CA Conrad’s book of (Soma)tic Exercises, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon collects 27 exercises, theatrical experiments designed to generate poems, and these are followed by the poems they produced. It’s highly original, creative, but dramatic, over-the-top, showy, and a little pretentious for my tastes. They nonetheless leave a lasting sensation that is both interesting and demanding; the (Soma)tic Exercises are innovative and crucial to our art form—they both invent a new genre and help increase freedom from the double tyrannies of both the tired narrative form and short, personal lyric form. Conrad must be one of the most original practitioners of poetry forging new territory. The (Soma)tic Exercises are really works of non-poetry, non-fiction: they do not argue for a point; rather they are about Conrad’s own wisdom. Written in prose, they are pulsating with a rich body of reading knowledge, the brute force of personal honesty, and a delicately calibrated tone that results in a powerful authoritative voice. Steeped in the liquids of mysticism, herbal medicine, sexual vulnerability, and a kind of pushing against our junk culture, the poems sing. They show a general affection for the universe, yet allow the reader the experience her own alienation from that universe as it presses against her.

All of the exercises are attempts are attempts to be somatic, in the sense of how the world affects the body, and how that body’s outer walls are moved, touched, made wet or dry, colored, changed in some way, and at the end of a series of sensory inputs, a new kind of poetic language will emerge. The concepts and insights of the exercises are provocative and often profoundly moving, but loaded with ostentatious nonsense—sitting outside during a storm, a tying red string around my penis, eating only blue food one day, putting a washed penny under my tongue, etc. None of that would be bad, though, if not for the qualitative discrepancies between the exercises and the poems derived from them. The lines themselves appear to radiate naivety; they’re short and the pacing is too quick, and the language and intelligence behind them is so much less interesting than their preceding exercises, it becomes tough to weigh the purposefulness of the exercises. In fact, the exercises are wildly varied, and show a kind of bravery that’s rare and important: then the poems follow and read identically to all the other poems regardless of the exercise from which it emerged. Perhaps that was the point, but the thrill of each exercise and the disappointment of each poem are schizophrenic.

The attention to detail in the (Soma)tic Exercises is impressive: watching Pasolini films in a discarded cardboard refrigerator box; examining Zoe Strauss photos while eating peas; finding objects in a graveyard. Conrad infuses the banality of life with the energy and enthusiasm required for making poems.

A related question of the strengths or weaknesses of this text is not with the writing, but its production: the large format, absent cover art, white text on black pages, handwritten endpapers, and padded length all make for unpleasant reading experiences; the book also includes a long interview with Conrad, and samples of his syllabi for workshops he conducted. These are meant to enhance the poems, but a less is more approach might have been better: rather than leaving me wanting more, I want much less. I say this cautiously because Conrad’s political stance and the ways he positions himself and his art is important and distinctive. Yet I feel that the (Soma)tic Exercises and the poems speak for themselves.

A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon reminds me of two works of art, but neither are books of poetry: Kazuo Ohno’s World From Without and Within (Wesleyan University Press, 2004) and the first Antony and the Johnsons album (Secretly Canadian, 2000). These show related ways of engaging the personal and the political; for example, American hubris in the world, seeking art as a panacea for suffering associated with gender and the body, and using the body as a template to new freedoms of expression via the artists’ chosen materiality of thought: dance (for Ohno), music (for Antony), or language (for Conrad).

The thinking behind the writing in this book is what will draw readers to it. He resists easy classification; he is, like Duke Ellington, beyond category. Either I am too closed-off from using my body as a creative wellspring to new ways to write, or the book’s nonsense cannot be separated from its wisdom. Operatic in scope, yet deeply local and personal, the book works in many ways.

A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon really should be required reading for MFA students, who are frequently anathema to taking imaginative leaps, yet I am unconvinced that lying in an MRI machine, meditating on the healing properties of a stone, or tucking a condom into my sock will help me write better poems. To me, writing is about writing; all the theatrics surrounding poetry has nothing to do with writing and therefore adds nothing to our trade. I found this text to be profound, relentless, frustrating, inspiring, demanding, silly, pompous, elastic, and mind-expanding. That is what poetry is for, and this is for poetry.

Check out the Rumpus Interview with CA Conrad.

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The World Falls Away, from the University of Pittsburgh Press, is a blessing for anyone interested in reading poetry. Coleman’s many books on Black Sparrow can be tough to find, and in this new book she shows herself and her full powers in tense, fraught, demanding, satisfying, funny, upsetting, or terminally top-of-head-cutting-off form.

Race shapes the writing to a certain extent, but the poems also defy the idea of “black writing.” The poems are political, in that they are concerned with social justice: they pour gasoline on conventional acceptance of poverty, racism, prison, drug addiction, etc. and bring fantastic energy to language so that the reader can become aware of their often invisible tendrils in daily American life. Even her poems about small things—her hair, for example in “My Crowning Glory”—are infused with a political tension that keeps in mind the potential for poems to “control, destroy, and create social institutions,” as Coleman put it.

Coleman’s work is functional and communal; she wields the oral tradition in a way that reflects her poetry ancestry—the blues queen, Koko Taylor, for example, or the fringe Beat genius, Bob Kaufman—but she also shows planed, hewn lines of intellectual poem-making. All of this happens on the streets of California. Shadows cast on the lines from Californian like Robert Duncan and Weldon Kees; these are never far from the human voices speaking in these poems.

To a certain extent, her poems increase the self-esteem of their reader. They have been increasing mine for nearly two decades because of their brutality and dignity. Her language is more Wanda Coleman and less like everybody else walking around the neighborhood than most writers are themselves and less like everybody else walking around the neighborhood. The poems always address the reader as a sensitive and intellectually curious person; the reader does not need her hand held around every line break.

Undeniably powerful, yet at their emotional cores, “accessible,” the poems work. By accessible, I do not mean the tyranny of the narrative poem to have a beginning, middle, and end, and to have the ability to be paraphrased; nor do I mean the tyranny of the short, personal lyric to comfort the reader with a defined voice. I mean the poems make the ironic, bored, jaded, and silly reader—he is a consumer of texts—into a fleshy, involved, concerned reader—a producer with her, moving into the depths to find meaning. Together we are challenging the critical methods always brought to bear on literature. If there is anything her poems are “about”, they must be about freedom. One thing this book shows is that finally the right wing in this country cannot have a monopoly on what that word means.

Coleman’s poems always have loci of history and power in their concerns: overgrown, foreclosed Detroit, child abuse, Coltrane’s “Naima”, interacting with a grandson, suicidal poets, Venice Beach, San Diego, doomed marriages, or cooking, for example. Almost every poem has a phrase, a line, or several, that thump the mind’s bass drums even days after the book has been put on the shelf:

“birth (an assembly line?). there are more knowzits than ever. / young, devout,

and DuSable—/ tellin’ us thangs.” (34)

“being fuckable is the best revenge” (50)

“zebra-tailed, she comes, exhausted with her doings” (80)

“the power of inkiness was at an oblique edge, / their very own Francis Bacon

worth a golden gavel” (91)

“and await the glacier you are certain is icing us over” (112)

“and work through me to the p-bone” (119)

These are uses of language never seen before or since; they are undoubtedly lines by Wanda Coleman. Even her most obvious poems, like “9/11, the Reznikoff Variation,” is one of the few poems about 9/11 that has not made me cringe or erupt in anger and frustration. She notices, for example, the failure of photography. Her poem’s second stanza uses almost no punctuation (à la Merwin); the subject and predicate seem to collapse on each other as a metonymy of the camera’s lens is conflated with a sound recording: “A frightened woman dressed in soot / elbows alongside other panicked runners / into the camera / tilted to capture the exploding skyline / its microphone / captures the curses and prayers of flight, / picture out of focus as photography fails.”

In “Detroit Left at the Moon,” she locates us with “a fullness gone flat”: geography has a social implication. She shows rusted, abandoned factories of the post-industrial city and how it affects the black middle class: “fresh in from the dream factory / blackness descending on blackness // the food has to be hardy to defend the bones / against the blight.” Invoking Malcolm X (as Detroit Red), Henry Ford, and discontents that “dwarfed a history of Septembers,” the poem invokes the worn spirit of the last decade in a fresh and terrific way.

Most of Coleman’s poems here have layers and levels; they remain satisfying and textured even after multiple readings. Her portmanteaus (“brainjello”) and nonce forms have an improvisatory edge, yet they somehow seem inevitable at the same time. Coleman is also unafraid in poems to be truthful. An elegy, for example, for Reetika Vazirani, called “The Blood This Morning,” is tender even as it blisters and shows muscularity and force as much as any of this work.

I think everyone should buy a copy of The World Falls Away. I wish Philip Levine well in his tenure as Poet Laureate, and vote for Wanda Coleman for the next one.

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Katrina Roberts’s Underdog is a subtle, yet intense book of poems that uses a range of forms, expressive language, and the approach of a witness to address immigration, family, and social justice. Underdog has plenty of allusions to the canine, and that other underdog, the Chinese immigrant, Dogon tribesman, a laborer, a gold prospector, or a reader of poems.

It begins with a wide poem, a tiered sequence of ten, 13-line “phantom” sonnets called “From Po Tolo to Emma Ya,” an allusion to Dogon astronomy and cosmology. In the style of an Albert Goldbarth poem, but more soulful, the poem is packed—like brown sugar in a cup—full with research, lists, phrases, and worlds. The poem also teaches us how to engage with the book, which makes long strides with long form. Roberts is masterful at weaving scenes of a quiet, domestic family life with wonderful compression: she manages to include cultures, languages, and worlds outside her own in a way that feels thoughtful and significant.

Often this compression is done within Roberts’s local geography of Washington State and the Northwest, and she creates, from the raw material of historical memory, stories of peoples’ lives who inhabited there, either in reality or in fantasy, creating a framework; in this way, her own quiet, domestic family life transcends its locality. Her own life becomes as mythological as those constellations that pivot in the sky around her.

Sometimes, as in “From Po Tolo to Emma Ya,” this is done grandly, with a large form; other times, she employs quieter lights and softer music to get at the same threads. For example, in “Improbable Wings,” the speaker says: “Once upon a time, // one at a time / each of these urchins curled within me. Three / times over I’ve been a woman / with two hearts. / Wings wands stars tulle / ribbons capes sequins. All flash / and approximation.” Expressing the sheer alien nature of a pregnancy, Roberts creates a sensation that is both satisfying and unfamiliar.

Elsewhere, she cites events from past centuries to evoke a hardscrabble existence as technology, industry, and the economy began changing peoples’ relationship to the land and themselves. For example, in “Welshpool, c. 1807,” she evokes prisoners carving miniature guillotines from mutton bones. In “Midway Atoll,” she shows her poems’ best quality: a mix of personal with historic re-imagining of the West. In “Afterlife,” the thinking behind the Chinese emperor’s underground terracotta army becomes a large-scale metaphor for a friend dying of a disease, perhaps cancer. A profound example of this feature of Underdog is in the poem “’Death Taps Quietly…’”, which relates (in the manner of Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines) an obituary of a poor Chinese immigrant in Walla Walla in 1957.

I prefer Roberts’s long form methods to make such connections; the few places I felt dissatisfied or bored were moments when a kind of static sentimentality had no long lines or intricate scale to create energy or focus the poet’s obsessions. “HMV,” a poem about Nipper, the dog that served as the model “His Master’s Voice” that later became identified with several brands like HMV and RCA, is too much like a pale imitation of James Merrill’s poem, “The Victor Dog,” on the same topic. I don’t know if there need to be two poems on this, but it’s tough in any case to go head-to-head with James Merrill. Sometimes poems like this appear in a book with themes because it’s “about” a dog—a literal dog—instead of the metaphoric dog vital to the vital poems here.

Roberts’s most exquisite small form expression is “The Arrangement,” a tough and tender reminiscence of a son giving his mother a bouquet of weeds. The tone and gravity of the poem are exactly right: “Someone’s refuse? He’d refuse to believe it anything / but a magnificent gift fit for none other than his lucky // mother. Indeed, no one ever has brought me quite / such an arrangement, nor any bouquets since // I can remember, and summer’s blown garden—a long time / past. And just as these are, they will last.” The form and rhyme are seamless analogues for the poem’s content.

My favorite poem in the book appears towards the end, “Ground Water, Enchanted,” a poem that evokes a sculptor, Buster Simpson. In contrast to the poem I thought imitated James Merrill, this one evokes all the pleasure of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Monument” but is totally original, abstract, particular, and mysterious.

Underdog shows that Theodore Roethke’s comment that “I detest dogs, but adore wolves” was only partially correct. These poems have all the instinct and fangs of a canine, and the plush, electric fur of a wolf: the intensity and sheer quality of workmanship in the poems is impressive. Poets seeking to write poems that tell narratives in a new way, that can be lyrical without being ironic, and can find connections from the past in the personal, would be wise to read this book.

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The publication of Tim Dlugos’s collected poems should invite a reassessment of his work as that of an important American poet of the late 20th century. This is true because there are several major poems here that cannot be ignored, and despite the fact that there are many terrible or throwaway poems in a book over 500 pages long.

Dlugos was a man of contradictions. He had a short life—he died of AIDS in 1990 when he was only forty—bursting with enthusiasm and disillusion. The dual nature of his life produced a humming tension in his best work that is unforgettable: a religious Catholic (and later Episcopalian) and a homosexual; a self-destructive alcoholic who nonetheless embraced sobriety; a pacifist and a militant; a minister of education to the poor and a Republican. Like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dlugos embraced rather than fled from these contradictions. Like Whitman, he was large; he contained multitudes.

Dlugos’s impressive long poem “A Fast Life” uses empty space to emphasize tension; it is used to intensify the leaps between syntax. It shows one of the best characteristics of his work: its emotional honesty can sometimes be perceived as his willingness to make a fool out of himself, but other times it can only be defined as grace:

I only was in Villanova once: on New Years
Eve with Patty when we got snowed in at
the apartment of her best friend and ex-
debate partner         I had a major crush on
the best friend’s boyfriend         we smoked
a little dope and played a board game
called Group Therapy, which measures how
honest you are         I had to make an appropriate
gesture of affection to the person I found
most attractive in the room         when I kissed
Patty she knew I was lying

Dlugos’s own life becomes a vast metaphor for the grace he was seeking in his religious and poetical endeavors. There is a feeling of complicity in his best poems in that he makes the reader love the burnished, tumultuous late nights and affection for those around him. His poems are an act of recovery for the passionate embrace of life (and those other forgotten lives) lost to AIDS.

Douglas Crimp, an art historian who advocates for culture actively struggling against AIDS said: “…violence of silence and omission almost as impossible to endure as violence of unleashed hatred and outright murder. Because this violence also desecrates the memories of our dead, we rise in anger to vindicate them. For many of us, mourning became militancy.” The poets in question were aware of the tug of silent mourning or absent language and the language in their poems as a militant reaction against silence.

The circumstances of the writing of Dlugos’s poems and the lenses by which we can read them now belong to the coexistence of two trends, the push toward a peaceful, quiet domestic life that constantly wrangles with the pressures of New York in the 1970s, and the still more urgent, ephemeral pulling away from death; a need that is communicated in the Dlugos’s relationships to language.

The poem that expresses these ideas most forcefully is the incomparable “G-9,” which was written in 1989 when he was admitted to the AIDS ward at Roosevelt Hospital. Written in a narrow, column-like form of one long gasp, the poem is political, unsentimental, unflinching, sensitive, and disturbing. The reader uses her breath and body in the present to connect to the poets’ mind in the past. The poem is the bridge between health and sickness, two points in time, the memory and its embodiment.

Poetry, because of its clarity and density of both language and form, is an effective response to the intensity of both urban life and of illness. Though these topics are endlessly interesting, they have also been elusive to write about with fresh sense impressions. The universality of these experience (even if not New York, or not AIDS) demands specific, striking, surprising, particular, and local data. Form is vital to describing the viral. Nonfiction can provide honesty, accuracy, and evoke emotion, but it lacks the passionate syntax and imaginative fluidity of poetry. Poetry often elides content in favor of form. Fiction (though Sarah Schulman’s People in Trouble is an important exception) must wrestle with the imposition of a structure over impossible historical events. To resolve these discrepancies of form and content, poetry has turned to elegy, even though it becomes eminently predictable and deadens surprise. “G-9” is not an elegy, though it does treat death and memory seriously.

It is among the strongest, most profound poems on AIDS (see also: Melvin Dixon, Tory Dent, Charles Barber, Lynda Hull) because of its superior interior consciousness overwhelming everything; its elegiac qualities are intimately bound to identity, to witness, and to an awareness of the tug of silent mourning or absent language and the language in “G-9” as a militant reaction against silence. It’s a shame to only offer a fragment of “G-9”, but this passage demonstrates its power:

After he died,
I had a dream in which
I was a student in a class
that he was posthumously
teaching. With mock annoyance
he exclaimed, “Oh, Tim!
I can’t believe you really think
that AIDS is a disease!”
There’s evidence in that
direction, I’ll tell him
if the dream recurs: the shiny
hamburger-in-lucite look
of the big lesion on my face;
the smaller ones I daub
with makeup; the loss
of forty pounds in a year;
the fatigue that comes on
at the least convenient times.
The symptoms like algae
on the surface of the grace
that buoys me up today.

Here is a poem that should be studied in every MFA program to show what to do and what not to do. William Empson showed that the pastoral is always political; Dlugos was unbound in his treatment of language, of space (both on the page and in terms of connecting illness and city), and of a passionate syntax. David Groff said of Tory Dent, for example: “Her poems all were written because time was short” and this is a lesson in language as vital if not essential. Empson echoes this: “It is clear at any rate that this grand notion of the inadequacy of life, so various in its means of expression, so reliable a bass note in the arts, needs to be counted as a possible territory of pastoral.”

Dlugos wrote in and of the 1970s—many of these poems are a catalog of poetry in New York City in that decade and the seedy, rust and wine-colored streets. Dlugos had a hagiographic adoration for Frank O’Hara and this compulsion unfortunately produced many “I did this-I did that” lists, yet even in his throwaway poems, there is a way of revealing the human that is indelible on the reader. For example, in a preposterous love poem to teen idol David Cassidy, Dlugos manages to end with something visionary and transcendent: “When your voice quavers I want you in my livingroom / to watch yourself on television with me, / and wonder whether our repaired / surfaces will ever interlock.”

A Fast Life shows the motions of a mind—poems that live and die by their expression of a secret, yet oddly public self. At the same time, the poems are an impression of the time and place in which they were made. Anybody’s collected poems will show the inability of a good poet to write wonderful poems without writing crap. But his wonderful poems are undeniably powerful.

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Lea Graham’s Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You is kitchen-sink full of allusion, percussion, and forcibly smashed fragments, but it there is an intelligent, human voice speaking in all the poems, and the poems mass together to express infatuation for not only other poems, but the world.

Her book begins with an epigraph from Richard Siken’s Crush, a book that was also interested in the violence of being enamored with people, and those peoples’ force and noise. Her book ends with an allusion to Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires. So, Lea Graham is also interested in language, and how it can be compressed or expanded to look at sex and its consequences. But, like other crushes—perhaps from adolescence or high school or even Facebook—the poems reflect the giddiness, the being overwhelmed with joy, of obsession. Her poems give voice to those obsessions, as in “Crush #421,” a poem that shows most of the threads in the book:

Alone, waterfalls read Prohibir Actividades Amorosas &
college kids from Poughkeepsie bought

the beer: Pollution is a dirty means to a radiant sunset like your smile
& You must be tired—you’ve been running through my mind all night
& Wanna fuck? Crossed legs on a bud back

to the city through cloud forests; rivering, their stories germinated,
coalesced—what grows shared—bromeliads, bougainvillea, bleeding
hearts: bract & spine, caudex & corolla, stamen,

calyx, carpel. Sitting at a bar next to a man with hair the color of
speech & honey & semen, his appetite straight-up Dionysian. He
said: You’re hot

.

Although the sign tells visitors: “amorous activities are prohibited,” the bar is filled with cheap, unimaginative pickup lines; it’s a meat market and one of the speaker’s paramour’s gets the last word. In terms of form, too, the poem is tricky and wonderful. The structure of long tercets allow the narrative to branch-out into stories that germinate into plants. Like spores that float through the air to plant their seeds on the backs of bees, Graham’s language here breezily moves past the pickup lines through a botanist’s diction. The plant parts become almost like human bodies wrapping around each other.

Graham’s various crushes themselves take of a kind of passionate tenacity, through neighborhoods, to other countries, and through visual arts. The mind moving through the poems is omnivorous: her interests show thinking that is akin to a giant sieve. Moisture seeps through the surface, and pieces of solid knowledge rest at the bottom. For example, in “A Crush on the Venus of Willendorf,” the speaker says: “Knees fricase, feet / shift, shuffle, impossible / to pull out, away from this / story before story: Magna mater? / Divine whore?” The poem employs the obscure verb “fricase,” as in “to rub”, and the interesting slant-rhyme (shuffle / impossible) along with the phrase “to pull out” with its sexual connotations before its exit wound of rhetorical questions. Is the Venus a nature goddess or something more bound to an unworkable gender bargain—is she divine or the vessel for a sexual fantasy? Gods have no bodies, and the poem in a clever and terrific way poses the difficulty of the crush. A crush is a fantasy, and therefore reveals more about the person with crush, but its source is the person she has the crush on. Like a teenager, the situation is ridiculous, but also deadly serious. Even our choices of whom we pursue, sleep with, and love are political.

Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You creates energy by relentlessly kneading its central questions. It mixes sophisticated word choice with images gleaned from mythology and popular culture, but these blur past the reader, like images seen through the window of a train. For example, in the prose poem “Bridge Jumping / W4M / Poughkeepsie (The Walkway)”, the speaker admits: “But I keep thinking of you like Colomb & Williams thought of Wayne C. Booth, writing his voice into the third edition of The Craft of Research years after he died. I imagine you might fish endangered sturgeon & dream of Guernica on Thursdays. If so, write to me. We could go to sea in a sieve, double the blind, buck your tiger, bell my cat, leap this dark—” For this speaker, her crush whispers like a half-remembered dream; it is almost academic in her re-imagining, yet remains intoxicating.

A crush is more about releasing that energy that about creating something that will last. This is ironic because Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You keeps giving, and becomes more crushing and crushable upon each reading. It’s a good choice for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club because it’s playful, original, and respects a reader’s intelligence. It mixes high and low, leather and lace, caffeine and alcohol, in a creative, swirling, surprising way.

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The most demanding poem, the book’s masterpiece, is at its center, “The Speed of Belief,” and is focused on the death of the poet’s father, Floyd Smith. Working in a range of forms, the poem (like most in the book) weaves hard-won wisdom with heartfelt observations; it “worries” or bends the word “walk,” for example, in section three, as the speaker tries to come to terms with the cold hand of death, even as it celebrates the lessons delivered to her from the father, who exists in the hallways of her memory. The word “walk” is repeated as a verb and noun, and as a rhetorical question. Often rhetorical questions are used to control a reader’s feelings, but in this book, they are asked either to God, or to endless tracts of space where they echo back or place pressure on the reader to come up with a response.

These questions are plentiful and are the glue that binds the book’s disparate elements together: “Is God being or pure force?” is the book’s opening salvo, and they keep coming: Does God love Gold? Is It us, or what contains us? What waits where the laughter gathers? Time stops, but does it end?; and so on….

Apart from the allusion to David Bowie’s song, “Life on Mars,” the title must refer to the de-oxygenated, weightless strangeness of living in a kind of vacuum; we are bombarded with particles of information, yet all our education cannot wrestle with some mysteries: love, childbirth, political violence, etc. The book is deadly serious and should be dealt with seriously.

Tracy K. Smith

Even its more minor poems, such as “Savior Machine”, are handled with specificity, insight, and evocative detail. The poem reflects on a patient seeing her psychotherapist two years after her sessions have terminated, and coming to the realization that he is a mortal, with failings, like her; his power over her has dissipated, and she now sees that the healing that took place was a “human hand reaching down to lift / A pebble from [her] tongue.”

In another impressive poem, “When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me,” the speaker addresses her child in the context of the child’s conception the previous winter. It shows the ways a somewhat trivial event that occurs ever minute has the momentous gravity of any political act in life. This is a poem that stands head-to-head with any perennial favorite in English.

Other times, and here I place blame on Smith’s editors, there is a mistake in an otherwise effort at greatness. For example, in the title poem, the speaker addresses the horrific case of Josef Fritzl, the 73-year-old Austrian who held his daughter prisoner for 24 years and fathered seven children with her. The poem aims to be contemplative and severe, but there is a hinge that demands accuracy and is instead deliberately diluted to make it soft: “Lying down with the daughter, who had no choice. Like a god / Moving through a world where every face looked furtively into his…” Here, a rape is phrased as a euphemism, I think, because the diction in the lines feels Biblical and meaningful. But to say: “lying down with” is a bad choice. Later in the poem, the crimes at Abu Ghraib prison are handled with more clarity, and the speaker is only left with her rhetorical questions; she becomes aware, as does the reader, that there is no intelligence in the universe that would allow this wilderness of horrors to happen.

I appreciate the political emphasis throughout Life on Mars, and I am impressed with the ways Smith demands that her readers are with her during the harrowing, invasive interrogations of both personal and political questions. Sometimes it remains unclear or uncertain how the personal and the political come together or separate. Can there be recompense in art from all the evil Smith describes? If there is a theory here, the book plays coyly with the questions: no resolution is forthcoming.

By contrast to “Life on Mars,” in the long poem “They May Love All That He Has Chosen And Hate All That He Has Rejected,” the speaker lets a range of victims of political murder speak to their murderers in a series of letters. In my view, this is a more nuanced way to make the connection between personal and political more tangible. This poem makes a strong contribution to public history: it addresses memory studies, and the study of public landmarks and memorials in a smart way.

Life on Mars is Smith’s third book, and it reflects the trajectory of the other two, though I think this is the strongest of the three. I think this book will satisfy current Book Club members, and encourage new ones to join. Consistently surprising and demanding, Life on Mars gives materiality to Victor Martinez’s statement that “poetry is the essence of thinking.”

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Rachel Richardson’s Copperhead is a poetic expression of the South, its feelings and memories, and the physical manifestations of its culture in music, food, and the thick air. Some of these memories are horrible, but Richardson uses a technically flawless form, surprising diction, and a light shade of blue to color most of the poems in a satisfying, absorbing way.

The poems in this book frequently blend the intertwined, sometimes complementary and sometimes contemptuous histories of what was called “race” music and what was called “hillbilly” music. The poems handle memories of the South—as place, as legacy, and as a kind of personal barometer—with a range of strategies. Some of these strategies work better for me than others: the evocative uses of place, for example, works. Richardson is masterful at showing an ugly action in an ecstatic place, Louisiana—or she shows people feeling ecstatic or being virtuous in an outright ugly place, also Louisiana. She also sometimes uses a formal majesty to convey her ideas. Take, for instance, the wonderful poem “Children Born after the War,” which uses an eleven-line nonce form and a passionate syntax to evoke most of the themes of the book: “…And each bright / fruit you tongue out of its shell / comes as if on air—no trace of origin, no thorn.” Richardson here equals the formal beauty of Derek Walcott’s poems concerning the brutal beauty of the Caribbean or Czeslaw Milosz’s on Poland’s terrible history during the Second World War.

Richardson also uses a refrain, or constant, to add wisdom and depth to the arc of the book. These seven untitled poems are a series called “Signs.” In 1954, Muddy Waters sang Willie Dixon’s lyrics to “Hoochie Coochie Man” and in the third verse, said: “On the seventh hour / On the seventh day / On the seventh month / The seven doctors say / He was born for good luck / And that you’ll see / I got seven hundred dollars / Don’t you mess with me.” Richardson likewise uses her seven signs to ingeniously stir up the speakers’ more abstract memories of the South. The speaker moves through parishes and townships seeing road signs, but these are also signs of divination. Richardson’s “sign” poems use a playful, heartbreaking push-pull mechanism to address this question. She praises and confronts—at the same time—the bloody, scarred landscape of the “South” in all its iterations.

My complaint here is that the book fails to make a distinction between the New and Old South, and it remains unclear, and sometimes this is done irresponsibly. For example, in the ironic poem “Note, upon Learning That Jimmie Davis Did Not Compose ‘You Are My Sunshine,’” the poem uses 12 tercets to celebrate a song—a song everybody knows—that is associated closely with Louisiana. It is a love poem that is both earnest and ironic. It recalls the story that Governor Davis rode a horse up the steps of the Baton Rouge capitol. But what the poem coyly does not reveal is that he did this to protest integration. (Davis’s master’s thesis was apparently titled “Comparative Intelligence of Whites, Blacks and Mulattoes”). The poem is somewhat sentimental (“How many times did I imagine your journey, / farmhouse to the wide stone steps, / on the sloping back of Sunshine—”) because it tries to evoke a childhood memory that is incapable of meeting eye-to-eye the reality of the history at stake. Editor’s Note: See the comments to this review for the full text of this poem.

It is impossible to discuss the South without discussing race, and a poem like that does not address it. There is an academic debate on how history is told in public space (a poem is a public space), and it cannot be resolved in one book and definitely not in a single review (Cf. Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America or Marita Sturken’s Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero). However, many of the poems in Copperhead begin with the local (the first-person singular) and move outward from there. As a technique, this makes perfect sense and is a successful, accurate mode. I think the larger question that must be addressed is one of tone.

The poems in Copperhead use the deeply wrought questions with which it is concerned to wisely come up with a sort of memoir, which is attaching deeply felt memories with deeply felt language, thus making it literature. When this poems do their best, there are as thrilling and expertly made as the best poems you love, but I think there are more strategic, and more nuanced questions beyond those of personal memories—such as race—that remain less successful.

One final concern has to do not with the writing of the book, but with its production. The “To Market To Market Jiggety-Jig” aspect of American poetry business necessitates that the writer get blurbs for the back cover praising it in order to sell it. Whoever bought a book because of the blurbs is a separate question. One such blurb on Richardson’s book describes it as a “gorgeous river song fast-rising above the heart’s levee.” This is the kind of thing that sure sounds wonderful and pretty, but is vacant and meaningless. There should be a moratorium on such things. The poems in Copperhead are fine without frilly lace and pink bows to tidy them up for the poetry prom.

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In February at the AWP Conference in Washington D.C., Claudia Rankine gave a talk about Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change.”

Afterward, she posted a call for responses to the conversation that started at AWP, and today she posted those responses here. Included among them is a piece by Rumpus reviewer and Poetry Book Club Board member Sean Singer. It is reproduced here in full:

I did not attend AWP this year; nonetheless, I feel compelled to respond to the debate.

Poems are about celebrating and confronting their subject matter and their attitude toward the world. In my opinion, a writer should show affection for the universe in a piece of writing.

All societies have their psychopathic elements, and America is psychopathological about race. I think it is irresponsible to ignore race in a piece of writing either in terms of content, form, psychological space, point-of-view, theme, or historical perspective. In both my creative and academic work I write about race frequently, either as a triumphant view of jazz culture, or as a critique of, for example, the immense problems facing the black metropolis of Newark, New Jersey.

The advantages of writing about race are plentiful: you stake a claim against the national psychosis, you put your facility with language to work for social justice, and, if you’re white, you remove the cobwebs of white privilege from your eyes. I don’t think a writer should ignore the question.

Everyone has a right to his or her opinion, but those who are informed have more of a right. For someone to claim that almost all poems about race come from a person of color’s point-of-view is patently absurd. If anything, the exact opposite is true. The default speaker of many poems from Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams to John Ashbery and Billy Collins is that of the egocentric, androcentric white male sitting in the living room and gazing out the window and marveling—all the while being subtly superior—at the world. To pretend that race is a force majeure and beyond the scope of such poems that on the surface have no racial element is historically inaccurate. Such poems are at best acts of bullying; that is trying to control the reader’s feelings without revealing his own. At worst they are part of the ludicrous racial psychopathology that responsible writers must try to overturn.

Besides being a poet, I am a scholar working in American Studies, and therefore am interested in historical facts. It is facile to assume that the speaker in the poem is the same as the poet, but from the time we begin to read as children and continuing to the time beyond when we have our precious MFA degrees and are taking part in the ridiculous literary marketplace, we do not pause to question the vicious and relentless invisibility of race in what we read and write.

Hannah Arendt said that: “One can resist only in the terms of the identity that is under attack.” Our entire system of the literary marketplace is inequitable. If a student feels embarrassed or that she will be misunderstood in confronting race in her poems, then dishonesty and Socratic bullying will take place in the classroom rather than everyone learning how to be a better reader. In the modern university system, diversity and multiculturalism are often thought of as being interchangeable; but are they different? And, if so, what are the differences? Such tropes are usually only thought of in terms of something to celebrate, and never in terms of what race is really about, which is power.

Even the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement are traditionally ignored in most classrooms in America as an attempt to make them invisible. Just to offer one example, Rosa Parks is remembered for “accidentally” becoming a Civil Rights icon for not giving up her bus seat; that she did so not intentionally, but spontaneously. The historical record shows, in fact, that Parks was actively and militantly political for more than 20 years prior to the bus boycott. We festishize neatly calibrated stories to absolve our responsibility. We engage in acts of self-deception if we say that poems are merely about self-expression and have no role to play in our own political militancy.

I think that misreading or miswriting race is a failure of the imagination. To write about a subject using abstractions, vague language, or generalities is not a technical problem. It is an ethical problem. Writers must act ethically and empathically if they are to understand not only “where the other person is coming from”, but the psychological space of the reader. It is the responsibility of the writing teacher to teach students how to read empathically. The only purpose of a writing workshop is to create better and more sophisticated readers; creating better writers is only a by-product and should not be the main concern.

I do not believe race can be constructed separately from history. Our attitudes about race have been designed, foisted upon us from above, and made us sick. Even assuming that the speaker of “The Change” is not the writer, there is a categorical difference between that poem and James Baldwin’s “Going To Meet The Man,” a 1965 short story told from the point-of-view of a white, racist sheriff who overcomes erectile dysfunction while remembering a lynching. In Baldwin’s story, though the reader hates Jesse, Baldwin has infused him with some pathos. In Hoagland’s poem the speaker is scornful, reactionary, and can barely hide his contempt not only for the black tennis player, but also for the reader who exists only as a thoughtless vessel in which contain the misinformation the speaker says and thinks. The speaker in “The Change” is more like someone in a Raymond Carver story, uneducated and wondering why the universe has passed him by.

An argument can be made that “The Change” demonstrates empathy for the racist tennis fan in the poem by coming around to his point-of-view, but if that is the case, why the unmitigated scorn, the easy humor, and the prose-like lines? To claim, at the end of the poem, that the twentieth century was a sepia-toned space that we pine for and long for, is historically ignorant. Like the McCain-Palin supporter who uses coded words to cover their racism, the speaker here shows off his ignorance and culpability like a badge of honor. The speaker in the poem is acting cruelly to suppress his guilt.

For someone to say “the poem is for white people” is a way of obviating the writer’s responsibility. It is analogous to a murderer saying to the jury: “Well, I killed her for all the other murderers out there.” I’m white and I don’t want to read something that preordains a narrow, self-aggrandizing view of what I am as a reader. “The Change” is written in the first person plural, “we”. In my view, this is a way of subtly controlling the reader. I advise all writers to eliminate “we” and “everybody.” The writer should instead name the guilty parties rather than lump the guilty and innocent together in the same rubber bag. This flaw in a piece of writing is a misreading of Freudian projection, or attributing one’s faults and desires onto others.

There have been books successful at inventing the language of racial identity. I suggest books by Nathaniel Mackey, bell hooks, Jay Wright, Melvin Dixon, Bob Kaufman, and Angela Y. Davis. The African American sculptor Elizabeth Catlett said: “We all live in a given moment in history and what we do reflects what level we are on in that moment.” In my view, we can take the shortsighted, scornful, cynical view of a poem like “The Change” or we can use our art form to work for social justice. Paying attention is a form of generosity. To me, if you are not writing and reading about race, then you are not paying attention; you do a disservice to the reader to treat her like a vestibule for casual jokes about a black tennis player. It does not create an interesting poem or create an interest in the reader to do so.

The obvious thing to do in a situation like this is to read some of these successful books. Let’s all do that now.

Sean Singer

Harlem, New York City

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Leslie Williams’s first book, Success of the Seed Plants, wields its words like an axe. Its dark and strange approach to the natural world shows grace and intelligence. It is a serious, mysterious, and spirited take on humanity through the subjects of plants, rural America, and the bargain people and their environment have struck. Williams is like a twenty-first century Transcendentalist, finding spiritual breath in all manner of leaves, flowers, and branches, yet—as in Hawthorne—a gloom always lurks just below the surface of the poems.

Williams is a master of diction, especially when she seeks the inscrutability of the natural world; this diction is connected to a tone that is neither affectionate nor menacing. The speaker, who is removed and speaks in the third-person in section one, and is a closer and more attentive first-person in section two, is so adept at precision and sensuality of her word choice, that they appear spontaneous, yet inevitable. The best poems in this book are all stark, shocking beauty and insinuating splendor.

Take, for example, the end of “Notes on the State of Virginia”:

…left for dark

in Virginia’s spelled heart, hoof-sweet—
while boundless July, laden with evenings, returns

with trinkets and wares, trundles out to her farthest
field with all the stars finespun, coming on—

the still pool still fringed
with the goldenseal, with scuppernong.

Williams alludes to the speaker’s emotional state, and like the Transcendentalists’ spirit at the poem’s core, connects that state to the seasonal pleasures of the environment, and to language itself. The play with sound creates texture and visual interest not with rhyme, but with consonance. The double meaning of the word “still” in the last couplet make the reader aware of the speaker’s ancestral attachment to the land, yet makes a point of her alienation from it.

Like many first books, Williams shows facility in a variety of forms, some of which are her own invention; these forms range from intimate couplets to sculptural tercets to freer spaced lines splashed across the page. Of this variety, I find her controlled forms, like the couplets, to be most effective given her subject matter and challenging, yet pliable language. Her more experimental attempts, where syntax is removed and replaced with white space, are less interesting and useful. These experiments feel like mere lists; since they are formless the content has nowhere to go. Fortunately there are not many of these, but “As in the Sidewalk Gardens” is one such poem. Without the architecture of lines to tether it, the subject matter, which includes such terrible topics as a rose, a dead bird, a trellis, “undue love,” solitude, the phrase “a kind of” as a modifier, and the attempt at a narrative. Compared to the majority of poems here they are unreadable.

The book is intelligently organized, an immensely difficult task when a book is finally finished. Some of the strongest, most surprising poems appear in Williams’s third section, such as “Pressing Flowers” and “Amaryllis is an Alias.” These poems can be placed in a contextual conversation with perennial favorites like Marianne Moore’s “Silence” or “O to Be a Dragon.” Williams offers descriptions with such grace and accuracy that they sometimes astonish: “This flower is out for itself. Full velveteen throttle,” she explains in a poem that discusses the sexual metaphoric power of a flower.

The threads in Williams’s poem often allude to connections between the natural world and the world of culture, or human expression. Her poems therefore are self-referential pieces of evidence of these connections. For example, in “Small Diaspora” she relates boys playing little league baseball and the organization of suburban gardens: “From exuberant hanging gardens / populous with knaves— // rakes, lotharios, libertines, / paladins, princelings, brigands, rogues, / paramours, suitors swain—” Her deliberately Elizabethan language increases the formality and irony her point. Her sons in fact are part of an ordered natural world; the stakes and flowerbeds merely arrange elements of entropy and detritus: soil, decay, predation, unawareness. A couple of pages later, a poem called “The Rake” takes the double meaning of the first term in her list and employs it differently. Here, an especially trite Romantic idea—“Spring is sprung / from winter’s prison!”—complete with exclamation point, is just the beginning of a meditation on the beauty and perhaps insignificance the speaker feels observing—perhaps feeling distinct and apart—a garden.

Williams is a fine poet, skillful and smart. She takes a range of topics I find by themselves repelling or uninteresting (suburban life, nature, flowers, gardening, Thomas Jefferson, the American South, etc.) and makes them compelling; she demands my attention because she is such an attentive writer. This attention is a form of generosity. She makes poems that are meant to be savored. She was a terrific choice for the Bellday Prize, but unfortunately the production quality of the book itself is unappealing. It has a plain green cover with Photoshopped images of spores and a amateurish, last-minute quality to the design. The matte cover, with its plain type, suggests a much weaker and more sentimental book than what the book actually is. In fact, the book is the complete opposite of what the cover suggests, which is a literal interpretation of “seed plants.” This is a shame. The book is fantastic, careful, and a significant accomplishment.

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Michael Klein’s then, we were still living is a masterful book full of melancholy’s dark colors, but painted-over with bright exuberance. His book is politically engaged, sensitive, and topical, but I think misses when it lacks authority on some of its subject matter. Klein writes lyrical poems in a subtle and sophisticated way—most of the poems include the first-person singular in the first line, an indication that the reader moves closely to a deeply felt human voice speaking. In many poems, the voice is a 21st century man, a lot like Michael Klein. His themes range from the death of a twin brother to the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent wars.

When Klein writes his most personal poems, those with an insouciant, bittersweet edge, full of affection, he writes memorable poems. When Klein is more detached—his poems about the war, for example—he still writes nonconformist poems with a bounding intelligence, but they’re an inch deep. The tour-de-force poem in this book is in its middle, “Five Places for Sex”, and it’s more surprising and complicated than what Thom Gunn had to say about sex in The Man With Night Sweats and it’s several notches above anything Allen Ginsberg wrote.

I frequently complain about too many adjectives and adverbs in poems weighing down good writing, but in this case, Klein is an expert at how to write them correctly. Like his metaphors, the adjectives are employed to heighten the imaginative leaps the lines are taking. For example, in “Five Places for Sex,” his metaphor for the orgasm and its inevitable denouement is: “until the panther rested—down so much—in the springy hills.” A different creature than Rilke’s panther in the zoo, this one conveys the ferocity and wildness of something now resting. The adjective “springy” has an organic, yet mechanical palpitation to it; that it modifies the location is even more surprising. The first section of the poem takes place on a train. The hills must be out the window; Klein therefore uses cues from a pastoral to make an evocative connection between something local and personal into a vast metaphor. Likewise, later in the poem, when there is another sexual encounter in a porno theater, the speaker describes what he sees as “squinting to a very basic music.” This could mean “important” or “essential”, but also the sense of “nothing added.” Amid the frenzy of a kind of sleazy eroticism, tinged with fear of AIDS (the poem is set in the 1980s), the boys “up on the screen” squint to the music. Klein’s subtle word choice makes something banal seething with pathos.

When Klein’s attentions are focused on something with which the speaker has authority, the reader believes the details. Those poems are not so much elegiac, but they still address grief. Rather, his poems seem to delicately conflate issues of love and death, but also social justice and unfairness, and sexuality. For example, in “Vaudeville,” he starts with something more general about the entertainment industry, then moves the camera eye closer to his own family history. We find out later that his grandparents were alcoholic vaudevillians. By the poem’s final stanza, the voice becomes raw and plaintive, which resembles wisdom:

It was what the doctor tells the patient: life is
your funny story and to live
above and below the story
you have to hear it singing only to you, away from the other singing.

Klein frequently uses repetitions of words and italics as a tool to indicate shifts in tone, in mood, and even emotional volume. It is admirable and a little unnerving just how unembarrassed he is to allow his poems to both conceal and reveal. In the poem “The mirror,” the speaker sees his lost twin brother in his own image, and using a repeated image of a shoulder bag, he is able to allow life and death—one brother to another—to commingle with anonymity and intimacy:

I know my brother in the mirror because of the way I have my shoulder bag
hanging off my shoulder—the way he would have it—not the way I would have it.
I’m not a shoulder bag kind of person.

So, it is him.
And then, of course, just as fast—it’s me
as I am in life with him, and as he is in death with me.

The poem’s long lines also mimic the thinking-through of the identity issue the speaker is experiencing, and since long lines slow a poem’s pacing, it forces the reader to take in the data more slowly and to be contemplative. This poem has some allusions to C.P. Cavafy’s poem “The Mirror in the Front Hall” in which an old mirror is “proud to have embraced total beauty for a few moments” when it “sees” a boy waiting for a receipt for a delivered package.

Klein’s métier is the elegy, the dominant form for poems written about 9/11, and the powerful image of the twin reappears, but sometimes in what I think are less successful ways. The obvious metaphor of the brother as twin and the Twin Towers as twins is little bit adolescent and disappointing. When, in “2001”, the speaker says: “In America, we make movies / before anything really happens,” the poet wrangles with the surreal horror of September 11, but not in an original or useful way. I advise all writers to eliminate “we” and “everybody.” Given the results of the midterm elections, I do not appreciate being lumped in the same “we” as the people who voted for Sharon Angle or Rand Paul. If Klein writes “we Americans,” the statement includes the millions who are repulsed. The writer should instead name the guilty parties rather than lump the guilty and innocent together in the same rubber bag. This flaw in a piece of writing is a misreading of Freudian projection, or attributing one’s faults and desires onto others.

Likewise, in Klein’s poems about the war, he writes about the fall of Kabul in the same way; the pronoun is meant to suggest unity and empathy, but actually does the opposite. Since the speaker lacks authority, he teams up with others to make the voice plural, as if that will boost its authority: “Almost free? / Almost enough horses? / Peace passeth not their understanding, but ours.” The problem is that, unlike his other work, Klein has no real authority about the subject and the poems feel disingenuous, no matter how interesting the writing is. If you read a book like Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War, by a person with dust on his eyelids, you realize a piece of writing that seems too psychically distant from the war do not suffice. Perhaps this is a question of sentimentality, relying on the subject matter of the poem to carry its emotional weight while the writing—which is tantamount to thinking—stays small.

Nevertheless, Klein’s then, we were still living is a thoughtful, emotional book that treats death in a fresh, even endearing way. The personality of the writer overflows in the best poems; it shows vulnerability and nothing here is overwritten. The tone is exactly right. Serious readers of poetry should get this book and absorb its message.

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