Larkin engages with poetry on the level of language and music even as she quarrels with speakers who appear to offer the writer transcriptions—these are both offered in tender and invective modes. Larkin’s poetic ancestor, Emily Dickinson, has given her permission, in a way, to wrestle with inner and outside pressures on female expectations for motherhood. These are hewn out of her beautiful language, ability to be expansive within a range of 10-12 lines, and to question not only motherhood, but also the ways the adult woman nurtures the inner child, in themes of freedom and responsibility. What expresses freedom and responsibility more for the writer than the act of making poems?

The opening poem, “Transport,” uses words like “milked,” “suck a brood,” “wet nurse,” “crowd my milk,” along with surprising turns like “hydro-muscular”, “snug and sleeping”, and in its final, devastating and demanding image, “they strapped me to a prow for luck.” The poem has blood in its veins—the speaker’s involvement, like a physical force, to motherhood, is nearly operatic.

Larkin is not satisfied with poems of content; her forms demand attention. In “Serenissima,” for example, she employs couplets—perhaps the most raw and naked of forms—that use enjambment to heighten tension and give surprise: “a tower, an otter, a spindle, a drum, / or thrush, the bird and the disease, // all of history would do, or just / a sandwich, a lech, a semi, an alp // but the old world I am not. The new world / flies out and never comes back.”

In “Enemy Love Song,” a “phantom sonnet,” Larkin uses 13 lines (the last trails off in its middle suggesting the missing end to the sonnet) for the structure of a love poem with no terms of endearment: “You are a beautiful tense with no language to live in,” Larkin writes. Filled with fury that only devotion to another person can summon, Larkin could be expressing the contradictory feelings of being romantically involved with another writer— sleeping with the enemy. Her cadence and tone is exactly right.

In “Elegy,” Larkin uses long lines in a kind of expansive “blank verse” combined with no punctuation, so the poem builds in pacing and energy, as each line spills into the subsequent line. She manages a sensitive take on the invective. Larkin astoundingly uses elegy not to be ironic, but to voice injustice. This poem upends the limitations of an elegy, though its sentiment on one level is elegiac, it is a powerful testament to struggling to maintain normalcy, through the tedium of loss, and to maintain appreciation for life.

God is a frequent force of angst and frustration for the speakers in My Scarlet Ways (“God is a stupid word but I’m going to / use it anyway,” she writes in “Direction.”). She—Larkin, not God—gives refreshing insight into why pain disrupts deliberate choice. If God is the mother, then the writer is the mother of the poem, giving life to the process of thought. In “The Headdress,” the speaker evokes “the dream of being sucked free / of her flesh and filled entirely with milk / she crowns the water where the floor falls / sheer her the headdress humming…” Elsewhere, as in “Heaven and Hell are Real Places,” the speaker thanks God “for giving me autumn / and unwrapping it so violently shaking / the knife in the air nicking the light then / hacking it in two and mincing it to bits / and my happiness is infinitely dying…” Alluding to Genesis 22, the story of Isaac and Abraham, the speaker expresses the sacrifices sometimes associated with free will and compulsion to obey.

Sometimes Larkin’s forms get away from her; when she has fewer restrictions in form—her 10-12 line forms serve her best—they tend to move closer to prose than necessary. For example, in “Bluestocking” and in “Middle Distance” the need to temper long lines becomes a spineless and tension-less muddle rather than seeing how long the collapsible telescope of the line can extend before breaking. Here, they seem to trail off into the edge of the page, with purposelessness.

However, Larkin is clearly an expert practitioner of poetry; she expresses a challenging and insistent female voice for the reader of the female experience. Even though women are more than half the population, they still exist as outsiders and second-class citizens in much of the world, and this includes Americans. Larkin’s speaker says: “She seemed to eat not for hunger / or pleasure but because she wanted / to be alone, uncomplicated / like wind” (“Queenright”) and in “Blue Nurse Movie”: “My jeans were too small / but she wore them anyway saying / my ass looks great in your jeans.” Earlier in the book, some maidens wear pair of jeans that are “riding up,” suggesting that the physical and psychic restraints, limitations, expectations, and possibilities for the female person in the world, and for the reader of female experience must be critiqued via poetry.

Whether Larkin evokes the Pound’s River Merchant’s Wife, the little kite-flying girl, or the lover who tells her suitor, “I am devout or with you watching. / Pig or god, I am learning how it’s done. / I have never been a genius of anything but you” (“Winding Sheet”), Larkin has made an urgent, serious book of poems that uses lyric in the best way.

Larkin’s speakers inhabit a female space that invites the sensitive reader into processes of feminist thought and feeling. Her preoccupations in language about God, urges and forces, and about the demands of language of the thinking and feeling writer, are important and should be waded through and understood. Read this book!

Related Posts:

• Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
• A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
• There Are More Knowzits Than Ever
• Wings Wands Stars Tulle
• Like Algae on the Surface of Grace

The book also includes many of Browning’s cartoons, and I greatly admire her ability to pursue two “genres” in one text; even though the cartoons somehow feel like an afterthought, they give so much pleasure and add interest to her theme of finding quirky or ironic beauty in the mundane travesties of life. I’ve had a fantasy of combining cartoons and poems in a single book for 30 years, and she’s done it in a terrific, if not inscrutable way.

The best poems in Either Way I’m Celebrating are her longer and more ambitious poems. For example, “The Meat from the Dream the Heart Knows” uses different kinds of syntax and diction to create a sensation of layers of interrupting voices not always the poet’s. Like most of the book, this poem uses humor as its basic tone, but veers into realms of seriousness when the humor becomes for the speaker another route to delusion or disappointment. In “Officer and a Gentleman” the speaker plays charades and tries to guess the name 1982 Richard Gere romance. The reader thinks the poem will be an exercise in nutsy goofhead-ness as double-entendres and witticisms give way a more serious comment about gender.

In “Notes About Art Pepper” Browning uses fragments of acute observations and ideas to say something surprising about the discrepancies between the ideal and the decaying physical reality—of art, of Art Pepper, and of the art of writing. “Something he said, tender harshness./ A child pulls a dandelion out of soil. A row of wind-crooked trees/ becomes unbearable. Want to hear a great knock-knock joke?/ Ok, you start.” This ingenious riff on the life of a heroin-destroyed alto saxophonist is one of the highlights of Either Way I’m Celebrating.

The centerpiece of the book is a section of untitled prose poems “Vale Tudo”, a reference to an “anything goes” style of Brazilian mixed martial arts. An unnamed couple tries—but fails—to watch mixed martial arts on motel pay-per-view as they verbally and without words box each other into submission. Browning has special ability and skill in getting the details right (what’s in the mall food court, getting the verb “squeaked” for a silk tie, etc.). The poem shows the highways, the birthplace of Walt Whitman, the boring scenery, and the decay of a boring relationship. Her poem is admirable not only for the tone of the human voice speaking in it, but for its ways of combining narrative, lyric, comic, and tragic elements; it’s a coming of age story, a road trip comedy, a romance, and a critique of capitalism. It has great style and quality of style.

Sometimes the strengths of Either Way I’m Celebrating are its weaknesses; sometimes, particularly in the shorter poems that inevitably lack momentum to create textures of tone, the speaker gives the sensation that she’s the smartest one in the room, an increasingly annoying quality. Check out the list of her other 21 books! Including one from 1985! What is a reader supposed to make of this? Are they self-published? Are they chapbooks? In an age when consumption versus production is a vital point in the making and reading of poetry, I find this list unnerving. This feeling extends to some of the poems. For instance, in “Feel Better” she says: “My audience uses semi-colons / accurately; I am a whole ass” and the rhetorical “Is this how people fuck until they’re not angry anymore?” The winking can be construed as a form of bullying because the speaker tries to manipulate the reader’s feelings without revealing her own. This manner of poem is a little a dessert from a chain restaurant: overpowering sugar with no depth. It’s a cartoonist’s dilemma: once you’ve hit the punch line there is no place to go.

Elsewhere this breeziness is diluted and made palatable by quick turns of the tone or the imagination. In “Don’t be Afraid to Help Sharks”, the poem begins “So we had all these rayguns”, but ends with “Gooey, out there beyond the yew.” There is an interesting leap to get to the sound play in the end and the poem is open to allow such a transformation. Yet, like many undergraduate poem that tries to mask lack of technique and skill with sarcasm and irony, the weakest parts of Either Way I’m Celebrating should have been revised or left out (e.g. “Still Life”). The book is too long for my tastes.

Either Way I’m Celebrating shows a kind of bravery that equals a kind of wisdom. In both her poems and cartoons, Browning shows an attractive, expansive, connection-making intelligence and cleverness that is supreme. I look forward to her next book. It is doing things in poetry in a subtle and endearing way; she proves to be a creative dynamo.

Related Posts:

• My Scarlet Ways by Tanya Larkin
• A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
• There Are More Knowzits Than Ever
• Wings Wands Stars Tulle
• Like Algae on the Surface of Grace

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.

Related Posts:

• My Scarlet Ways by Tanya Larkin
• Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
• There Are More Knowzits Than Ever
• Wings Wands Stars Tulle
• Like Algae on the Surface of Grace

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.

Related Posts:

• My Scarlet Ways by Tanya Larkin
• Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
• A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
• Wings Wands Stars Tulle
• Like Algae on the Surface of Grace

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.

Related Posts:

• My Scarlet Ways by Tanya Larkin
• Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
• A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
• There Are More Knowzits Than Ever
• Like Algae on the Surface of Grace

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.

Related Posts:

• My Scarlet Ways by Tanya Larkin
• Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
• A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
• There Are More Knowzits Than Ever
• Wings Wands Stars Tulle

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.

Related Posts:

• Why I Chose Gregory Orr’s River Inside the River for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
• My Scarlet Ways by Tanya Larkin
• Why I Chose Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
• “Book of Dog” by Cleopatra Mathis
• Why I Chose Cleopatra Mathis’s “Book of Dog” for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

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.”

Related Posts:

• Poetry Book Club News
• Happy Birthday Tracy K. Smith!
• Why I Chose Lea Graham’s Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Interviews Tracy K. Smith
• Why I Chose Gregory Orr’s River Inside the River for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

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.

Related Posts:

• My Scarlet Ways by Tanya Larkin
• Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
• A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
• There Are More Knowzits Than Ever
• Wings Wands Stars Tulle

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

Related Posts:

• An Open Letter from Claudia Rankine
• Exploring the Redwood Forest: Journals and the Private Self
• On Loitering
• Poetry Wire: Follow Your Strengths, Manage Your Weaknesses, and Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys
• FUNNY WOMEN #100: Writing the Next Great American Woman’s Novel