This is Dan Chelotti. Dan Chelotti, who I imagine as a very careful shopper. First, he is ambivalent, like the non-plussed kind of ambivalent. “I don’t really want / the things I want” he says in “The Giantess Is Coming.” What doesn’t he not want? Lots. In this poem it includes an Italian villa, a whistle, and a donkey that comes to that whistle. But in other poems it includes things like eating a hot dog while running the bases for a home run. Or walking righteously while wearing headphones. Or being named Per. Why doesn’t he want these things? Partly because this is what life is in the 21st Century. We wish, then we deny that wish. Many of these poems feature Dan Chelotti talking himself out of what he tells you he wants. How about this one: “I’ve read heaven / is half-finished, overcrowded.” from “A Perfectly Good Ottoman.” If you haven’t gathered at this point, there is a pool of miserable that stands as landscaping in these poems. Not misery. These are not poems of dread. Only miserable.

Which doesn’t necessarily sound like a recommendation. Granted, there are poetry books that operate on miserable alone. Chelotti’s is not one of them. Dan Chelotti’s x has something else: wonder. And what a concoction it is to mix ambivalence and wonder. You need to read this book if only to spice up your Contemporary American Poetry world, which is like an overproducing orchard of wonder these days. Have you read Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees? Have you read Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine or M. A. Vizsolyi’s The Lamp with Wings? I would maintain there is a special stance Chelotti accomplishes by juxtaposing his wonder to his ambivalence. It’s something similar to Mathias Svalina’s Destruction Myth, where the optimism animating a creation myth is employed for a negative critique of some contemporary phenomenon. But the occasion driving Chelotti’s poems always feel more mundane to me. More incidental. Like I could be the guy living through this poem.

And this is how the poems surprise you. “You could live this life,” the poems say, “but you probably don’t.” You probably do experience a lack of determination in your life (i.e. like every time you visit facebook.com), so does Dan Chelotti. But then he has so many other options. The following is a perfectly mundane opening to the poem “Real Work”:

When the phone rings,
even in the middle of
a sandwich, I feel obliged
to answer. I see
a single vestigial board
of what was
a treehouse.

Here, a picture of Dan Chelotti eating lunch in his garage? Living in 1995 with a cordless telephone? But now, just six lines later, the poem starts looking at the most unlikely possibilities:

The Galaxies that fly
over my house
shake my house.
I pause mid-sentence,
let them pass

Do you want to know where this poem ends? With our beloved gravity leaking into another dimension. This is the mind of a Dan Chelotti poem. A place where consequence is sharp and versatile and easily manipulated by any new possibility, and it’s probably one you hadn’t considered before you started reading. Which might make these poems sound like they’re impulsive. They are. Kind of. Try impulsive like you’re trying to decide whether you should buy the new copy of People Magazine or not.

Of course, that statement presumes to understand the motivation behind the Chelotti poem. FYI, I haven’t figured that out yet. And that’s absolutely fine with me. Because I like listening to Chelotti’s voice. It is both momentous and casual, and akin to a reality where all realistic potentials have been infiltrated by just an incrementally better imaginative potential. Isn’t this a lot like the argument Wallace Stevens makes for the poetry of Marianne Moore? “To confront fact in its total bleakness is for any poet a completely baffling experience.” Says Stevens. And so the poet acknowledges reality as one of the fact-alternatives to be combined with other imaginative alternatives. Think Moore’s sublimely intuitive series of factual observations, but replace it with Chelotti’s fantasy alternatives to the mundane, and you get Facts 2.0. An improved reality! Or perhaps a reality more aptly described by the abstract variable, x.

Related Posts:

• Incarnadine by Mary Szybist
• Murder Ballad by Jane Springer
• “The Lamp With Wings” by M. A. Vizsolyi
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević

As befitting the first movements of an origin story, Skin Shift opens with the apocryphally titled “Orange Colored Sky,” a poem that serves to introduce some of the poet’s obsessions, namely with femininity, mythology and childhood. Hittinger writes:

Hittinger sees Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman, as a model for his own blossoming femininity, and thus goes about mimicking Lynda Carter, who portrayed the character on television, with the accoutrements of his childhood bedroom. All this interest in Wonder Woman stems from the grace and ease of her metamorphosis from normal woman to super woman—the speaker of the poem craves the same transformation, both for its ease and for the final product. Superheroes are considered to be the modern equivalent to mythological figures in some circles, and Wonder Woman, whose mythology is indelibly linked with the Greek Pantheon (she’s the daughter of Hippolyta in the comics) seems like an appropriate to guide the speaker’s nascent queer urges from a “leaning toward” into a “learning toward.”

If the young speaker of Hittinger’s first poem wants to transform into Wonder Woman, to harness her power, it comes as no surprise that one of the poet’s chief modes of writing is through persona. This tendency to dive into the skins of others helps us to parse the book’s title—Skin Shift isn’t simply about transforming from human to superhuman, it’s about shifting into another flesh altogether. The movement can be horizontal as much as it is vertical. Some of the personas adopted by Hittinger’s speakers include an astronomer, an ornithologist, a geologist, and an alchemist. The poet enjoys stepping into their skins because they offer both a specialized eye and subject, and a way to “Laugh. Clear the jam. [And] Start again.” Other poems in the book—such as “Circe’s Letterpress” and “Samson in Reverse”—collapse the distance between biography and persona, mimicking some of the impetus behind Skin Shift’s opening poem, but no other poems collapse this distance as effectively as the poems in the book’s third section, “Narcissus Resists.”

“Narcissus Resists” is split up into five smaller sections, each headed by five “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” poems, and containing three poems that each start with the letter “C,” the lone exception being the fifth “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” poem, which ends the third section. It seems to be no accident that all the poems in this section are fourteen lines long, though they do not bare the qualities (meter, rhyme) of traditional sonnets, they seem inflected (or provoked) by the spirit of the “sonnets” in Henri Cole’s Middle Earth and Blackbird and Wolf. These “sonnets” are far more naked in their content than Cole’s, recounting the troubled adventures of Hittinger’s Narcissus, a young gay man who idolizes a Madonna-like pop star and hosts an online strip show. These poems cleverly repurpose both pop culture and the myth of the Greek figure, exploring the way shifting from one skin into another can be destructive. In “Metamorphosis of Narcissus IV,” Hittinger explores the collective ire of Narcissus’s spurned suitor:

Transformation isn’t a key to self-discovery for Narcissus, it’s a way of avoiding himself and the havoc he’s wreaked, intentional or not, in the lives of others. Narcissus wants to escape, his guilt manifesting in this ghost dog image, but cannot because Narcissus, much as he might resist, only sees himself. The poems in Skin Shift do not shy away from the implications of shifting from one’s skin to another—they do not indulge in the fantasy such role change can bring, but also in the ways shifting can feed into revising history, denying the reality that the self imposes, or as a means for coping with trauma. Hittinger’s poems are ambitious in their scope and in how artfully they balance raw emotional language with thoughtfully constructed conceits. Ultimately its hard not to find another skin for yourself nestled somewhere between these pages.

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In “Poem Capitalism” she describes how she practices

this thing I call Objectless
Objectivism. Like: I face the thing, but also
am the thing—so we aren’t. Once, I was content to find
the marble hollow. Filled with a giant star. Now

laved in grease, I rub again against
that dry nubbin in the great warehouse Archyron—(this is not
some reference you’re supposed to get, it’s just this
weird feeling I had.) The yellow frame darkens. I live

in the light but perish in the industrial warehouse,
under the specter of marriage, of hip. Again I wrote
a meaningless poem! and left me
with all the burden of meaning. He died, and she—

We carried her through

Following John Berryman’s lead, Ted Berrigan, in both life and “the poems” succinctly nailed the riff “he died” (“dear Berrigan. He died/ Back to books. I read.” Berrigan’s “Sonnet #2”) Božičević drops in the reference, but then goes further, opening up the question of what about her? And, with the help of claiming a plurality, i.e. “we”, takes the poem beyond where they left off, into a further doorway. Carrying (in fact, rescuing) the speaker of the poem, the body itself, away from the trap that consumed both previous male poets, in life as well as in the work.

Not that death isn’t seemingly everywhere for Božičević. Born in Croatia in 1977, Božičević has been on the fringes at least—if not in the middle of—violent war torn situations. I don’t feel it is poetic fancy when she writes in “Casual Elegy for Luka Skračić”: “I / study from Luka’s textbooks, later he / gets blown up walking to film school, Luka / dies for his art.”

Božičević’s poems are diatribes that refuse become didactic. She’s too busy interrogating herself as much as she is the world, for the poem to slide into meeting easy expectations. In “War on a Lunchbreak” her own gendered sexuality, and that of her friends and the larger society, alongside her past history and current nationality status, caught up between her homeland and her adopted United States, surges to the surface as she reflects upon the hellish clerical job she’s stuck working just to get by. She asks, “What’s war?”

Eternal countrylessness.
Lady poets writing about cock,
not thinking about gender. My friends married in Vegas
to good-ol’-boys or hipster drummers, just ‘cos they can, or
when I contemplate
starving myself
so I’d be “the bomb,” or. I’m sorry
I keep tossing and turning. My livelihood here

depends on people who’ve never tasted
war, and act offended when one leaves work
on time. Not that I ever lay hiding

dying in a ditch, but if I had, I think I’d
know much about dry grass, the incredible value of it:
Simply to see the stalks
move would be enough.

I’d like to have time to type this,
but all day long they’re looking over my shoulder.

Where the poems in Rise in the Fallmay appear to be going in search of death, Božičević is in fact only drawing attention towards realizing life. These poems are affirming her concern with how to live, what’s required, where to find it. As dark as the subject matter gets at times, the over-riding encouragement that this is life, get on with it, is ever just as insistent. Be brave is the message. There’s nothing to fear once you look at things head on.

I think I nod at the true death: when from a moving train
I see a house in the morning sun
and it casts a shadow on the ground, an inquiry
and I think “Crisp inquiry”
& go on to work, perfumed of it—that’s the kind of death
I’m talking about.

An angle of light. Believe in it. I believe in the light and the disorder of the word
repeated until quote Meaning unquote leeches out of it. And that’s
what I wanted to do with dame Death, for you:
repeat it until you’re all, What? D-E-A-T-H? ‘Cause Amy
that’s all it is, a word, material in the way the lake moves through the trees
is material, that is: insofar, not at all.
Because we haven’t yet swum in it. See what I mean?
(“Death, Is All”)

Božičević does not mince words. “I’ll tell you straight up: / you don’t get to talk about Mayakovsky: / take that skateboard and go back to the suburbs. And talk about them.” (“About Mayakovsky”) It is totally great to have poems by a relatively young poet so directly address everyday reality while remaining free of pretension. There’s no placating search after any
specific lingo of MFA craft or other academic jargon. Božičević is all-poet, crystal clear about what she wants to say and who her audience is. The humor is rampant. After reading, “A Poem for You” it’s ridiculously difficult (if you could manage it before) to ever look at any My Little Pony with a straight face again:

I want to write a nice long poem for all you straight girls.
Your religion’s rose and glass castles
hold no place for me, I’m out of my princess phase.
Your pink pony wants to fuck you
She’s limp with longing from being
always touched and hollow,
comb-tugged right out of her field:

Oh I’m too tired to worship at your kittenish emptiness.
For years my emptiness echoed into yours: Oh Hai!
For years I’ve been your pony, and I wanted to fuck you

without your pink dress, the glitter and the organs,
all colorless—

But Božičević is not at all just about putting down “straight girls”. As she goes on to say, “I’m over it.” The poem continues unfolding, complicating its own intentions which are, and never should be, entirely clear.

I love someone now, she’s teaching a class,
she had a bad dream & threw the lotion
at the hurtful door, and I love her, there’s nothing hollow there.
There’s no void in the straight girls either, not really.

This yard is in you, ladies,
green and monn-lit, where you prance like difficult adult Bambis:
that’s not desperate, that’s beauty. I only wanted
to have my fill, as I fill her:

undo you first, then balance out the void in a weighted way
so then you’ll know: How
do you do a Barbie?
With meaning. Women, I’ll defend
your beauty

when no-one else will: when you’re lacerated with IVs
and wrinkles, I’ll say how I filled you with Awwww.
When you’re a crazy-eyed teen who hears voices & sings them
out at an American Idol
audition, a sparrow

aping the starsong ringtone–
I’ll get it. I love you when you’re not quite right.

Božičević opens the possibility that poets might strive to be heroes. Not necessarily ‘saving the day’ kind of heroes, but heroes nonetheless.

Look
at any object & see
the shimmer of philosophers playing inside…And they’re
what you want. And it takes a show-off, sacred whore
you say you don’t
believe in, but ecto-drool over, to make
them emanate: and I don’t got that, babe. I’m sitting here,
wet from my run and
know that somewhere among these ducks and squirrels and,
reflected in the car hood, ducks
and leaf silhouettes
is a way for me to manage
the pain of:
all I ever wanted was to serve.
(“We’re the Aliens We’ve Been Looking For”)

That’s not to say that Božičević doesn’t call ‘Bullshit’ on playing out that role. Still, she does both get the girl and is the girl. Plus, she writes it down always telling it straight. No apologies. She’s not expecting anything further from poetry than the opportunity of the poem itself.

Related Posts:

• X by Dan Chelotti
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams
• Easy Math by Lauren Shapiro

If pith is the mode of the automaton and the worker bee, then Desolation: Souvenir, Hoover’s latest work, puts smoke in the hive. His work is the interruption to the monotony of habituation, deadly as Schlovsky claims. It calls attention to the anemic patterns of habit, using pain and courage to carve through.

Though Hoover is relatively prolific, his writing is capable of traversing, if not discovering within itself, new measures of emotional depth and conceptual difficulty. The entire volume of his published work should be the call to invent new concepts in the prizing of poetic superheroes that acknowledges the sustained lift of a long-fighting heavy weight. Scars and blows all gorgeously legible.

Desolation: Souvenir starts at the point where language fails (as maybe it is supposed to if it is to show it is capable of meaning anything that would touch us): the death of a child. The brief poems piece aphorisms into elegy. The awkward junctures function as attempts at connection, solace, that instead show the gaps – of what is unknown, of what is suffering, of what’s been lost. In “the dream and now a field,” Hoover’s speaker identifies the “vain remedy” of language in the aftermath of emotional evacuation: “the consolations pour/ those unseen wither/ thinking’s like a wind/ tying knots in twine” (14).

These elegies are not only for the loss of a person, but address the sense of impermanence inherent in language in the moment it seeks to comfort, to close a gap or cover an open wound. Hoover writes in “and what is last in us”: “touch is a form of speech/close your eyes to imagine/open them to remember/forms are firm, shapes shift” (29). Where the contradictions do not result in a zero sum, instead verify the irrational logic of the heart suffering what is ultimately unthinkable, impossible.

The language is colloquial; occasionally literary references crop up, and then recede back into the subtle mixture of short lines, references to the personal and to cycles of earth, and transient, lithe meditations on the nature of words, and reality.

In a short section at the end of the book, called “The Windows (The Actual Acts)” Hoover spends twenty four pages on an exercise which seems to be for the purpose of trying to get language to be something real. They are propositions. If propositions are meant to illustrate the things of the world that are, and that can be said, all else is nonsense. In “The Windows” Hoover is carving even more depth to his unnamed speaker. In a move to fix language to say and to be what is, to imply permanence, and, therefore, the propositions function to claim the unchangeable immortal truths of the world. They are a gorgeous defense to the metaphysics and splayed logic of language when confronted by death.

Hoover’s propositions, however, shape what is with humor and a lush bleed of the illogical into what is: “A new species of clam being eaten by a new species of bird./ And there’s no new man to record it./ To imagine a world is to clean it./ Hard to conceive of a dirty new world.” And, here he leaves us, in a dirty new world – with perfect half-finished lives, sentences, thoughts, and sort of made beds. Where people and words suffer and die, or survive and maybe get shocked hard enough into having to be something new.

Related Posts:

• X by Dan Chelotti
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams
• Easy Math by Lauren Shapiro

I suppose, one thinks about this sort of thing often when one is bleeding poems into existence. One thinks about the trials, sure. But there are also the utter absurdities. Writing lines? Writing stanzas? Shaping metaphor into an argument, or argument into a metaphor? And then writing without hope of knowing what it is you’re going to get to, get at? And then getting lost! Bad judgment indeed.

And then the further absurdity: Trying to figure out what it is you’ve experienced or understood and making that into something else — a poem? The whole process can be a series of bad judgments. Something like:

“Robert Penn Warren’s Definition of Poetry”

A poem?
Could be.
Bad judgment —
Probably.

But what if there were some way to figure out what kind of poet you are? To improve the judgment?

Isaiah Berlin’s frame of the hedgehog and the fox is sometimes useful. The metaphor, which was the tittle of Berlin’s 1950s essay on Tolstoy and the styles of other writers, is a reference to a fragment by the Greek poet Archilochus, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Berlin divides writers into the two categories. Hedgehogs filter their experience and literary output through a single frame, a defining idea, a unitary vision. Think of Dante, think of Nietzsche, think of Roth, think of Faulkner, think of Merwin, think of Adrienne Rich and Emily Dickinson and Milosz. Foxes, on the other hand, utilize an array of objectives and materials. No single idea is of interest. Think of Shakespeare, think of J.C. Oates, think of Billy Collins, think of John Ashbery and Eudora Welty.

Put the circular you into the corresponding hedgehog or fox circle (rather than try to put a circular you into a hedgehog or fox square), and you might be be able to sort out what you have written, are writing, and might write in the future. And just live with that. Well, by that I mean, thrive there. Embrace it. It’d be good judgment.

Here’s another test. Have a look at this painting by the pre-Raphaelite English painter, John William Waterhouse:

“The Lady of Shalott” depicts of scene from Tennyson’s poem. There’s unrequited love! There’s Camelot! There’s a lady locked in a tower! It’s those Saturdays of yore collapsed on a couch reading adventure poetry while it’s raining outside.

But also look closely at the painting. Aside from its ekphrastic foundation, look at the expression on the woman’s face. The general despair of her mouth, the dis-allegience with reality in the eyes, the urgency of the body toward some kind of action. Are these the kinds of themes your writing entertains? Too, take a look at the smaller details: the two blown-out candles, the meek lantern, the domestic bedding in the non-domestic vessel, the high light of liberty in the upper right that can’t be reached that must be meant as a contrast with the lower right blackness under the boat of the river, the awaiting suicidal darkness. And finally, the little chain clasped delicately around her right hand. Are these the kind of delicacies that are revered in your writing? Do you write with a depictionist’s sense of precision? Especially for the image?

Or consider these two paintings by Pablo Picasso: “Maia au Bateau” and “The Weeping Woman.”

Do these images more accurately reflect the sort of poetry you write? In the boat painting, I see not, as in the Whitehouse, a woman in despair inside a boat, but a woman holding a toy boat who has become so triangulated she has blended into the boat itself. (In the Waterhouse, the woman is distinct from the boat, no?)

Look closely at the landscape, too. There really isn’t any. It’s an interior, it’s a carpet, with a corresponding wall not just resembling the room but blanketing it into darkness so that there is no differentiation of space, of time, of qualities of actual living. And the multi-colored fragmentary distorted face is concurrent with the boat’s angles. All the particulars are blended into the other particulars. Pile on upon pile on. Everything distorted into a singular tapestry.

Or in the weeping painting: Are we not meant to have the woman’s pain transferred literally into us? Is this the sort of breaking down of barriers between, let’s call it now, reader and writer that you’re after in your poems? Do you want the figures in your poems to be sanctified or sacrificed? Do you want them to be real or hyper-real? Do you care if they have past lives or are they figurations tearing themselves into pieces and tearing themselves both into and out of an idea?

Are you writing for depiction or for transformation? Or for distortion? Or for absolute pure utterance?

Filter your own writing through the one (the Waterhouse) or the other (the Picasso), and you’ll go a long way to sorting out what kind of poet you are, have been, and can be.

I’ll say, too, it’s not an all or nothing sort of proposition. You’re not all depiction or all distortion. Just as you are not all hedgehog or all fox.

Writers have tendencies, leanings, urges, predispositions. No need to hide from them. It would be bad judgement to try.

When you recognize who you are as a poet and what your ambitions are, you enter the larger art of poetry and all of its thousands of years of development as a fellow participant and not as an mere observer. You scissor yourself into the art’s very consciousness. You stitch yourself into its multi-traditions that enhance your poems and which you in turn bring freshness to, bring contemporaneity to, and bring your singular voice to. This is the communion that can help differentiate your poems inside the art of poetry.

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I don’t mean to suggest that Adams employs trickery. Quite the contrary — her writing is specific (without being limiting) and straightforward (without offering a conclusive narrative). In the opening stanza of the section “Winter Came” she writes:

This was the year I deserved the winter,
and when it came there was nothing
I could say—
I could not send it back.

It had come for me.

There is nothing hidden here; Adams is not playing games with her reader. She shoots straight from the hip, and her aim is true.

It is difficult not to imagine the “I” in these poems as Adams herself, although one never knows. Perhaps, like the many versions of Jane Doe that we meet in the title section of the book, the “I” is many versions of Adams. Perhaps the “I” is entirely other from the writer (though I am more doubtful than usual of this).

The “I” in Forty-One Jane Doe’s takes on identities. She is Pandora, opening the box: “It was me. There was no lock or key. I just asked, ‘Shall I?’/And the stars fell out.” In the first section of the collection, aptly titled “A Mystery Story,” she is a detective, investigating the weather. She is alternately knowing and wondering, known and unknown.

What is clear throughout is the presence of a narrator, serving not as lecturer or advisor to the reader but as guide and interrogator. The “I” addresses the reader directly in the section “Technologies”: “My body./Reader,/he strokes it in letters” and “Reader, you and I have been lashed/by the weather. We’ve been let down.” A few pages later, the “I” questions the reader, asking “Do you know mathematical beauty, reader?” and then acknowledges itself:

It is an act of extreme egotism to believe
that my being [here]changes the city.
Disrupts it so.
A windbreak. A shadow caster.
My breath catches. Extends.

Self or selfless,
I am in the way.

Whoever she is, the “I” in Adams’ poetry is aware, of herself and of everything she encounters. She is as inquisitive as she is introspective — Forty-One Jane Doe’s is a book of investigation, of questioning. “Why must the body insist?” asks the narrator in a later section of the book. But as we’ve already been told, “The detective/she leaves it to you.”

There are clues that serve both to clarify and to confuse. “The first clue is snowflakes,” but also, “The first clue is wide-eyed.” There are hand-delivered clues and clues made of “paper/wrapped.” There are hints and evidence. And, “Some days there are no clues/other than the patterns of migrating birds.”

There are windows. Pandora gives her box an intentional window “[t]o become perceptible; to be expressed; to permit passage; to make manifest. Maybe for all these reasons. It caught a cluster, a bee and a thistle; the spindle of a watch balance. The sun on the tip of a matchstick.” Later on, there is an accidental window, an unintentional aperture as “the ceiling collapsed,/the roof opened to reveal the sky/yawning back at me—.”

And, of course, there are the Janes. The title section begins, “There are Janes for everyday./And there are sometime Janes.” There are recognizable, apparent Janes and there are hidden Janes. The Janes are distinct and unique, but crowd them “in a graffitied bathroom stall” and “they would all be dialing the same number.”

Adams shifts back and forth between the plural and singular in this section. The many Janes sometimes coalesce into one Jane:

Mornings, Jane tries to look so tall,
no matter what she’s carrying.
She strides down the wooden train platform, one hand
holding her skirt against the breeze, the other clutching.

And then are split apart into multiples again:

One day there were high rise office buildings
and tenements and grids
and alleyways sunk under with rain water.
And then the Janes came with them.

Above all else, the Janes are aware: “One Jane Doe remember burying / Jane Doe in the sand. There is a moment, she says,/when you know what you are doing / is wrong, but you do it anyway.” This is a poetry concerned with the specificities of the universe, of nature, of science and of the body, of love and of pain. The Janes are aware, the “I” is aware, and Adams is aware.

Forty-One Jane Doe’s closes, fittingly, with a question:

If you know the end,
if the day has already come
and another begun for you
can you tell me of it,
so I may know
what to look for?

Like I said, this poetry is magic. Ultimately, Adams challenges her readers to observe intensely the world around us, to decide for ourselves which particulars are clues to be deciphered and which questions are asking for our answers.

(Note: Three short films, created in tandem with the writing, accompany Forty-One Jane Doe’s. The images presented in these films serve to reinforce and inform the poems. I’d recommend reading the book in its entirety prior to viewing the films.)

Related Posts:

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I entered the book from its first pages, drawn in and distracted from my own private pain by Orr’s play of language down the page. Orr’s short lines run up against his long sentences. The brief poems are only momentary intervals within their long sequences. He has something both simple and complex to say. I think I think something about what I am to think, and then Orr asks me to think again. I think I think something about what I am to feel, and then Orr asks me to think again.

Love overwhelms us.

Or death takes

One more
Of those.
We cherish most.

Where else?

Where else can we go? (68)

Immediately I copied these lines out of the book and passed them along. For these lines, alone, I could have chosen River Inside the River to discuss in this month’s club. But this book shows us that nothing, no matter how singular or solitary, really stands alone, and so it is not just for these lines that I selected this book.

I often say that reading poetry, and writing it, means taking part in a long conversation, one that has been going on around us all along. We can jump in with our own way of seeing things, sharing in the dialogue for awhile. Then we, and so much of what we love, will be gone. River Inside the River reminds us these things are true, both the long running conversation and the brevity of our time in its midst. This book acknowledges the frailty and continuity of mortals and their words.

Starting with Adam and Eve and their simultaneously immediate and eternal loss, Orr pulls at the root of all heart ache. “To Speak,” “To See, “To Write,” “To Name”: These are the titles of the first five poems in the book, taking us to the base representation of the verbs, before the complications of tense and time and case. Soon enough, though, in the book’s sixth poem, when the worm fails to appear for the grand naming ceremony in Eden, “a dark shroud” (17) is stitched through the cycle, and even this careful design begins to be corrupted. How quickly Orr brings us to the point. “The book said: everything perishes,” he writes in a later poem. “The Book said: that’s why we sing” (89).

In the collection’s three sequences, “Eden and After,” “The City of Poetry,” and “River Inside the River,” Orr balances the need to say things newly against the impossibility of saying anything new. He gives beauty reign equal to anguish. In the middle of “The City of Poetry,” just after he he asks where else we can go, in the face of love and loss, besides the city of poetry, Orr writes, “If you’re halfway honest, I’m sure/They’ll tell you this city, like the human heart,/ Contains it all–spun sugar and gossamer,/But also deepest grief and even horror” (69). The book deals with loss, yes. The book confronts Orr’s own difficult history, and also our nation’s, and also the world’s. But the book also talks about love and hope, the spaces we’ve created, through imagination and determination, where we can rest and love and grow to be ourselves. The book talks about the “Mother’s House” and how that is just another name for the transformative power of verse.

Despite or maybe because of the length of each cycle, the individual poems in this collection are spare, often as short as eight or twelve lines. Most made up of three or four beats, and some as little as one. Why go on and on?

River inside the river.
World within the world.

All we have is words

To reveal the rose
That the rose obscures. (124)

We all know what happened in Eden and afterward, so why go on? We all know that people we love will die, that love can corrupt us, that humans are hard on each other time and time again. Why go on? Why rehash, at length the old familiar song? Except that we need, sometimes, often perhaps, to know we are part of something larger than ourselves alone. Except that the writing brings us to something new. The words can “reveal the rose/That the rose obscures.” At times in this collection we run across familiar forms (Oh look, a villanelle!) and names as familiar as Shakespeare, Sappho, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Neruda, and we see them as we always saw them, but yet we see them new. Those poets, like so many people, are lost to us. Those old forms are past their prime, and even the new forms are made up of nothing that’s new. I could be devastated by all of this so easily, but I am not. I turned to this book because I wanted the busy work of reading poetry, the distraction of working through words, but Orr reminds us that poetry is alchemy. In the process of reading about grief and beauty and people and forms I knew, Orr introduced something that made everything altogether new.

“I’m an old man/ Made young again/ By the poems I love,” writes Orr as he closes “The City of Poetry.” I could go on and on quoting lines and stanzas from this collection, evidence to support my admiration for this book which is, in turn, evidence to support the need for poetry. I could go on and on quoting moments when Orr has reminded me, newly, what it is I always knew. I could go on and on, talking you through this book, but I won’t. You’ll need to take this journey on your own.

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There is another thing that kind of made me laugh at myself: I continued to pay attention because Richard Blanco is a fine, fine-looking man. Dem arms. Seriously.

Look, perhaps we should have more open lusting for poets, yeah? If that is someone’s gateway into a poet’s work, then so be it. We all need more poetry in our lives.

All right, now that I’ve got all that off my chest, can I also tell you that I really enjoy Looking for The Gulf Motel? Yes, I do. Truly. It hits all my thematic hot spots — love, lust, and loneliness. Blanco revels in memory and intimacy, and much like Tracy K. Smith’s poetry, his work makes me want to bed down and stay.

Because my parents come from Florida — Miami, more specifically — and because I still visit my maternal grandmother in Port St. Lucie (which is more on the central coast), I feel at home reading about Florida. I’ve never lived there, but I imagine the familiarity I have is similar to what Blanco feels about Cuba, minus the political upheaval.

We click beers — Viva Cuba — though
I want to believe I’d hate my life here

from “Poem Between Havana and Varadero”

And I think I’d hate to live in central Florida, though I could grow to love Miami. My mom still likes to tell the story of taking me to a Cuban restaurant, and how the waitstaff was so amused by this baby with a giant, blond-fuzzed head, who would shovel in all the black beans she could get her hands on. Even though I barely remember my last trip to Miami at nine years old, I don’t think I’d feel like a tourist. (For one thing, I’d be busy eating all the properly cooked platanos in sight and would therefore be unconcerned with other matters.)

Everything I am is here still, sitting
with my grandfather on lawn chairs
watching plum sunsets and the clouds
of his tabaco vanishing into the wind,
into the chirp of crickets echoing back
from stars that haven’t moved since
I first saw them, and the moon not yet
replaced by the glow of the city’s lights

from “Sitting on My Mother’s Porch in Westchester, Florida”

Motel is not all about Cuba and Florida, but about identity, and about feeling comfortable with our desires. Whether we know we will be at home farther north, or that we do not fit the tidy traditional narrative our families imagined, Blanco has the words. I loved his poems about his romantic relationships, and “we were no good at that kind of talk, / remember? We had no language for / those mysteries: two men consumed / with one another.” (“Cheers to Hyakutake”)

There’s also an underlying anxiety with the desire to sometimes be someone else — to be the specific someone another needs. Is he supposed to be his father? Is there another him somewhere out there in another parallel universe? And the biggest question of all: “Why have you been sad all your life?” (“Birthday Portrait”)

To be honest, I don’t know what I love most about Looking for The Gulf Motel because it’s just all so true. What I don’t understand about people who get so turned off by the concept of the Other, as though their poor little brains cannot possibly process anything deviating from what’s in front of their noses, is that we’re really not so different. We all want to be loved, desired, and not so sad. We have complicated relationships, romantic and familial, and it’s not so scary to say so. Richard Blanco is a treasure, his words a salve, and he fills me with the best sort of yearning. Most of all, he makes me want to get to work.

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All across America, men are inventing
the steam engine while women sew
the faces of presidents into quilts.
If a whistle is left alone in the forest
it may restore a measure of silence
to the world. Television
reminds me of a math problem
I got wrong on the SAT. Come on, Kathy says,
can’t you just enjoy it for once? By now we know
who patented the steam engine,
but think of all the men who tinkered around,
helping to invent it. Kathy is like one
of their wives, knitting a scarf
out of peach wool. Kathy, I say,
feeling a burst of goodwill,
I’ll give you all my collectibles.
Thanks, she says. I’ll take the John Lennon
dinnerware set for eight. As I walk home
to get it, the world looks like
a Brueghel painting and all the trees
are sending off beautiful
little equations into the air.

Let’s note at the start that the first law of thermodynamics is that energy is constant, just so we’re all on the same page. So: what’s going down here? I think a compelling argument could be made that ultimately Shapiro’s speaker’s exploding the idea of individual tasks (“think of all the men who tinkered around, / helping to invent it”), which is why the title’s significant: if energy’s not lost, then all the work done, in a big enough context, leads to every development. Maybe that’s a bullshitty metaphysical stretch, but it seems, at least according to this poem, sort of reasonable. Aside from that aspect, the poem’s fairly thick with what’d have to be called philosophical stuff: the half-joke about something in a forest and who’d hear it comes in for revision, this time as something to “restore a measure of silence / to the world,” and television—that greatest pleasure-giver, that narcotic of light and laughtrack—”reminds me of a math problem / I got wrong on the SAT.” Whatever you decide that those lines mean, they’re trying in their way to bend and tweak things —just look at the fact that the linebreak turns television from a math problem into a math problem the speaker got wrong.

And, of course, there’s math: math in the bit about TV, and math at the poem’s end, and it’s those equations I want to focus on for a second. Because, of course: regardless of the poem’s title or ideas, that’s just a beautiful image, the notion of trees “sending off beautiful / little equations into the air.” It’s just gorgeous, which is the other thing to note: Lauren Shapiro makes gorgeous poetry, and there are lines in this book that’ll stun—you’ll dogear every sixth page or so. But take a second to humor the possibility that there’s more going on: if the poem’s about energy being constant, and if the poem addresses notions of somthing’s invention coming not just from the Eureka-shouting discoverer but from everyone who tinkered up to the discovery, and if the poem ends with this gorgeous image or idea of trees offering/transmitting equations—literally things for other people to solve, or try to solve, anyway—that surely all adds up to something, yes? Maybe that’s an optimistic read, but I finished that poem sort of stunned at the potential Shapiro was seemingly offering: that the world is, as she says in the book’s title, Easy Math.

Here’s another—here’s “ESL Students” from early on in the book’s first quadrant of poems.

They ask, Why is it in the car but on the bus?
I turn up my hands and give them a pained expression.
There is a moment of quiet anger. Then they pop
open their blouses and the buttons fall
like foreign coins to the floor.
They stand on the desks. They kick the air.
We’re sick of this bullshit, they say.
I am very still. I look them in the eyes.
We’ve show you our tits! they shout.
Yes, I say quietly, and begin to unbotton my cardigan.
The class is silent. For some time we stand there naked,
they on their desks and me in front of the blackboard.
Then Maoki says, There is a difference scene
in every room in the world.
Our clothes are but the lint of a passing era, says Hana.
I will light a candle and watch the prayer moths
circle the room like used napkins, says Oui.
I don’t speak. A shadow passes over the left
side of my chest. Then the bell rings.

I won’t go through and nerdily take apart this one, but just look for a second at what Shapiro’s pulling off: these students don’t understand, or are frustrated by, the weird inconsistencies in language—they’re frustrated that the coding system of meaning is fucked or flawed. Fair enough, obviously. And in response, they get naked. Play along however you like, but it’s hard not to feel like they’re begging for language to reveal (at its best, shouldn’t language be perfectly transparent—shouldn’t I be able to say I feel good and have that be 100% clear to anyone I talk to? Isn’t one of the big crap deals of language the ambiguity, the way it fails?), and when they realize this new language (ESL students) won’t, they reveal themselves, like a dare: here’s what we’ll do, not language, do your part. Maybe that’s a drastic misread. But then it gets even weirder and cooler, with three students offering these strange lines toward the end, and what’s the teacher do? Doesn’t speak. Take the poem however you want: the drama enacted in it has to have something to do not just with communication, but with the ease of communication, with what we expect systems (math or language) to provide for us if we offer our dilligence.

I want to make clear, too: it’s possible the book is in fact doing none of this stuff, and it’s just a very good debut collection of poetry with sharply memorable lines (“When I reach out for you, there’s a tiny genie / in my right ear saying, Go! and an enormous / elephant in my left saying, What the fuck / are you thinking, you little shit?” from “First Man Gets the Oyster, Second Man Gets the Shell”; “I’ve always wanted to be the softest piece / in the chess set. I’ve always known / there never was a soft piece in the chess set.” in “A to Z”). Easy Math is, as far as I can tell, a really beautiful scattering, an attempt to find sense and sustenance (emotional, aesthetic, whatever). Such of course could be said about lots of books, but the big value in Easy Math that I can find is how it doesn’t quite solve, doesn’t quite offer anything as simple as closure. The last line in her poem “Dominoes” applies well to the experience of reading this book and being forced to reconsider the world around you, the one you’re trying to fix, or escape with books, or whatever: “Why couldn’t you see any beauty in that?”

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Born in 1934 to Italian immigrants, Ceravolo got an engineering degree, served in the Army and wrote ardent, engaged poetry until shortly before his death from a brain tumor in 1988. He studied with Kenneth Koch, and won the first Frank O’Hara Prize for Spring In This World of Poor Mutts. He was always considered something of a “poet’s poet,” appreciated with detailed loyalty by writers who felt hugely grateful to have been introduced to his work. Collected Poems is the banquet with all the courses to validate their enthusiasm.

Koch called a Ceravolo poem “an amazing perceptual archaeology,” and that’s a good place to begin, with its engagement of what one senses (perceives), and also what one must dig for. Ceravolo’s combinations of words, line spacing and the music they make both amaze and stop breath.

“Passion for the Sky,” from the O’Hara Prize volume, gives a brief glimpse of how so much comes together with so little :

It is a flawless love poem, for the person who is loved and for other offerings night holds.

There is an almost relentless urgency in every line, demanding a level of being awake that could be enervating, but miraculously isn’t. With Ceravolo reading becomes both energizing and, more often than not, a time-out to praise, as well as a respite from surroundings. “Dive in!” I want to shout in response to “Inland:”

This poem makes me think of Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” as do other Ceravolo poems, in part because, deliberately avoiding stardom, he lived in mundane Bloomfield, New Jersey, where typical Springsteen fans lead lives of unheralded emotions . Bloomfield is close enough to New York to satisfy many appetites, and Ceravolo was an eager consumer, admiring Ted Berrigan and absorbing the grit and rough beauties that the area had to offer. He was also not completely immune to the lure of surface glitter, and posed for Francesco Scavullo, the lens master best known for glamming up Cosmopolitan Magazine for many years. The Wesleyan staff was wise to use one of Scavullo’s smoldering portraits for the cover of this book, as a way help hook a new generation on a talent that ranks with the best that American letters has to offer.

“End of the World” could be about any place, including the industrial parts of New Jersey not far from where Ceravolo lived and worked :

This is the kind of poem that makes me ache over the fact that Ceravolo is not with us to share a bill with Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Ed Roberson and other living masters. His physicality is ever-present, sometimes with the plain elegance of “Lethal Sonnet:’’

Ceravolo was a man of many parts, laboring to unite a whole and to do it with integrity. Engineering is an occupation that has more room for poetry (think precision, dedication, symmetry, and a lust for questions and answers ) than one might immediately assume. He made room to fall in love, to marry and have children and be attentive to those he loved. He fed his muse in ways that honor the sacred without ever crossing the line into a slackness that bruises the raw holiness he sought, found and celebrated. Sometimes his short poems say it best :

“Vision.”
Sacrifice love and record position
The goats balance
On beautiful mountains.

“Promontory”
At dawn whatever light
returns, my heart
becomes quicker and quicker
in the night.

He was also wounded by events beyond his control, taking them in as if they were his own, as if suffering for them could somehow heal individuals ripped apart by the decisions of others. “Lament #2 for Lebanon” is too long to quote in full, but like almost everything in this collection, shows bravery, balance, and pure art:

Tomorrow night before the winds blow down
the hungry trees : they’re swaying in the mist,
I want to stop this grove from filling.
Stars in our sleep ride the massacre
in corners of destruction’s nest.
Suns of chords
like dialysis or death.
unknown
Oh Lebanon
land of wood,
defoliated dreams, decapitated screams.
land of wood
Like a pawn you lie
in the middle of the beast,
in the midst of an
old land of sorrows
of controversy crossing the soul.
A dark walk in the desert!
A scorched memory’s toll!

The entire piece is about twice what you see here, and is, like every word in this volume, (including David Lehman’s rigorously appreciative introduction) a “scorched memory” and well worth the price, the toll of time spent with this incendiary material.

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