Born in 1936, Marge Piercy has made decisions that serve as scaffolding for her poetry and fiction. She has stayed actively true to her progressive, feminist convictions. She has returned, with depth, to Jewish traditions she was born into. She has maintained a complicated appreciation for the natural world, especially the environs of her Cape Cod home. She has remained in a long, loving marriage of encouraging equals, to Ira Wood, her sometime collaborator, and co-instructor when leading writing workshops. She’s also kept her sense of humor.

She harnesses worldly concerns with matters of the soul, with a straightforward beauty that provides many examples from The Hunger Moon—New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010. It is her eighteenth volume of poetry.

“The visitation,” from What Are Big Girls Made Of? weaves in and out of the moment, making it exquisitely current :

The yearling doe stands by the pile of salt
hay, nibbling and then strolls up the path.
Among the spring flowers she stands amazed,
hundreds of daffodils, forsythia,
the bright chalices of tulips, crimson,
golden, orange streaked with green, the wild tulips
opening like stars fallen on the ground.

This, and more, before Piercy makes her point with language that is as right to see and hear as the deer is both lovely and a symbol of rough reality :

Graceful among the rhododendrons, I know
what her skittish courage represents : she
is beautiful as those sub-Saharan children
with huge luminous brown eyes of star-
vation. A hard winter following a hurricane,
tangles of downed trees even the deer
cannot penetrate, a long slow spring
with the buds obdurate as pebbles,
too much building, so she comes to stand
in our garden, eyes flowering with wonder
under the incandescent buffet of the fruit
trees, this garden cafeteria she has walked
into to graze, from the lean late woods.

Never be misled by forthright declarations in a Piercy poem. Each reverberates music it was meant to sound, as in “Wellfleet Shabbat” from The Art Of Blessing the Day:

The hawk eye of the sun slowly shuts.
The breast of the bay is softly feathered
dove grey. The sky is barred like the sand
when the tide trickles out.
The great doors of Shabbat are swinging
open over the ocean, loosing the moon
floating up slow distorted vast, a copper
balloon just sailing free.
The wind slides over the waves, patting
them with its giant hand, and the sea
stretches its muscles in the deep,
purrs and rolls over.
The sweet beeswax candles flicker
and sigh, standing between the phlox
and the roast chicken. The wine shines
its red lantern of joy.
Here on this piney sandspit, the Shekhina
comes on the short strong wings of the seaside
sparrow raising her song and bringing
down the fresh clear night.

“Shekhina” represents devine, female spirit in Jewish life, making this and other poems in the collection, read like prayers one’s foremothers might have wished for, had they time, not to mention a loving spouse who no doubt helps with the meal so that all at the table can be lit by the “red lantern of joy.” Generations of Jewish women fought to learn the language and rituals reserved for men, making Wellfleet Shabbat and its neighbors in these pages a kind of altar of acknowledgement and remembrance, sacred bricks and mortar.

Love poems. Poems confronting war. Poems about cats. All are notoriously difficult to write without falling into dogmatic babble or trite traps. Piercy avoids this, in selection after selection, as in this from “Implications of one-plus one” from Available Light:

Ten years of fitting our bodies together
and still they sing wild songs in new keys.

She suggests they’re still singing even after watching football together, deliciously possessing him and the game, announcing “Football is mine,” in “Football for dummies” a recent composition. The poem is pure fun, and you cheer for everyone.

“Peace in a Time of war,” quoted in part, makes my point about war poems and highlights Piercy’s versatility once more :

Ceremony is a moat we have
crossed into a moment’s
harmony as if the world paused –
but it doesn’t. What we must
do waits like coats tossed
on the bed for us to rise
from this warm table
put on again and go out.

And then there are the poems about cats. As someone who likes dogs and shares a bed with a man and one or more felines, I’ve written my share of terrible cat poems and am always on the prowl for good ones by others. In “Old cat crying,” as in all topics she seizes, Piercy is empathetically masterful, and in this case the mastery connects feline need to human need and loss :

He should not have died
before her. She cries
for him to come. She
sniffed his body and knew,
but she has forgotten
and he does not come.

Piercy apprehends what conventional wisdom sometimes disdains. We humans show emotion in ways, like sniffing (who among us has not sniffed a garment recalling scent of a long-gone love?) that can seem both feral and genuine.

Not surprisingly, for someone whose prose includes Sleeping With Cats, A Memoir, Piercy ends with a poem about the death of a cat. Like this entire collection, and like Breaking Camp, her first volume of poetry, published by Wesleyan in 1968, and well worth repeat visits, “End of days” engages the senses and enlarges them. Cats “see clearly/through hooded eyes, “we are informed, before being reminded how terrible it is to face the end of life while confined in “the silent scream of hospitals.”

Marge Piercy’s unflinching clarity of vision continues to be the kind of sturdy example so vital to literature. She has long been teaching and in the public arena, on the humane side of almost every contemporary issue. Lesser poets, lesser citizens have been appointed United States Poet Laureate. It’s her turn.

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“Assuming that there weren’t any mind-altering chemicals in the run-off from Nowa Huta, the notoriously polluted steelworks outside Krakow (where Szymborska spent nearly her entire life), we can only conclude that Poland’s postwar poetic greatness was largely a historical accident—the collision of a deep and enduring literary culture with Europe’s ghastliest battleground.”

(Via The Book Bench)

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• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Announces…

Rob Griffith, in The Moon from Every Window, attempts many things at once, which isn’t surprising from a poetry collection. What surprises, though, is how well he accomplishes them. In three very different but equally gorgeous sections, Griffith guides us through every poetic form from sonnet to villanelle, all while examining the idea of what it means to be in one place instead of all others, what it means not to know your own momentum and position at the same time, to never see the moon from every window.

In the first section, Griffith deals with domesticity, sharpening his poetry on everyday ideas. The collection opens with “The War at Home,” where a dog, “a boxer mix,” wages war on a springtime hydrangea by habitually using the bush as his toilet, but try as the dog may, he can’t win the war and kill the flower. What does this mean for the dog? For us, who may be trapped in similar wars at home that we will never win? Through the course of the section, Griffith explores a relationship falling apart. In Griffith’s world, we all become chained to monotony, even the undead. In “When the Zombies Come,” what is interesting is not that zombies descend; it is that the zombies quickly become us. The poem concludes:

I like to think they’ll mill and stare, then bend
to take up our uniforms, our jobs
and lives—a zombie checkout boy who sacks
the bread and eggs; the zombie line ref
who shambles downfield to make some bad calls;
and zombie teachers gurgling out declensions
for lie and lay. And at a desk, paused
with pen in hand, a zombie poet writes
a zombie sonnet for his sonnet love. He sings
of flawless gray skin, of eyes like curdled milk.

Here we see how Griffith shines. His exquisite verb choice (“mill,” “gurgling,” “paused,” “shambles”), his intriguing line endings (to pause on the word “pause” is at once obvious and effective), and his ability to make everything mundane (even a zombie invasion) show Griffith’s attention to language and the discipline of poetry.

The most notable and obvious evidence of his devotion to detail is his pervasive use of poetic forms. Like Natasha Trethewey in Native Guard, Griffith employs poems that adhere to forms at random, causing the reader to constantly ask, “Is this poem a form I don’t know?” Usually I am unimpressed by neo-formalism since form usually trumps content, but Griffith manages to utilize form without sacrificing what he has to say. “Heisenberg to His Wife” is a sonnet, “Patchwork Garden” is a haiku (and like all haikus, it is too short to be effective), and other poems show an impressive penchant for blank verse, as seen in this opening line from “For a Party at a Friend’s House,” “Not everything is elegy, thank God…” And this wordplay shows another of Griffith’s strengths: humor. Like the zombies, Griffith’s poetry does not take itself too seriously, even when it wanders into heavy physics.

The second section of the book focuses on two seemingly random and unrelated thinkers, Werner Heisenberg and Jonathan Edwards. In the first poem of the section, “Heisenberg’s Love Song,” Griffith begins with an epigraph from Heisenberg: “The momentum and position of a particle cannot / both be known at the same time. Knowing one will disrupt / knowing the other.” The section explores the idea of our inability to know where we are and where we are going. This builds off the collapsed domesticity of the first section. “Heisenberg’s Love Song” ends: “Are you moving toward me or away?” The final stanza of the second poem in the section, “Heisenberg to His Wife,” reads:

And nearly everywhere at once, it jumps
From state to state, absorbing and emitting
All those quanta—a light switch off or on,
No in-betweens. It’s here we are finally stumped.
Like love, the change is total, and I’ll admit,
The trouble lies in telling when it’s gone.

We cannot know our position and momentum, Griffith seems to say. Instead, as he declares in “Heisenberg in Old Age,”

each moment is simply a kind of waiting
for the next, a halfway house where no one leaves.
He wonders what it’s all for, a world
where the present is myth and nothing exists
but memory and anticipation.

Griffith, with all his deft wordplay and formal skills, is most impressive with his consistency to his poetic project. The Moon from Every Window meditates on the Heisenberg principle, that a particle’s momentum and position cannot both be known, and how it relates to people. By introducing the idea in the second section makes a reader rethink the first section, which is thrilling. With only a few exceptions, like “Ruth’s Alexandriad” which lacks impact, the poems in this collection succeed. The third section, with multiple poems about fishing, show a speaker on the move, either hitchhiking in Tennessee or finding his Chinese doppelgänger, showing a man now aware that where he is and where he is going cannot both be know, so he focuses only on where he is. The final lines in this strong, intriguing collection, in a poem called “Disappearing,” read: “…I’d just be gone, / like stars swallowed by the mackerel-light of dawn.”

Read “Disappearing,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Rob Griffith.

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I’d like to cap this pen, lock the drawers,
and take my coat off the chair. I’d stop
the clocks at half-past two, then grab my keys
and drive away—no notes, no calls, the lights
still blazing from every room. I’d start no cults,
I’m sure. There’d be no acolytes who swear
they’d seen me drinking beer in Mexico,
no sunburnt tourists saying Yes! I saw him
at a truckstop in Des Moines. I’d just be gone,
like stars swallowed by the mackerel-light of dawn.

-Rob Griffith

Read the Rumpus Review of Rob Griffith’s The Moon From Every Window.

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• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Announces…

February’s book is D. A. Powell’s Useless Landscape. Those are in the mail and we’ll start talking about them soon. Look for my essay on why I chose this book later this week. March’s book will be Linda Hogan’s Indios, and Camille Dungy will be leading that discussion.

Finally, this really isn’t book club news, but what the hell. The Rumpus is holding a fundraiser at the AWP convention, so if you’re going to be in Chicago on March 1, come by 826 Chicago. Readers include Nick Flynn, Cheryl Strayed, Peter Orner, Sommer Browning, Brian Spears and Stephen Elliott.

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What a collection! Marianne Boruch’s The Book of Hours is the work of a grown-up, full of gravity and understanding. These poems are sharp reflections, half caught before they’re gone. The words don’t always line up in sentences with conventional meanings, but at the same time, you know what Boruch is getting at, and her insights are worth the attention.

I’ll write a poem down whole–these are impossible to subdivide and get at the sense of them. Perhaps that’s high enough praise of a poet? She’s making things whole and smooth; chopping one up is like slicing into a raw egg.

Take a look at this one, called “To live in the bird guide, the yellowthroat’s”

To live in the bird guide, the yellowthroat’s
down thicket and hedgerow, like any
storybook would have it. And maybe his
witchety witchety witchety is love my life!

Times three. It could be steely: how dare you
and what do you know of migration
and ice. It’s the edge, prime happenstance
between woods and field, most ordinary

tangle of vine into brush. But his new
pause before each overdrive triplet
means some weather’s coming, weather
said secret, with a spike through it.

No. I’m bad weather closing in,
his silence tripped by my noise, my shade.
four seconds of threat. He’s at it again,
his fate to say nothing he says.

Like Wallace Stevens and his “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” this poem rolls around the yellowthroat, and you see why I couldn’t leave off any lines and still make any kind of point about it—as her phrases leave us off balance and looking around corners, “it’s the edge, prime happenstance/between woods and field, most ordinary” we wheel around the stand-off between the yellowthroat and the person—is it right to watch a bird survive for an aesthetic delight? The person’s shadow frightens the bird, even as she loves the bird’s life—and then, in the last line, a reminder how opaque the bird’s meanings and intentions are to the human mind.

Another poem, “In the crosshairs of mystery, they” juxtaposes the viscerally of death—one’s own personal death—beside the conventional phrases, the religion and the hospital IV.

Here it is, complete:

In the crosshairs of mystery, they
say to say: you can let go now (mother,
father, fill-in-the-blank). I know you’re only
holding on for us. Imagine. But imagine

the body. Imagine only half scenes and flashes,
decades of nothing between. You’re eighty,
in a diaper, everyone too nice, words
fast, too faint, making over the pretty flowers.

How many IVs? How much oxygen?
Our sitting there, our staring—she did let go of that,
the room, the cheap chairs, let go of Mondays, the guy
bringing the host to her from Mass, gravely aware

of his part in the drama, then someone else
entirely when no, she turned away.
Later, how to find her? I tried blurting out.
I tried letting go of the sentence, midsentence.

The poems jump into the air, twists around and land somewhere five feet away, you can see how impossible it would be to quote a line or two for purposes of review. These poems are sophisticated, mature works. I hope, in writing about them, that I don’t give the false impression that I’ve got to the bottom of what they have to offer. They’re often about the strange, complex and imperfect mapping of nature—human and wild—onto our 21st century lives. The nature Boruch has in her crosshairs; sometimes it’s the yellowthroat’s witchety witchety witchety, and sometimes it’s our own mystery.

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My kingdom for Dora Malech’s lexical agility! Say So is the second collection from this pedigreed poet, and it swings on elephant wings. By that I mean Malech manages to make nimble meaning out of our current crop of clichés by a variety of methods, whether that means mashing up figures of speech:

If I were an operation, I’d be fly by night
and very bloody. …
— “Face For Radio”

or applying a devastating twist to an aphorism:

The way to a man’s heart is through his ribcage.
— “Goodbye, I Love You”

or creating a slightly new aphorism that seems truer the more you think about it:

…Best
left unsaid: Oops. …
— “Note to So Sorry for Self

In our everyday language — which is so often blundering, clunky and obfuscatory — Malech finds, in her way, as much room for rejoicing as Whitman did. While the invocation of Whitman isn’t exactly right — Malech is more of a miniaturist (but then, next to Walt, isn’t everyone?), there is something about Malech’s reveling in the American demotic that is bound to draw comparisons to Walt (at least one, anyway), especially to his exuberance. Because Say So is exuberant, if subtler and more difficult than Leaves of Grass. Where Whitman’s lines are cataracts down cliffsides, Malech’s are levers in Rube Goldberg machines, each line activating the next one as the poem careens toward its end, one step ahead of the entire contraption’s collapse:

K.O. to my O.T. and bait to my switch, I crown
you one-trick pony to my one-horse town,
…
…Let me begin by saying if he hollers,
end with goes the weasel. In between,
cream filling. Get over it, meaning, the moon. …
…
My fruit bat, my gewgaw. You had me at no duh.
— From “Love Poem”

There is no solid footing here. Taking a tentative step onto “if he hollers,” we suddenly find ourselves at the other end of a different children’s rhyme, “goes the weasel”. As the line breaks, Malech seems to promise an explanation of how we got from “hollers” to “weasel” by telling us what came “[i]n between…”. Instead, we get “cream filling” — a figurative pie in the face.

That bit of prosodic slapstick is a Malech hallmark. She is often mordantly funny, as in this deadpan opening to a poem called “Inventing the Body”: “The lungs were my idea./Shins, his./Breasts, mine, though he agreed.” If I seem to be surveying Say So’s surfaces while dancing around the question of what these poems are about, well, I would argue (somewhat conveniently) that it’s unavoidable. For me, these poems are about unintentional association, the ways our minds wander even when — especially when? — they’re trying to wrap themselves around a given idea. These poems explore the mind’s language leaks, its mission creep, by enacting them.

Earlier this year, Malech told “Bookworm” host Michael Silverblatt “Uh oh” hugs ‘ha ha’ uncomfortably close,” which is the pithiest explication of the double-sided nature of comedy I’ve ever heard.

Malech’s playfulness with language extends past the aural, as her jokes and near-miss puns can also often be visual, so much so that you can sometimes almost mistake them for typos.
For instance:

For his sake I steered clear or flicker,
singed the noodles, sang for supper —
— From “Relatively Long Arms”

or:

Now solve for x where mph is speed and oomph is impact
— From “Them’s Fighting Words”

or:

Here lies the sigh begun nine lines ago.
— From “Flight, Fight Or”

The title of this last poem is one of four which seem to be from Malech’s imaginary index of clichés, which includes “Forever Hold Your Peace, Speak Now Or”, “Break, Make Or”, and “Go, Touch And”.

Say So also includes a group of prose poems which, for my money, are not as strong as her more whimsical, rollicking, rickety lyrics. (Further disclosure: I once worked at ReDivider, the Emerson College-based journal in which two of the poems Malech collects here first appeared. However, as Nonfiction Editor I had no input into the poetry content.)

That’s not to say the prose poems aren’t often enjoyable. In fact, they contain some of Malech’s shiniest gems, such as “Past tense is too easy, turns tale vestigial only.” or the haunting “Yes, I cross my legs and bolt my door, read boys/girls as boys slash girls.” Those lines are from “Canzone: How To” and the volume-ending, really excellent “Body Language.” In other words, I would not want to have missed the prose poems in this book, I am just less likely to return to them.

Because this is a book to be returned to — to be sampled and enjoyed and mulled over. For all my enthusiasm for Malech’s magnificent wordplay, it can become overwhelming in one sitting, as you feel yourself pummeled by double- and triple-entendres.

“The words too whoseoever,” Beckett wrote in his late work Worstward Ho!. “What room for worse! How almost true they sometimes ring!” At her best, Malech reinvigorates some of those worn out words and idioms, making them ring just a little truer. In the process, she reminds us, in her words, of “[t]he privilege of language,/the privy and the ledge.”

Read “Thousands are gathered outside the interior ministry,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Dora Malech.

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Bloody lullabies soothe the centuries.
Can’t see the cradles for the tops of trees
but you know the rest: you can’t rest, poor babies.

Keeper must feed the open mouth of less than,
promise sweet imminence lest its equation
flash its vast imbalance. All you can count on

is its truth is false. Tired of penance-
as-usual, its subjects take their chances,
lob bottles onto logic’s premises,

throw garbage at the ever-guarded gates.
The grid goes down: the city burns now less
symmetrically. Volleys of rubber bullets,

real bullets, as cell phone videos
catch, like bloody butterflies, howls (souls?)
rising from the fallen. Chants of life goes

on until it doesn’t, or so the slogans
sound mid-madness, around the salvoes’ din.
This is test without constant, the red duration,

mothers hurling rock-a-byes: my son died
a hero. In an unspecified inside,
sanctum sanctorum, a kettle cries

for order or gives voice to its dissent,
rails against the status quo or against
chaos, depending on who’s left.

-Dora Malech

Read the Rumpus review of Say So.

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In the poem “Phil–,” the speaker warns of the dangers of “focus[ing] on one thing / and mak[ing] it stand for every thing,” which is a good piece of advice for any reader of One Sleeps The Other Doesn’t, Jacqueline Waters long-awaited second book of poetry. The book, which is just over 100 pages long, consists of 14 poems–not including the poems-within-poem that appear in “Hello Due to Confusion: A Guard: II.” And while many of the poems are long, discursive, and paratactic, the book resists being easily summed up or captured in a brief blurb.

The poems often read as an extended conversation with one’s self, or perhaps with an other. In “Garden of Eden a College,” which was originally published as a chapbook from A Rest Press, the speaker claims, “my affairs / are just my questions,” and later in the poem a voice, perhaps the speaker’s inner-editor, parenthetically says, “These are all very good questions but stop / asking them.” And so there is a visible struggle in these poems–the reader gets to see the speaker thinking through ideas, expressing her doubts, and all the mess and contradictions that includes.

This is especially the case in “Garden of Eden a College,” where two characters, Jacqueline and Lampwick, appear and seem to be in a constant back-and-forth, tug-of-war, question-and-answer. Lampwick exists in opposition to Jacqueline and interrogates her. However, a strange slippage occurs in the back-and-forth and it can become unclear who is speaking. For example, “Lampwick this is not what you are looking for / or it is and you are totally embarrassed,” most likely should be read as Jacqueline addressing Lampwick; however, after so many of these exchanges and the strange way the characters constantly address each other by name, it is easy to begin reading it as one might a play, “Lampwick[:] [T]his is not…” Ultimately, it doesn’t seem to matter who is responsible for saying what, as the struggle between the two characters could easily be a struggle within a single, splintered self. This sort of shift in voice, or talking to or questioning one’s self, works well at the close of another long poem, “The Saw That Talked”:

How I can frame it aw I don’t know
cut-throat
Not that I feel that way
but that it appeals to me
to what
to feel that way

The “to what” in the penultimate line–the stutter, or hesitation, or interrupting voice–adds an interesting layer to the poem. Instead of the poem as monologue, we have the poem as dialogue.

Like “Garden of Eden a College” and “The Saw That Talked,” the poems throughout the collection easily lend themselves to multiple readings. The overall lack of punctuation can draw into question where one statement ends and a new one begins, and that is one of the pleasures of these poems. Another pleasure comes in the strangeness and playfulness in language, beginning with the weirdly wonderful enjambment of the book’s title. One poem is titled “Guard of an Eaten Collage: A Guard: I,” and the next poem is “The Garden of Eden a College.” “Garden of Eden” is preceded and followed by “guards,” which is explained in a fourth poem, “Somnambulism.” Written in two columns, “Somnambulism” reads like two separate pieces: one half reads like a performance piece that would fit alongside the imaginative blueprints for plays that appear in Jonathan Ball’s 2010 Coach House release, Clockfire; the other half reads as a straight-forward explanation for the poems that precede it:

I thought if my produc-
tions would not or could
not protect me, I could, at
the very least, protect my
productions. To protect
one production I imagined
especially vulnerable I pro-
duced other productions to
act as guards.

There are a number of lines that can be culled throughout the collection that speak to the act of writing itself, but if one were to draw too much attention to these statements, one would be in danger of focusing on one part and trying to make it represent the whole.

Throughout the book, the tone often comes across as flat or indifferent. In the opening poem, “A Ploy,” the speaker claims:

no emotion is pleasing!
each must be rejected
        replaced by an opposite
in turn rejected and replaced by yet another
strain of undifferentiated sentiment

There is also a sense of exhaustion: “Jackie I see / Lampwick I tire.” This exhaustion, or perhaps emotional remove, lends itself to wonderful descriptions that get at the strangeness of so many things people have accepted as normal in their lives. For example, “The Tax,” looks at relationships and the odd exchange of saying “I love you,” which “Begets an I LOVE YOU back, or it falters / As it its harbor / Fails to find.” And later, the poem looks at the structure of relationships:

…they are structures
These arrangements: living together
Sleeping alongside, staying awake while the other one sleeps. You have
To care! Be the sun
shining through a watery cloud, or the cloud
Creased to a white veil
Since where you believe you have power you don’t
And where you do you refuse to wield it

In the opening poem, “A Ploy,” “you” are instructed to reject your emotions until “you find your ways / have rearranged you slightly.” Although this rearrangement is not as extreme as Rimbaud’s idea of a complete derangement of the senses, Jacqueline Waters is definitely onto something here. This slight rearrangement results in unique descriptions and a worldview that gleans from a wide range of sources–from Jack Lemmon, to Apollinaire, to Linda Napolitano’s UFO abduction–however, the biggest source seems to be Waters own inner-self. This is an intelligent and well-crafted poetry that demands multiple readings. And it is a voice–perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience–that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel.

Read “Scissor Half,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Jacqueline Waters.

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You were telling me your dream
at some point you started
just making it up

Thus believer and unbeliever are brought to heel

I hate it

But allow it like a veil between my heart and mind it would be boring to lift

Really I’ve got to find a place
to lie down and go to work

I’m OK, I stand up and take my time
which I also accrue

Regret fixing the problem
but persist

I feel good about my persistence which I also ridicule

Do-over

You can have it

You couldn’t make
the connection

Much less
all of them

-Jacqueline Waters

Read the Rumpus Review of One Sleeps The Other Doesn’t.

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• My Affairs Are Just My Questions
• “Ode to Ross Watson,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Steve Fellner
• “Death, Is Always,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Amy King
• “Kināyah,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Marthe Reed