Stephen Berg
Halo (Sheep Meadow Press, 2000)
Porno Diva Numero Uno (Lingo Books, 2000)

In these two smallish books of prose poems, Berg strains for the visceral transcendence of the saints, a fairly anachronistic project considering how the Beats — by accessing such “cursed” moderns as Artaud and Rimbaud — have apparently exhausted the subject. He describes a sort of ars poetica in Halo, a series a short quasi-religious paragraphs: “Curtains she calls it ‘curtain of the world’ mercy behind it on the other side cruelty here in the God-world no-God, whenever I read to her — ‘I have to know that as a thinking, finite being I am God crucified’ — it shreds me, no-time which is God God everywhere everything we are, often in great heat I write to a friend say everything that shames batters inspires won’t send it burn it on stove papery ash God’s words, woke in the dark again clawed the unwalled dark again.” (“Simone,” 19) Something seems either entirely naive or slightly forced about these poems, as their basic form — the run-on sentence that drops elements of normal syntax as it seems spoken in a “white heat” — is both not very beautiful to read, and not nearly as gregarious, image-laden or charming as his New American models — O’Hara in “Meditation In An Emergency” and Ginsberg in his major early works such as the confesional “Kaddish.” Nor do they seem to have anything contained within them that society is necessarily suppressing (Berg is not being “suicided by society,” and he has no counter-culture to expose) nor philosophically resonant, and so one wonders whether a craft-obsessed poet — whether Basho or Williams — would have been able to find profundity in the pseudo-profundity of “Of”: “That death is what you cannot do that death is what you cannot be that death is not the opposite of nothing.” (24) Porno Diva Numero Uno is more successful, as it takes as its central theme an imaginary relationship between the author and Marcel Duchamp around the time he was constructing his final work Etant donnés [1946-66] (housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, from which city Berg edits and publishes the American Poetry Review). But once again, Berg’s form stumbles, as even interesting speech seem compromised by the poet _making excuses_ for the language by applying — even where a dialogic contrast seems necessary — elements of his “signature style,” the run-on: “…I could name anything just by touching it but it was only after a period of disgust with visual art with the quality of distance it depends on that I decided — and this was the only reason for my decision — to do some of my things so the idea was touch not art how would you like to eat an apple drink a glass of wine if you didn’t have hands anyhow put a bicycle wheel and a stool together black white and you’ve got the wildness of an impossible combination combined you almost don’t know what to do with it touch look spin sit eat what? so I’m like a blind artist I _am_ a blind artist a man with no ideas only the memory of that early lesson'” (13) Porno Diva — as its flashy title suggests — seems framed as a deep, candid investigation of eroticism of the cheap suburban brand, but while Battaille is clearly the godfather, here, Berg doesn’t make many of his own investigations — very few images, digressions, infatuations, etc. seem particularly inspired by Berg’s sexual imagination. Though an interesting image may point one somewhere in that direction (“…in our age two removes from the viewer first the door then the wall then herholding the puny lamp of orgasm up there dream of faceless leather…” [66]), for the most part it seems Berg is undecided whether to be Duchamp’s Boswell (though much of Duchamp’s material seems taken from common sources), the hectic but image-dry visionary of Halo, or a collagist of art-related non-sequiturs. Berg seems to get focused when he introduces genuinely odd unliterary matter that intrigues him, such as the long section on the mating habits of Rhinoceri, in which the sentences become suddenly rather narrative, not to mention sickly tittilating. Perhaps that is a lesson, for though Berg calls himself an “apostle of the ordinary” (27), one wonders why he opts for the ecstatic, fireworks mode in his writing when the material is so plain.

Original ending:

— it’s as if Arthur Rimbaud were trying to construct the Drunken Boat out of the materials of Williams’s “This is just to say,” or Jackson Pollock were trying to fill a large abstract canvas with his children’s shoelaces. Both ideas have their appeal — as does Berg’s work, which if anything seems honestly in love with poetry and language — though the fruits might just seem a bit thin for the amount of writing involved.

Charles Bernstein, Republics of Reality: 1975-1995
(Sun & Moon, 2000)

At once the most controversial and popular, most accessible and yet most difficult, of the “Language” poets, Bernstein is also the writer of that group who strove early on to experiment with both extremes of these newly discovered methods, whether it be in the use of the word in its isolated, utopian expressivity, or in the plain phrase at it operates in daily life to convey our most banal thoughts. This collection of long out-of-print chapbooks — none of these poems have appeared in any of Bernstein’s many breatkthrough volumes, such as Islets/Irritations (1983) or Dark City (1994) — provides a unique overview of his career, meanwhile adding to the range of his impressive canon of major and minor (sometimes upsettingly so) works. If one associates “Language” poetry with the non-referential, the unemotive, and fetishization of textual form and the language of theory over that of speech — in other words, opaque writing — one will be immediately surprised with the opening poem from the 1976 volume “Parsing”, titled “Sentences,” practically a litany of anxieties, attitudes and stuttering intensities, produced by the need to be social: “I feel too dependent. / I feel no sense of myself. / I continually need reassurance. / I feel she won’t really express her feelings. / I feel shut out. / I can project everything and be reassured of nothing. / I am constantly feeling left. / I see in her silence and distance the same fear and pain I have.” (20) If this poetry is defiantly “un-poetic” — the lyric subject, nor the lyric whooosh, is nowhere to be seen, and odd instances later in the poem (“He said, ‘Bring me the holy bible with all y’alls names in it.’”) seem lifted from other works entirely — Bernstein’s restraint and confidence with this method puts him at a distance from his more technically exhibtionistic peers. His interest, then, is in language and how it is used among people, not as its used buried away in some theoretical text; this basic understanding renders such dense works as “Poem” (from “Shade,” 1978) both welcoming and discomforting, cinematic in an avant-garde way but not without its moments of satiric narrative: “a sound of some importance / diffuses / ‘as dark red circles’ / digress, reverberate / connect, unhook. / Your clothes, for example / face, style / radiate mediocrity / coyly, slipping / & in how many minutes / body & consciousness / deflect, ‘flame on flare’ / missed purpose.” (72-73) One figures Mallarme’s proto-lettrist Throw of the Dice as a founding text for Bernstein’s poetics, as each poem illustrates a basic mechanism of language’s movement as caught on the page, and yet Bernstein is democratic mirror to the aristocratic French Symbolist, and in his later poems — the short poems collected in “The Absent Father in ‘Dumbo’” and “Residual Rubbernecking” — take the project far from the austere, dystopic fragments of the early works into near-totally banal, or oppressively purple and unbeautiful, lyricism: “Such mortal slurp to strain this sprawl went droopy / Gadzooks it seems would bend these slopes in girth / None trailing failed to hear the ship looks loopey / Who’s seen it nailed uptight right at its berth” (353) Only Bernstein takes the promise of materialist poetics, and the desire to make language visible, would attempt such a distance from the norms of good taste, and though one is not sure if these later poems are the best encore to the fabulous and ambitious early chapbooks (those poems that resemble the early works but don’t attain their power seem mere improvisations, inattentively included), the volume as a whole presents as many promises as it does problems, beauties as it does strange new things, all of which there are many.

Lee Ann Brown, Polyverse
(Sun & Moon Press, 2000)

Chosen for the New American Poetry Series by Charles Bernstein, Polyverse is an exciting firsts collection by a poet who has been too long known only to the poetry communities of the Lower East Side and San Francisco. In this mammoth volume, Brown explores — with an engaging, faux innocent but candidly libidinal energy — a wide variety of forms and subject matters, ranging from “Sestina Aylene,” a buoyant love poem that is also mediation on the writing of verse, through the “Two By Fours” written in collaboration with the poet Jack Collom (reminiscent of the famous “Pull My Daisy” of Kerouac and Ginsburg) to the long unpunctuated prose meditation “A Long Sentence Distance,” a tour-de-force of grammatical hijinks and tonal shifts which excessively catalogues Brown’s loves of life. “Write the most beautiful sentence in the world and fill the whole page with its sinuous references to longhand inquisitive beauty despite always remembering you girlfriend suicided and world may not give you everything you ever wanted asking yourself should I grow up…” starts “A Long Sentence,” and with at a pace and candor not seen since O’Hara continues for six pages in a breathless romp. Play is the order of the day, here, and even the shortest poems combine humor and thoughtful insight with a need to keep afloat, such as “Poetry”: “a condensed form / of food & time.” “Dreams Listing” is a light exploration into surrealist autonomy: “A small purple bird is on its androgynous animal shelf. I ask it to step out onto my wet finger. It does and turns into a tiny man dressed in a grey suit, ” while “To Jennifer M.” is a girl-power anthem, one of many quasi-erotic poems in the collection: “Let’s make out in the girl’s room / Let me write you a wild heart[…]/ But it couldn’t surpass yours / beating so multivariously / in your left aligned margin.” Split into three parts which are sometimes divided into sub-sections, Polyverse is an encyclopedic argument for poetry at every interstitial moment of life, not to mention for “free love” with a sincerity and child-like greed that is addictive. The first part, “Her Hearsay Book,” has sections titled “a museme” — process poems that use their titles as the pools of letters from which its words are formed — and “CoLabs”, poems written in collaboration with other authors, ranging from the well-known (Bernadette Mayer) to the up-and-coming (Jennifer Moxley, Lisa Jarnot) — both “experimental” sections that don’t fail to invite the reader in for the fun. The second part “Velocity City,” contains poems written in homage to popular singers, capturing both the sexual energy and immediate satisfaction of rock music, and strongly contributes to the portrait of an ephemeral social scene that the book portrays. Like many of the most vital cultural products of its generation, Polyverse combines optimism, a collage “pop” sensibility, shameless narcissism and yet a tremendous Whitmanic generosity and gregarious social sensibility in a way rare in books of poetry today.

Miles Champion, Three Bell Zero
(Roof Books, 2000)

Each page of this young English poet’s first stateside collection (Compositional Bonbons Placate was published by Carcanet in 1996) is brimming with the conflicts of intentionality and chance, design and improvision, or perhaps simply work and fun, but not in drawn-out meditations so much as by well-honed linguistic breaks, taking the project of the Surrealist explosion of the veils of reality to the level of the word. Champion takes his lead from the American Language poets, and his poems sometimes resemble, page for page, works by Bernstein, Di Palma, Andrews and Coolidge, but his attention to this heritage — for him an overseas import rather than “native” — operaties as an engaged criticism of the slumberingly conservative nature of English poetry in the century of modernism. But rather than take “innovation” as his guiding principle, Champion creates an entire culture or sensibility that, for all of its completeness and, at times, lyrical coherence (the metrical regularities of the quasi-narrative “Clovis,” for example, greet aesthetic closure at every step), strikes always in the other direction, or as many “other” directions as can be contained in these careful, spare poems: “Signs the ever / Water & wine to form an oblong cut-off / Or baffle at social what’s / That is, in Hegelian terms, the scarf cigar / A man is than made / I think ex-Parisian liver suit or difference / Perfumes the harder focus / Road or dog brains rise / Light is eat / You is in pellet-type pole / The clearing colour sort of adding the twig / & I found a kind of digital dried dill / Stick […] (untitled, 15) Champion rigorousness, adeptness with staccato meters, and learnedness measure up against any in the Language camp, especially during their “heroic” phase, but because he doesn’t cling to the principle of author as originator, or even copyrighter, of his words or works — such that a Romantic or individualistic strain creeps in (this has affected a number of second-generation Language poets) — he is able to focus on the central, universal concern, which is to make readers see and hear words. His near-utopic faith in this project can bring on a Symbolistic, quasi-religious undercurrent: “The nod / dis- / members the / tactile / echo of / a solipsistic / gesture. Diffuse / summa-. I / mean, to / provide you / with layers. (Target / fit / mists.) I / was in / the twenty- / four-hour / metaphor, laundering / an intense / & crystalline / hush.” (“Finishing Touches,” 45) However, for all of his graceful maneuvering among the most difficult postmodern practices, the spirit of community always peeps through in the generous imagery and the sheer pleasure in perfoming language: “Candour disposes the lustre / tinctures for what chance / the person’s mount or invisible taipliece / free brochurettes impressing the indefinite fold […]” (“Poem,” 66). Though a slender 68-pages long, the poems in Three Bell Zero will remind everyone of what it felt like to read poems for the first time, with excitiment and a sense of belonging and purpose.

Dominic Cheung, Drifting
(Green Integer, 2000)

As Cheung writes in the Forward to his first American collection, these poems ring with notes of “a sense of the diaspora, a misplacement of time and space, and a feeling of helplessness regarding fleeting life and love.” (i) Living in the United States since 1967, the Taiwanese-born Cheung had already published two volumes of poetry and one volume of prose in his early twenties. He proves himself, in translating his own work into English (all from a 1986 collection called Drifters), to have a subtle and pleasant ear for off-rhymes and the effect of simple vocabulary and syntax, no doubt informed by the Western tradition of translations from Asian languages, but not anxious or ironic about it. The opening poem, “Fragrant Herbs by the Mountain Stream,” effectively builds up the mythological tone centered around the history of a Tibetan knife he received as a gift, a history resonant of death and, perhaps, of cultural revenge against colonial China: “But the Han Chinese brough in liberation and suppression, / Modernization and pollution, / Recovery and hatred, / Tearing out the heart of the green, green plain. // Vaguely I hold this Tibetan knife in my palm, / No one knows of my martial skill.” (16-17) “Love Poem of Tea” — a short poem that flirts with ballad meters while never straying from the softer tones of “Oriental” free verse — begins a series of poems centered around the tea ritual: “Let your dryness inside me / Softly uncoil and stretch; / Let me dissolve / Imperceptibly, your tension,” (18) he writes, the masculine ending “stretch” and feminine “tension” creating a deft half-rhyme that suggests, as well, the subtle workings of gender in a poem in which the male protagonist imagines himself as a bowl of tea. Spring and autumn seem, for Cheung, the seasons of the melancholic wanderer, as his most resonant moments come in describing them: “In the fiction and reality of flower seasons / To search for a good friend / Transcending language and age / Remains an heroic quest, and an illusion.” (41) Cheung seems to resemble, in this way, the Eliot of “Journey of the Magi” more than the wintry, “Anglo-Saxon” Pound of Cathay, and at times Cheung’s taste in abstractions also suggest Eliot, though his subtle ear is sometimes unable to completely salvage a pile-up of loose sentiments: “Though the same season and weather prevail / The country never ceases changing / There are themes of passion, and of indifference; / Though the same person and personality remain / Stars and events keep mutating / There are plots of joy, and of sadness. / Since departure and reunion remain unpredictable / Loneliness is conspicuous.” (44) But Cheung is less a philosopher than a social and political exile, a wanderer on American shores who is unsure not only of his own identity but that of his home country, stuck in its own limbo. His melencholy, passion, and the complexity of his situation are finely expressed in this group of poems: “Endless drifting, wandering among time, / As it thickens with the midnight dew/ […] Self, the self, to be identified! / Nation, the nation, to be recognized! / Life, a life to be realized! / Country, a country, to become strong!” (59)

Frances Chung, Crazy Melon
(Wesleyan, 2000)

Chung died in 1 990 at the age of forty, leaving behind several different plans for collections of her work — manuscripts titled “Crazy Melon” and “Chinese Apple,” with several poems repeated between them — along with collections assembled for fellowship and book submissions and poems that were published but didn’t appear in either. In “Crazy Melon,” the earlier manuscript, Chung captures something of the crepuscular underside of Chinatown culture in the seventies and eighties; as Lew mentions in the Afterword, she is like the flaneur figure, composing poetic “miniatures” that at once participate in and conflict with the acquisitiveness of souvenirs shoppers and amateur Orientalists: “the gypsy men with pocket full of holes / count their slippery fistful of coins / five six times to pass the time / living day to day by the grace of god / walking nowhere seeing no one thing / but eliot images of youth forsaken in bar mirrors / watching boxing matches on glary black and white screen / deus ex machina” (“bread”, 1 6) At other times, these poems hone some of their anxiety and alienation on the objectification of being “Chinese” in Chinatown, and those poems that convey this anger with complexity, the poems ring with rich, expressive, and in many ways communal, ironies: “Neon lights that warm no one. How long / ago have we stopped reading the words / and the colors? On Saturday night, / the streets are so crowded with people / that to walk freely I have to walk in / the gutter. The visitors do not hear / you when you say excuse me. They are / so busy taking in the wonders of Chinatown.” (untitled, 9) While Chung’s poems do not display a great virtuosity of technique, the carefulness she pays to rhythms and effects recalls some of the intensity of early Williams as he developed his own techniques from scratch. The first version of Chung’s poem beginning “do you remember when it seemed the whole world / was closed,” for example, is unlike any other in the book as it explores some counter-intuitive linebreaks and rhetorical juxtapositions, suggesting a deep engagement with the words that is parrallel to the carefulness she takes in recording Chinatown life (including her own: “Where is the cockroach who left / its footprint on my bowl). In contrast, some of the later, more “accomplished” poems in “Chinese Apple” seem to succumb not only to some of the Orientalist tonalities the younger Chung would have dismissed or scolded, but to more normative poetics; consequently, as she was travelling in Mexico and elsewhere at the time, the poems are less documentarian than lyrical. Lew’s afterword is sure to set the tone for Chung scholarship in the future, with deep readings of the complexes of marketplace objectification of minority cultures and the intensity of being in the subject, or observer-observed, position; this is coupled with a description of the manuscripts and editing process that helps readers along as they enjoy the honest, generous and often very beautiful work of this under-recognized poet.

Clark Coolidge, Alien Tatters
(Atelos, 2000)

Coolidge’s latest collection of long poems — hot on the heels of his massive group of loopy lyrics from The Figures, On The Nameways — takes the reader to a delicately upsetting space which seems run by the evil twin of Descarte’s god, replacing every object in the room until, like in a swoon, one falls squarely into the lush language: “Just kind of a nice frying person. The rest was on the latch moved over. I could just see a foot or threat of one because my head was lying on my head. A bit. Then another weighted hand, sort of spoollike and in spots and dashes. Gaming room with a spread to it.” (72) “Puzzle Faces” is framed like a discovery narrative, an air of mystery being created by the author’s subjunctive sense of meaning and lack of agency as he/she, in a partly lotus-eater state, tries to avoid panic and indecision: “There is something heavy being lifted like a blot from the paper. Are you all prepared? There will be little fun in thin rooms. Might have to barter for favors. This is an uneven clime. I’ll have to eat when I can, there being no rooms for it here. Where purest night is considered a sort of vitamin not just anyone should ingest. I watch the lights popping out all the way down the cabin. There must be creatures here who would overlead the populace, just a feeling.” (140) However, like the other four long prose pieces in this book, it soon breaks down into his idiosyncratic stand-up-parataxis comedy mode, and so rather than follow though, Beckett-like, on the implications of its shady premises, the work becomes a play of surfaces on which anything can strike from a number of angles (“I can’t believe the underwear that comes with America”), though always returning somehow to that discovering voice: “Lower on the block was half a chicken. There may be people here who roam, but they are not the semblables. They are mildly warm and senseless. I have to send away and enclose my vocabulary. I am small and that is my name, ‘Small'” (145) As Coolidge writes in the Afterword, he was very attentive to reportings in the papers of UFO sightings and alien abductions, and had a “huge desire to participate somehow. If I couldn’t go, then perhaps at least I might learn to speak the language, and use it to take myself further in, or out, to what?” (199) The long first poem, “Alien Tatters,” takes up this theme most strongly, seeming to describe what happens among these creatures, though they never seem to escape his head: “At first there was so much light in the room with me that I thought it must be the dog. But no. Okay, but I will explain that the grass was green. They gave me the kind of Jello where it still came in a set. Then I got launched somehow and let’s forget all about ceilings. When I couldn’t see what was below the eyes I always breathed heavily in short pants. But I’m not even sure about the eyes. I can’t even see the eats.” (63) But speaking this language — as challenging and seemingly whimsical as trying to learn dolphin mating calls — seems to have been Coolidge’s desire since his early minimal poems (in “Space” and “General Electric”) through his bee-bop Kerouac prosody (in “Sound as Thought”) and his other long prose works (“Book of During,” etc.). That he decides on a quasi-science fiction theme for his latest book — though one thoroughly absent of technological fetishism and/or the humanist reclamation of weirdness and otherness (cf. Kinsella’s The Visitants) — is not so unusual given the sheen of philosophical depth that popular culture and digital technology, not to mention the freakish alienation talk shows grant to panopticized suburban life, have given the genre. While Coolidge may not be for everyone — one has to really be able to get over long works with no significant “themes,” linear narrative or apparent correlation with social realities to read him — this is a thoroughly enjoyable book and unlike anything else one will find on the shelves this year.

Clark Coolidge, On The Nameways
(The Figures, 2000)

Like Ashbery in his recent “Girls on the Run,” Coolidge indulges in fantasies of serious play among grownups, creating, in this long series of short poems (for which there will, presumably, be a Volume II), a landscape in which words themelves become characters, suggest psychological dimensions, and in the end depart having pleased, perverted or deceived: “In the Land of Oo Bla Dee / stooping distance from the Renal Tailpiece / wore the uniform to the very edge / clasping of the mudguard // Progress Hornblower was a liar […] // But there’s a lowline limiter / and Jimmy Semester is lifting it / riffs and breaths all hauled away / a general snuffing a total rolling / just no end to these shifting witnesses […]” (“A Roll of Candy Dueling,” 42) There is something that is not so much anti-intellectual but defiantly slap-happy about the way Coolidge uses language, and it’s not because he always quite sure what he’s doing (as he freely admits): “The Pillgollick has soiled himself again / stop fishing for end rhymes / would you paint beer cans? / I laugh at myself in Backwardsland / is there a brain at the end of this line? / Tsathoggua!” (“Dashiell Gorky,” 64). If the Americans could not be given credit for having invented Surrealism, Coolidge proves that the basic premises of automatism — separated from Freudian symbolism and card-carrying Marxism — still thrum as the undertone to our mutually scrambled, consumerized and even infantalized, consciousnesses, as he takes his digitized bee-bop prosody — there’s a touch of Kerouac still here but the method is clearly paranoic — to the people in witty, electric doses: “The Indian on the penis / the sign of the only stable seating / in this country // BRAP / but it seemed like to me it wasn’t / as hot as it had been / the porcelien fart had a flame embossed […] / an umbilical wallet it was / the engine on my father’s hands / (bent).” (“Kink,” 13) The cumulative effect is of hearing a quirky, jazz-suffused, horny, literate, art-induced, troubled, lazy, friendly, rhythmically polyglot, Stein-bobbled, cranky and constantly energized mind-at-play, scribbling while watching an old video on the television. Fans of Coolidge might be disappointed that On the Nameways doesn’t extend beyond the exciting, nearly hallucinogenic writing of his earlier collections of short poems, such as Solution Passages and Sound as Thought, and at times doesn’t rack up its effects the way it could — the more minimal poems, for instance, suggest Creeley, but Coolidge fails to go for the kill with a stunning finish — but for newcomers to this important American poet, this is a great, mostly entertaining, place to start.

Kevin Davies, Comp.
(Edge Books, 2000)

“What gets me is / the robots are doing / my job, but I don’t get / the money, / some extrapolated node / of expansion-contraction gets / my money, which I need / for time travel.” So Davies sets the tone in his long-awaited follow-up to Pause Button (Tsumani, 1990?), somewhere between the ridiculous of having aspirations, the sense of survivor’s guilt in a world of indifferent social and economic commerce, the oddness of feeling one has a job and that it should be “fulfilling” — indeed, of having a value-system at all. Davies’ poetics derive from the cross-roads of “projective” speech-based verse — his challenging, never imprecise cocktail of alternating line-lengths, swift-moving fragments and page-splattered stanzas are its noticeable marks — and language poetry, which unapologetically divorces the fragment from constraints of organic form, plunging each unit of the poem — rhythm, word, punctuation — into the realm of social critique. What strikes one is the elegance he brings to project; not a line is wasted, not a “white space” trampled on by some ego-driven drive to sully emptiness with authorial presence: “Yet / what if there is a perfectly natural / form, and god wants us to kiss it and talk dirty?” (49) The long central poem, “Karnal Bunt”, is a sequence of single-page arrangements hanging on the presence of the dot, the period; like a Calder mobile, each one seems just tenuous and balanced enough to maintain it tensions. But Davies isn’t one to fetishize aesthetic moments, as each line is spurred on its incisive, cerebral comedy that would fail on HBO but cuts to the heart of the post-leftist, cerebral literary community from which he emerges. “An edited Scotch ambiance of translated Chinese reads to itself” would not bring down the house at Comedy Central. “Untitled Poem from the First Clinton Administration” takes the project one step further, adding the note of duende — a sort of heatedness that runs up against his constructivist leanings — as a stream of melancholic invective aimed at the NAFTA-flattened globe and its promise and pretensions: “They don’t care about the details but fuck with the structure and they’ll crush your spine / A shell of other people / Reflowered / Pressed into action / Figures of demented nostalgia / With diplomas, credit histories / Unbridgeable gaps where their eyes should be / The cramp as such / Because it is written / Veins in the forearms of Satan / Like unanswered mail in a bag of donuts / The entire earth / Trembles in the throes of its decision-making process” (85). Davies humor — like the best of the counter-culture sixties — aims from the darker corners of the room, shattering the false light of economic progress and globalization; nonetheless, he is not without light himself, bursting from the clashes of social contradiction and a not-defeated utopic urge: “Why be sad? / Kissinger will die / before they can upload him.” (49) Comp. is one of the best books of poetry to have emerged from the alternative American poetry scene in years, and is sure to revive many a reader’s faith in the possibilities of poetry to speak, construct, goad, amuse, teach and, incidentally, survive the absurd, valueless stasis of the present time.

Stacy Doris, Paramour
(Krupskaya, 2000)

A freewheeling manual on the intoxications of love may seem a poor career move in a day when Victorian mores and sexual disease have sent everyone willingly back to a public, post-60s sexual civility. Doris faces this challenge by going over the top, with an excessive, polymorphic romp through the many permutations love can inhabit, and in the meantime finds that off-stage, rarely-seen space where aesthetics and titillation meet in lascivious embrace. As she writes in her introduction, her task — influenced by the “current technological unconscious’ restructuring of space… in which locations and identities shift with radical illogic” — was to explore, primarily through palindrome, the “demonstration and distortion of many kinds of lyric verse” and “human sexual response.” What results is something both mythic (in the spirit of the Satyricon), medieval (with its gothic complexity) and somewhat late-Enlightenment (in the manner of Sade, exhausting all possibilities but that of God’s existence). _Paramour_ is a landscape strewn with figures — ballads, eclogues, prose poems — from the cultural tradition who meet again and again in a large box of mirrors to revisit their amours: “Pipe drives the kids wild, / Piping sprinkles bright goo, / In a cloud of chewy fluid, / And Pipe laughing sing to all: / ‘Pipe a game about a toy!’ / So kids pop with happy guns. / ‘Pipey peek in fun again;’ / So shoot too to tickle here.” (4) Like Lee Ann Brown’s _Polyverse_ (Sun & Moon), Paramour skids through a variety of formal poses, transmitting its carnal logic through pun and prose, epigraph and song — no stone left unturned in its quest for momentary satisfaction: “Get all fuzzy Gets all mixed / when your body feels so rich / and in me But in its / so fully seeps all destructs / may a new / a hand’s more than / in all, more in!” (7) “A Four-Tongued Version” from the chapter “How to Love” is a beautiful long sequence of shorter, quatrain poems that are like versified fortune-cookies, each one either a sharp, beguiling puzzle, some kernel of “wisdom”, or a telescoped narrative: “While she slept / he suffered her sister. / Whose weather / could be nicer?” (20) Included is a calendar of valentines — one poem for every day of February — , a manual of love and war based on the writings of Sun Tzu, several pages that seem like games (her last full-length book of poems, _Kildare_, took place inside a video game), all of which walks the cusp of this book’s question, which is: can form itself be the only content, or must it ever point to a “moral,” ideological stance, or philosophical pose to justify itself? Doris’s book is both refreshingly free of the sentimentality of love but, as well, free of much of psychology most of us — in less extreme moments — identify with it.

Lyn Hejinian, Happily
(The Post-Apollo Press, 2000)

This small book by Hejinian presents a linked series of pleasures, pleasures that are not corrupted by over-arching theoretical significance imposing its will on the structure, though, indeed, a “theory” seems to be at its base. That is to say, there is an “ambient” quality to this work, an attempt to provide the “mental furniture” (it Satie’s phrase) to daily living and thinking which approaches as from a distance, but a distance that is neither exterior or interior, but is to be found in language. That it appear “far” is mostly a quality of the measured incompleteness of the phrasing, which can be contrasted to the overdetermined quality of the aphorism or rhymed couplet. The sentences have a self-containment — they can be read individually for their contents and aporias — but fall, when taken on a long-view, into a pragmatist’s discourse of viewing thought in its moment-by-moment self-creation: “_Now_ is a blinding instant one single explosion but somehow some part of it gets accentuated / And each time the moment falls the emphasis of the moment falls into time differently / No sooner noticed no sooner now that falls from something / Now is a noted conjunction / The happiness of knowing it appears” (27) The reader is guided along by a rhythmic certainty that doesn’t fall into a regularity suggesting “pace” or a normative meter; likewise, “conclusions” appear — “Now is a noted conjunction” for example — which can spiral off into an entire philosophical thesis (suggesting closure) but which, in obedience to the method of the poem, leads only to the next moment and the promise — the best promise of poetry — of further discoveries, of “possible futures”. (“Dailiness” seems to be some aspect of this, that one should not create thought or linguistic structures that could not, in fact, survive the contingencies of day, whether these be impositions on one’s reading time or the hierarchies created when values are too much analyzed, too much banished to the linearities of, say, academic discourse.) “There is no ‘correct path’ / No sure indication / It is hazy even to itself” she writes, echoing, in a sense, Dante, but subverting in some ways the entire mythos of the “bildungsroman” and the promise of metaphysical certainty, in which humans are banished to the second-tier, “mundane” task of the approach to essence and the ideal. Some lines read like counter-arguments to the accusation of relativity; Hejinian opts for the approach that pragmatism relieves one not just of final vocabularies but also of any myth that contingent values fail in their relationship to the “eternal verities”: “From the second moment of life, one can test experience, be eager to please, have the mouth of a scholar, hands never at rest, there is no such thing as objectivity but that doesn’t mean everything is unclear and one doesn’t fail to choose the next moment for a long time.” (30) The poem ends beautifully, and it sounds like a beginning, subsuming within itself both Bergsonian notions of time as a tactile, immeasurable quantity but whose recognition is revelatory, and the Marcusian argument that uncontaminated “pleasure” is a quality worth fighting for in the economic/political nexus, though difficult to deduce freed of the needs of capital: “No, happily I’m feeling the wind in its own right rather than as of particular pertinence to _us_ as a windy moment / I hear its lines leaving in a rumor the silence of which is to catch on quickly to arrange things in preparation for what will come next / That may be the thing and logically we go then it departs.” (39)

Adeena Karasick, Dyssemia Sleaze
(Talonbooks, 2000)

Canadian poet Karasick continues her pop-inflected, extroverted and libidinal investigations into a deconstructive, pun- and anagram-motivated poetics in her most visually compelling, if somewhat overdone, book. A high-end production — one of the few books of poetry to boast full color, glossy pages through most of its contents — Karasick uses photographs, drawings, multiple typefaces, the classic spatial accoutrements of “projective verse” and just about the kitchen sink to propel her words across, under and on top of the page. The sequence “Menaheh Yehuda” treats the syllable as an erotically charged node or synapse, as each word is jarred forward by the phonemic contours of the preceding, trashing any notions lyrical cleanliness and opting for the morally “obscene” literary enactment of flesh-against-flesh: “And, as normative tilts ooze in a choreography of tropic / blot clotters / a cotillion of many cullers, isolata eros swigs in / blunt pulses & skins the surface of / her dimpled limits / fermented in riggish gashings / grasped in spronged frottage ruffled fetchings / fraught with hâute conduits.” (23) “Improbable Grammars V” takes the “wall” (or, at times, specifically Jerusalem’s Western Wall) as its theme, a center around which Karasick assembles, with a Benjaminian nod, tons of quotes and images involving historicity and reading. Though this seems the most labor-intensive section of the book, it is probably the least successful, as a series of what have become postmodern cliches — the language of fissures, simulteneity, non-linear and paratactic grammar, virtuality, multiple identities, puns using parenthetical le(tt)ers and s/lashes, dislocations, etc. — abound, and the cumulative effect of the clashing color images and attention-deficit typefaces — technicolor dreamcoats for the prose of the unadorned letter — begin to strike one as a good idea gone awry, or going nowhere in particular. Some of the most difficult passages to physically read don’t yield much news, though often the contrast of theoretical language and the slap-happy graphemes conspire to create some intriguing hermeneutic whirlpools: “Exposing the fullness of speech, s/he mouths (muths) all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and becomes the writ(h)ing, the wound, the word. S/he swallows, devours and rends the world apart and at the same time (as a s/cite for ingesting, assimilating) becomes one with the wor(l)d thus, with a collapse of interiority, s/he transgresses herself and becomes an assemblage of surface disruptions.” (56) Perhaps, as an example of tossing everything against the “wall” of the page and seeing what comes back, “Grammars” is successful as an exhibitionistic, youthful, and near-hysterical display of ambition and desire, though a more thoughtful, specific experiment, with the goal of aesthetic solutions for the new technolgoies (in the manner of MacLuhan’s books, or the Coup de Des) might have been more satisfying, and perhaps monumental. However, Karasick’s energy can be infectious, and Dyssemia Sleaze is unlike any book of poetry published recently, turning its back on (and turning over) the more conventional, nearly sanctified values of both the lyric and the visual poem (mired in its own traditions), and in the meantime looking toward the future.

John Kinsella, Visitants
(Bloodaxe Books, 2000)

Loosely centered around the theme of space aliens invading our comfortable, however empty, environments — whether as cigar-shaped specks falling across the landscape, or in the form of dialogic “”others”” with whom we commune in awkward, somewhat “”experimental,”” tongues (“”Visitant Eclogue””) — Kinsella’s 19th book of poetry fully demonstrates that this ambitious, talented young Australian poet shows no signs of letting up. The Kinsella oeuvre is becoming massive — in 1998, both a 350-page Poems 1980-1994 appeared, along with a volume of new work, The Hunt and other poems, and he threatens to become both the Whitman and the Spenser (with his emphasis on the “”new pastoral””) of his country in one fell swoop. Here, he takes full advantage of what has been dubbed the “”natural surrealism”” of the Australian landscape, writing of people who appear troubled by some itch, some voice they’ve heard in the backyard, or something that appeared only upon reflection, or maybe in an old snapshot, that upon closer analysis could only have been sign of a “”visitant””: “”I’d swear it wasn’t there before I lifted / the camera — a Pentax Super — I looked / directly at what’s now the picture. / And I’m looking at it now — that 2001-like plinth / rising out of the field, defying / sky and fenceline and bales of leaden cloud.”” (“”The Plinth that Haunts the Photograph, 25) But these shadowy “”others”” are, it becomes clear, an alternate version of ourselves, or at least the creations of our minds in response to some lack, some need for meaning in the “”postmodern”” world: “”Mother so wanted to believe / in the signifying craft, / the One to which all others / would call in time of need, / the warm singularity.”” (“”The Three Laws of Robotics, 29) While mating the dazzling language of science fiction with concurrent meditation on the need for this belief, Kinsella is not always lost in the stars, a certain knowing eyewink irony peeking through. “”Skylab in the Theory of Forms,”” for instance, is an autobiographical romp on how space flight and the awesome metaphors it created affected his young eyes, while “”The Bermuda Triangle,”” a short riff on the vacation home of “”Patrick Rafter, saviour of Australian Tennis,”” takes pot-shots at questions of nation and colonialism in the world of Baudrillardian simulacra: “”… as if Play- / Station IS living, as if a package holiday / has you hungering after the wealth / of the pyramids, concentrated to an echoing / point of ambiguity, like the limitations / of radar, and re-runs of The Day the Earth / Stood Still…”” (49) Kinsella’s lines are very loose, his descriptions baroque, like middle-period Williams on speed, and though nearly prosey they are never flat or mannered. However, when he moderates his tendency for the charismatic run-on with a verse form, like the sestina or the sonnet garland, or attempts a play on a classical form, like the eclogue, or, in the other extreme, a pomo language-salad (“”Dispossession””), he seems a bit out of place — he has little spirit of “”play”” that make these forms work at their best, and one feels he’s showing off. But, as poems like “”nature morte, Oh Rhetoric!”” — a long improvisation on Cicciolina, Joseph Brodsky, The Island of Doctor Moureau, the writing of one of his own earlier poems (which infects this one like a virus) and the “”desensitized environment”” of modern life in which the body “”is not that frightening”” — demonstrate, when the Kinsella word-machine is at full throttle, he’s able to amaze you like few poets today.

Andrew Levy, Paper Head Last Lyrics
(Roof Books, 2000)

Levy sets out upon his poetic project with an ethics of observation and agitation, setting out with no definable goals but with a quasi-Buddhist, quasi-materialist calling to be in the world, moment-by-moment, recording its contradictions and, when there is beauty, its necessity and how it is learned: “A surfer in methodological self-consciousness / forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting / to wipe clear tihs screen with / some cloth of disparity / What we will try to become, that labor / curious about each / Not curious about God, or sexual mores.” (69) The idiom in the long title poem which takes up most of this book is somewhere between Williams’ Asphodel and the fluid, polyglot and cross-spliced rhetorical strategies of Barrett Watten’s Progress; Levy never sounds entirely like he’s “speaking” to one singular figure, like a Flossie, but this poem-including-history seems poignant in a way that suggests the Modernist, never entirley submitting itself to the rigors of method or foregrounded structure. Indeed, Levy is willfully “transcendental,” not minding to point the eye up toward a “God” or an ideal otherness, even if it is one he doesn’t choose to name: “Did you write the great line to take everyone / to another earth,” (69) he writes, and later, as if turning directly on his Language poet heritage: “A philosophy of pissing off the other side / abandoning the secular car / making and unmaking time.”(74) Later, however, he takes shots at what might be called the subtone of transcendental philoshophy in mainstream, class-defined American culture: “A memory of light / The turd of transcendence establishes a hillside estate: / Transcendence Hill Club / Croquet is the game of choice for its ladies / All the members are ladies at / Transcendence Hill” (52) The tone is primarily meditative, but occasionally the “news” breaks in (not to mention the occasional Andrews-esque obscenity-as-direct-address) to trouble the isolation of this mind. The worst one can say about the poem is that its politics, when they take center-stage, seem undeveloped; one section riffs on potential lines of a Nixon biography (as if Nixon, and later Kissinger, were the figures most needing debunking in the world today), and some targets for a sort of name-calling include the GOP and the Democratic National Convention (“Troglodytes and Neanderthals”), the NRA, and the military, while passing up the contradiction inherent in some of the Protestant “good-works” philosophy of the poem — the Poundian “make it new” — and their linkages to the basic power structures of these institutions. But as a whole, “Paper Head Last Lyrics” along with the beautiful essay “An Indespensible Coefficient of Esthetic Order” — with their guerilla attacks on the problematic rise of “virtual realities,” and hence virtual moralities, in a de-spiritualized America — presents the image of a complex, invested mind at play among words, and with a poetic ability that is rare. Levy, with his very readable, honest and public new book, is one more proof of the continuing validity of writing in the modernist tradition today.

Enrique Linh, Figures of Speech
(Host Publications, 2000)

Figures of Speech presents, in an all-too brief format, the life of an interesting, unsparing poet; indeed, the format of the posthumous “selected poems” often provides the illusion of a completeness to one’s life, but a reading of Lihn’s work demonstrates how this struggle with a sense of wholeness seemed not to be resolvable even by the prospect of death. Lihn was one of Chile’s foremost poets, yet, despite a collection published by New Directions in 1978 (The Dark Room and Other Poems) and an earlier translated volume from 1969, he has not acquired the reputation in the States of his countryman Pablo Neruda. This careful, liberal selection from the poet’s first pamphlet to his deathbed poems (but not including his political poems and long poems such as “Written in Cuba”) by Lihn’s friend and translator David Oliphant, goes far to redress this situation. The opening “Portrait” describes the poet at his most bitterly reduced but most youthful as well, a self-description that rivals such works as “The Waste Land” or Rimbaud’s “Seven Year Old Poets” (and, even earlier, Nerval’s writing ) as an image of the fractured sensibility taking on the ancient mission of the bard in the modern world: “Poet from head to toe / a man of bitten fingernails, convulsive, neurotic, / orphan of the eagles, father to his own increase, […] / his soul rarely diminutive, / appeared on going away, / furious in his happiness, joyless in his grief, / abortion of his very chaste orgasm, / the gardener’s dog… […] / his secret transparent not by choice, / obscure from convergent intents.” (3) It is these “convergent interests” that mark the site of the ambiguous self shoring its ruins against the request for identity, public or poetic (or, conversely, shoring its sense of identity against the request for plural universality. This image of the writer is revised in the later, more complex poem “Literature,” where he considers not just himself but his South American countryman in their quixotic mission, corrupted by it is not just by self-delusion but the mundane nature of social recognition (he is almost Artaudian in his iconoclastic reduction-to-absurdity, but humbled by his unheroic, bureaucratic muzzle): “When I find myself around other writers / we do little more than speak like good or bad functionaries / of Literature […] / When I run across such stars of the first order / and those peacocks shine with the necessary prudence / I’d like to invite them to puke, because writing as well as they / is to perform the blandest task. When I come upon myself / facing the empty page I think of peacocks / and try at least not to show off, but I write / to the extent of my hatred for literature, / and to young authors I would like to yell / cut it with the farce, you too will enter the business / because literature is the softest of jobs […].” (41) His sonnets — which Oliphant translates in their exact rhyme scheme thought the original Spanish is en face (these can be awkward, as when he breaks the word “chorus” into “cho-/ rus” for the sake of rhyme) — states the case more poignantly, conjuring the image of a man just barely being kept afloat by words: “What would I be without my words / without my signs of impotence,”(55) and earlier, in which he imagines meeting his double, he concludes that he walks “in vain / behind his very self minus his literature.” (49) (Ironically, one of the poems Oliphant translated was lost in its original Spanish, and Linh had to reconstruct a Spanish “original,” included in this collection.) That the occupation of words, of naming, is growing ever more tenuous, and that syntax’s value is fading among the proliferation of the values inculcated by telecommunications, is conveyed in the effective title of one poem, “Age of Data,” which concludes “data is just the opposite of God.” (39) The section “Brooklyn Monster” contains poems Lihn wrote in his travels in New York, Texas, Canada and Spain, and will, of course, evoke for American readers Lorca’s poems of “Poet in New York,” mostly through the vignette-like approach and empathy for the dispossessed they share, as in the poem “Brooklyn Monster” itself, in which he creates a frightening, expressionistic portrait of a lone rider: “The man / — if it is not a woman — dresses like a half-naked conscript, like a cadaver / they would have carried from concentration camp to the crematory oven / With feet much smaller than its destitute shoes / The woman — if it’s not a man — with white / plaster make-up running down its face / in the ritual expulsion of sex” (107). Linh’s Toronto is unlike any you will find elsewhere, but is worth reading as a contrast to the relative disinterest in mythologized “cities” in Canadian poetics. In “Europeans,” which is set in Paris, his mixed-feelings about the continent’s cultural legacy are most completely assayed; at one point he mocks a tenet of Godard’s semiotics while, later, he admits he is “wrong,” finding some value in the philosophy of surfaces, a philosophy much at odds with his Latin American (perhaps both Catholic and American Indian) need to read below the surfaces, to find correspondences. This is not to say he is unsophisticated or baffled in his outlook; in fact, he finds a way to read the paradoxes of what he experiences, such as his run-in with a European whose words contradict her own novelistic presence: “Those people that French lady those noses like / a lady’s antennas and stilettos or radars […] / We’re all dead — she repeated — even though her / wonderful legs shouted to the contrary / and her nose flitted ecstatic over tropics / with a modesty occasionally exemplary among / her transatlantic kind / stripped of excesses of / intellectual curiosity / as ever happens / when a woman of fifty travels / universally alone be she French or not […] (97).” The several poems from his deathbed are, the translator notes, among the most moving written on the subject, but as they are often more abstract they don’t often carry over well as the earlier, satirical or expressionistic ones. The title “Pain Has Nothing To Do With Pain,” for example, hints at the difficulty of translating these poems — it sounds a bit awkward, even if those words correspond directly with the original. Nonetheless, as Oliphant writes in his introduction, this is a scathing metaphysical critique of the roles doctors seem to play in prolonging the process of dying: “Perhaps doctors are nothing but experts and death — the apple / of their eyes — is a pet problem / science solves it with partial solutions, that is to say, it puts off / its undissolvable nodule sealing a pleura, to start with / It may be that I am one of those who pay anything for the procedure. (153)” The “Art and Life” section contains some of Lihn’s many poems on the visual arts, concerning such artists such as Turner and Kandinsky, but it also includes his most humble, and most affirmative, credo on art in society: “People who circle around the museum pieces / forgetful of their condition as museum pieces / and who seem, well, to ignore where they are / The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a work of art / accomplished by their artistic lavatories. // We are works of art momentarily alive.” (65) This poem, itself called “Art and Life,” envisions a unified field theory of art, speech and personhood that serves to override any neurosis about the fragmentary human self, and even death, suggesting, with a sort of nod to theories of ambience, that individuals, like art, are vessels of meaning, with the added bonus that we know something of what these meanings are.

Laura Moriarty, Nude Memoir
Krupskaya, 2000

Something of a spiritual autobiography, a pragmatist’s enunciation of feminist issues of the body and love, a screenplay for a never-to-be-made film, a sort of ambient wash (in the spirit of Stein), and a “poem including history”, Moriarty’s latest book is a mature exhibition of the powers of late modern, and perhaps early “new modern,” writing. The poem starts with what would appear to be the central theme, a reflection on the use of the nude in art and as metaphor, deriving from the privileged male gaze on the female body: “The nude is given / The nude is not a woman / Who displays a tendency to be naked / An artist keeps the whole game in mind / From her he learns / Replaced by physical presence / “With eyes shut like a bride…” (7) This relationship — often portrayed as one-sided in feminist writing, but here complicated by the fact of Moriarty’s power as an artist and creator, and hence not a spokesman for the “victim” — is torqued and turned throughout the early sections, as gender roles are troubled and estranged: “Diana puts together supsension systems beginning at 5 a.m. Energy. Apollo. The male nude. The female worker. Automobile. Moves and comes to rest. Potential movement. The machine. ‘Eyes shut like a bride..’ (Adorno) Stumbling into position. Precision. Accountability. Exhaustion is the steel of her eyes. She is a real woman. Paradise.” (11) Themes intermingle with no obvious regularity throughout the work, as it dips into reflections on Duchamp’s The Box of 1914, slavery in Haiti, Buster Keaton, Nietzsche (“Supposing truth is a woman,” from Beyond Good and Evil), Moriarty’s relationship to the late poet Jerry Estrin, and a figure called “Kim” who could be a stand-in for Theresa Cha or Myong Mi Kim (“Her name was Kim. She was named for the war.”), whose works — part history, part autobiography — Nude Memoir resembles. Like Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel, Nude Memoir has a sort of fugal quality in its relationship to names, with figures and ideas reappearing at later moments in the work, troubling the relationship to normative narrative though the urge for anecdotal telling is very strong. But unlike Lu’s book, which more clearly narrative, Moriarty’s writing is a sort of a quasi-paratactic shorthand which often breaks into “poetry,” linebreaks and all, and is perhaps weakened by a sense of stasis that one senses after reading too many clipped, telegraphed sentences, though she offers occasional commentary on what is happening: “Terrible grammar. The spelling of the murderess. Portable like poetry. Her notebook of lies. A convoluted spirit invading itself like a false idea of the soul. She stole from her victims. They all became writers. To say about her. To restate the obvious. The disappointment. The injury comes after pain. Followed by long scrolls of fiction. Women move through it. Frantic hieroglyphs. Nothing moves fast enough. Was she a mother or a monster?” (45) Perhaps this disembodied, somewhat monotone cadence is the most honest way to create a poetics that avoids the masculinity or orientalism of a single, judging perspective and the Faustian urge to horde knowledge, and the low-intensity of Moriarty’s writing, like ambient music, is pleasurable, textured and full of detail and insight such that one is pulled along in reading the book with trust and affection. It is an advancement on the modes of postmodern writing in that it is not troubled by a need to rise above it’s reader with top-down channelings of superior knowledge and radical ideology (though knowledge and ideology are present), but rather engages the reader in a competant, compelling and intelligent play of meaning and language. As Moriarty writes: “Commentary is what she provides. In the form of an amused silence.” (72)

Tom Raworth, Tottering State
(O Books, 2000)

Hot on the heals of the American publication of fellow Englishman J.H. Prynne’s Poems is the expanded edition of Raworth’s underground classic selected early poems, originally published by The Figures in 1984. Ranging from the author’s debut volume, The Relation Ship, to his major long poem Writing (not included in the original selection), Tottering State is an colorful, resonantly sunlit window on the work of a writer considered by many American poets (such as Robert Creeley) as the best living writer in England. Indeed, the American affinities — along with echoes of French poets like Pierre Reverdy — are most visible in his earlier work. At times he seems like a more cerebral, dark version of Berrigan, or maybe a departure from Ashbery of Some Trees into more formally wilder territories, but this is never to the detriment of fun, a zen-like openness, and a English rapier’s wit. His cerebral quality comes through in the precision in his choice of imagery, his modification of the moods of conversation, and the surrealist dive into absurdities arriving at just the right moment to both deepen his sentiment and render it more painterly: “now the pink stripes, the books, the clothes you wear / in the eaves of houses i ask whose land it is // an orange the size of a melon rolling slowly across the field / where i sit at the centre in an upright coffin of five panes of glass // there is no air the sun shines / and under me you’ve planted a quick growing cactus” (31, sic) The philosophical underpinnings — always that of a layman, never venturing far into “theory” unless it’s to present it as _possible_ in normal conversation — bubble to the surface of the work when least expected, as in an anecdote about a child that has eaten green crayons (which remains — like a solipsism — the same green upon reaching the other end), to the quick-stab poem “Univesity Days,” which runs in its entirety: “[this poem has been removed for further study]”. (76) Nowness, thisness, hereness, but also you-ness, I-ness and witness, are the axes around which such linked sequences as “The Conscience of a Conservative,” revolve, with such choice moments of telescoped, daily life as the following: “o / hand / make a circle // how / the wound / snaps shut.” (103) In such poems, Raworth seems as full of child-like amazement and blissful, paratactic perceptions as another New York poet, Joseph Ceravalo, though he surehandedly connects it to a private/public sense of responsibility and opinion. In the later work collected in Tottering State, he seems to have entered adolescence, as the long, slender word streams in poems such as “That More Simple Natural Time Tone Distortion,” push the once retreating poet into a more directly politicized, consequently more filmic than painterly, consideration of time. He almost illustrates Bergson’s once-radical request that we not divide time into weeks and days, but a slipstream of contingent moments: “slow / low / thump / long flame / dry / flash bur / just / move / tree browns / to south / our horse / white / no trace / of action / in memory / and fear / but this / is / clear / this area / this never / ending / song / to last / gasp / cold colours / enough / flashes / to leach him / out” (134). If such extreme forms suggest a relationship to the American Language poets, it is there, but that would be to miss the humanism in Raworth’s work, the persona he has unwittingly created for himself as benevolent, however mischeivous, tourguide to the hear and now in its many ambivalent (drag) disguises. Only he shows how interesting this this this can be.

Stephen Rodefer, Mon Canard
(The Figures, 2000)

Author of books as diverse as a celebrated translation of Villon under the pseudonym of Jean Calais (1968) to the spellbinding Four Lectures (1982), recognized by many as a distinctive masterpiece of Language writing, Rodefer has never been one to fit easily into a method or recognized “voice” — indeed, into a stable reputation. His most typical form of writing, as exhibited in several small-press books, has been the quick, though elegant, improvisational poem — inspired by the examples of everyone from Olson to O’Hara, Baudelaire to Stein — which is why this new selection of long poems from the past seven years is especially welcome. In Mon Canard, Rodefer returns again to the large canvas of Four Lectures, each of the book’s six poems exploring a distinctive style: the short, linked prose poems (a la Rimbuad’s Illuminations) of “Daydreams of Frascati:, the Williamsesque three-step in “Erasers” (which even sounds like “Asphodel” at moments) and “Arabesque at Bar”; the projective, satiric apostrophe in “Answer to Dr. Agathon”; a high-flown language-salad pun-machine in “Mon Canard”; and — in a sort of wicked inversion, signifying his embattled relationship to Language poetry itself — the quasi-constructivist stanza of Barrett Watten in “Stewed and Fraught with Birds.” This isn’t to say that Rodefer is derivative; on the contrary, he needs these forms to reign in the various tones of address exhibits and which, one senses, society will never be entirely pleased with: “The ligaments / of your phraseology / will eventually get / put to some truth test or other // and you’ll be lucky / if anyone reads / it with a big guffaw / or sneezes” (“Stewed,” 114). This poet, like the modernists he most admires, and as distinct from the determinations of postmodernist gesture, is railing for a concept of value when the old, stable ones have vanished; as a result, his use of reference resounds with the need to shore up history and knowledge against personal dissolution: “I am come to your cartop Ajax, waxing toward an invitation to an opening in some hedgerow. Our Leninist principles have toppled, to become fabulous and Sylvan once again. We are the last metaphysical activists in American nihilism. We demand a Pope from the Bronx.” (“Daydreams,” 10) In this way, he presents something of the classic “description of a struggle” (Kafka’s first short story) that is rarely seen anymore since the paranoic has overwhelmed avant-garde writing and deleted the agonic persona entirley. While some of the poems, like “Mon Canard,” can be faulted for a metrical repetitiveness, the gesture of the effort can be appreciated for erecting particular reading challenges when least expected — i.e. in the course of libidinous play and rhetorical directness. In any case, the book offers depths to language and, most importantly, the range of human feeling — from the dark to the bright, the indulgent to the ascetic — that only a writer as dedicated to the poet’s “free radical” life as Rodefer can provide.

Hung Tu, Verisimilitude
(Atelos, 2000)

“Like omelets / nations fold” writes Tu at the opening of the series “Short Subject,” and in this spare and careful book not only nations but discourses of all sorts — the personal, the ideological, the lyrical, the global, the funny and the earnest — collapse into themselves revealing both their intercontextuality and competing degrees of relevance. The opening sequence, “It’s Just Your Basic CYA (The Streets of San Francisco)” demonstrates the many virtues of Tu’s style: his precise readings public symbols enmeshed in human interactions (“Mutual Taunt Theater / a squad car rolls by / the masses: “You got any donuts” / the cops: “You got any crack” [23]), his assured sense of place in California contrasted with global corporatism (“over the table — mergers / across the mesa — maquilas” [25]), and his always poignant, yet ironic, reading of history: “in 1855, Mt. Diablo served as the summit / from which northern California and Nevada / were surveyed by army engineers / 150 years later, pickets reinforce their imagination” (23). Each of the seven medium length sequences of this book display different facets of Tu’s project, such as in “Verisimiltude,” in which he matches the public spectacle of capital with the private, responsible, somewhat damaged spectacle of a disaffected misfit: “with the installation of cameras / epistemology is really moot / the patron saint of / the illuminated porch / vintage Balzac of nineteen / ’97 democratic straw men […]/ this push cart your kingdom / this counter your moat / the action-hero genre / and juice bar explosion / power is frost and tasty / no one forgot 19 whatever / but everyone tried” (41) “Uneven Development, Uneven Poetics (Simon & Simon)” takes the local, class based concerns of “It’s Just Your Basic” to an international scale, wrapping several complex strands of thought in democratic, almost haiku-like simplicities: “China Embraces Liberalism! / consequences live in neighborhoods / but since this is literature / I’m interested in the term FOB” (50) “Dated” links several smaller fragments together into a stream of subversive aura (“There’s a little American / imperialist in every / Australian trying to / get out of its coral box” [67]), while “Short Subject”and the “Birth of Cool (Cash)” return to the fragment, and “Market Psychology” straddles both modes: “o the rally cap / Noah’s Ark school of diversity applied to Noah’s Bagel / two women a focal point over coffee and danish / her decision making process applied to tattoos” (105) Tu seems to have mastered the very short political poem, somewhat following in the line of writers like Bruce Andrews and Jeff Derksen who have made their poems lyrical channels of crushed and compressed social codes. But Tu has a facility with the lyric that these writers either lack or choose to ignore; as he takes the field of values as his subject over ideological manhandling, the tone is one of disaffection and responsibility, and of an imagination that is thoroughly disgusted with it all but able, however bitterly, to be amused. This is a remarkable book coming at a time when many younger writers are retreating to a humble, apolitical bohemianism in their effort to be conversational; Tu shows that you can have it both ways.

Darren Wershler-Henry, The Tapeworm Foundry: And or the Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination
(House of Anansi, 2000)

Taking up the call of a global poetics infused with the criss-crossing of information flow, a local poetics (centered around a Toronto as you’ve never known it) and a need to communicate beyond the surface intensity of radical form, Wershler-Henry muscles through a single-sentence poem of possibility whose only punctuation is the conjunction “andor.” Any strand of this text — a DNA fiber for the new world chaos theory — propels the reader through a corridor exquisite options and micro-narratives, like a Borges short story compacted into the moment between breaths: “[…] andor realize your imac is just a big tamagotchi andor design a transformer to use up wasted ergs of energy from excessive pressure on electric buzzers andor quit making art in order to play chinese checkers andor tattooo your poems on the back of someone else but be sure to make no spelling mistakes anor prepare to correct them in a different colour of ink andor do it all for the nookie andor delete ambiguities and then convert to specificities […]” Billed as a “list of book proposals,” Tapeworm is actually much more: a manifesto for significant and/or excessive action in a world increasingly circumscribed by middle-of-the-road politics, false notions of rationality and productivity, and the infinite hunger of a technologized economy for all the good bad (read: useless, fun, diabolic) ideas that the young, the disaffected and the inordinately talented can produce. Tapeworm’s various attacks on institutions, the bourgeois, the mainstream and closed ways of thinking are not to be ignored; this is a book that revivifies the initial burst of excitment Dadaism and other modernist forms created, but unlike much “avant-garde” work today, it is not caught up in the self-satisfying, doxical terminology of the cultural instiutions — schools, museums, even the cliques — but wants to reach out, to expand, to take no prisoners. If the work seems juvenile and “easy,” that’s because the author — who has conveniently escaped through the back door of exquisite process — has sacrificed the “difficulty” (often just confusion or a hapless shield against obviousness posing as hieratic) of much experimental poetry today. If there is an overriding metaphor to how this poem operates, it may be that of information itself; at times, even the simple construct (an advance over the conjunctivitis of much late “new sentence” work, including recent portions of The Alphabet itself) breaks down as a subset of phrases separated by “or” take over (here, in a rephrasing of Raymond Queneau’s project in [ ]: “[…] andor find ninetynine different ways to retell the story of one man accusing another man of jostling him deliberately on a crowded bus at midday but aviod all anagrams or antiphrases or alexandrines or back slang or blurbs or epentheses or gallicisms or haiku or hellenisms of litotes or logical analysis or negativities or permutatiosn or proper names or prostheses or spoonerisms or syncopes or surprise andor […].” Like all great literary works, Tapeworm presents some fundamental problems, one of which is: what is the use of all this discipline — since this is, if anything, a disciplined work (as his tournequet approach to his Oulipian cousin suggests) — in world whose only avenues for progress — personal, social, and otherwise — seem to lead inexorably into melding into the corporate whole? This book raises suspicions about everything, not the least of which is where the “author” of such a work stands. Perhaps, like in the radical performative work of Beuys and Acconci, the author is the gesture itself.