oppen is apparent, especially in some of the shorter poems in which the weight of an economic and moral code bear heavily, though not rendering pathos impossible: “At three-second intervals / air / disturbed his coiffure / too dense & / closely trimmed / to model the much-admired / ruffle effect // To sell his labor power / Find a willing employer // & the competent fan / empire made” (Mile End Road, 40) At times, as at the end of “Pneumatic Drill,” Wilkinson seems to mourn the loss of the visionary capacity, or at least to ironize it; at others, he gives over to a sort of apocalpytic quality that he could be said to share with London poet Allen Fisher, with whom he is not often associated. The following lines, coming in at angles one after the other, seem to push the envelope toward the “overwhelming question”: “Beyond the heated policy / Which scorches the earth / Wet wool stinks on a hearth // Excess in that package / Smokes out the affirmative mate / In a blonde rage // Striation of exacted space / Enflames the offered meteors / Like burs on the carapace // His feet slip on the landing pad / Burst the sandals / Whose awaited message was banal.” (notes to “About the Level I Start From,” (80). Poems like “Bullyboy Tears” take up nursery-rhyme-like rhythms, while others, especially the long poems (like “Aquamarine”), bury deep within them the traces of poetics structures that one wouldn’t expect in late-modernist writing. This book is not reading for everyone: because Wilkinson often sacrifices any notion of an “authorial voice,” or a protagonist even in apparently narrative poems, and because he is not interested in “play” in the form of either Language poetics or the poems of Ashbery, one is often at a loss as to how the images collect to form larger meaning structures, or how the music is to operate through the voice &em; the “voice” itself seems obviously unattractive. However, close attention pays off, and the effect and confidence of the rhythms can be something like a ligher Pound. Flung Clear, a book only available in England and which collects Wilkinson’s later books, shows how the poet was able to collect these many disparate, fragementary impulses and create large-scale poems of great power and beauty.