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That the flyleaves of Mongrelisme: A Difficult Manual for
Desperate Times are printed with the word "INFORMATION" in a
continuously repeated and only slightly varied stream ("INFORMAZIONI";
"INFORMACIÓN"; "INFORMAZIONEN") might be received as a reader's
clue--or, alternately, as anything but. Part One of an ongoing
project, this serial poem enters the drained architectures of an
elementary language primer, reviving mystery within the space designed
to organize and repress it. Quotations from "Anon" and the apocryphal
"Genre Tallique," meditative or improvisational streams of (someone's)
consciousness, interpolated subsection and sub-subsection
subordinations, appendices, and other textual machines lend
Mongrelisme the air of a genetic encounter between poem and
database: a series of determined accidents that demonstrate what
"Tallique," in the first sequence here, terms the "flagrant
improbabilities of culture." For all that, though, this poem---as in
Retallack's work generally---is animated by a vital and generous sense
of humor, which rescues it from philosophic gravitas even as it opens
new avenues for the pleasures of thinking in our era of resurgent
literalisme.
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Alphabets is a series of abecedary compositions, worked out over
a period of eleven years with a variety of constraints and procedures.
From the straightforward acrostics of "Los Alephs" (1986) or the
bestiary "A Life" (1991) to the more submerged devices of "Rhum"
(1995), the result is an admirable success, playing the arbitrary
order of an index against the lyric pathos it threatens, like a cento
from a dictionary come to self-consciousness: "H, like heart, is a
commodity./ I is for the innocence I won't insist upon." Wisdom is
half learning to relax, and these poems pan little truths from the
discontinuities and contretemps of organized knowledge. "Devices are
no better than cannons, mocks my turkey, or dashes or cousins crassly
asleep on a willing sea." Risked here is, of course, a tedium that is
the dark side of inviting your reader's active collaboration:
Alphabets is meant to be read slowly, day by day, not in a
breathless consumptive rush. When it succeeds, this work reminds us
that poetic composition requires no epiphanic seizure to obtain
genuine mystery.
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Formalism in poetry can mean a kind of neoconservatism, or---as this
polymorphic and polylingual work would have it--etwas ganz
anderes. Its title raids that of a late work of J. L. Austin, the
Oxford philosopher of the speech act who famously "failed to say why
what I have said is interesting," and it demonstrates just how
astonishingly heterogeneous theory and practice can be. The book's
intricately nested serial structures mimic instruction manuals, charts
and diagrams, dictionary and encyclopedia entries, labels and plaques,
computer printouts and scrolling messages, "creating parallel texts
left and right full of opposing forces in a sad space of alternating
dire lexical black and white squares." These poems (they might as
easily be named "radical essays") work to defamiliarize, and
aestheticize, information as it is organized and transmitted by the
new media. Rather than seeming coldly constructed, though, the work
here is, in the most ordinary sense, enthralling; Retallack's figures
are vertiginously lovely, gesturing toward a kind of cybernetic beauty
for which there's no critical aesthetic, as yet.
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At this point, the principal legacy of 1960s free verse may be a
myopic identification of formalism with conservatism---as though
constraint were indistinguishable from repression. Aaron
Shurin's The Paradise of Forms is just that---a delightful
mélange of the containers, frames, and matrices that map the printed
page on which a poem comes to life. That these forms take shape
paradoxically, through breakage, shock, glissement, makes them
no less "prosodic" or constructive. From the disjunctive lyric of
"Parallel Views" (The Graces, 1983), the work grows
increasingly tactical, refracted and serial, advancing from interior
depths to syntactic horizons: "Wasp of benevolent diction in
contention with cars, a narrow pole deep into the North dug with
cautious abandon." By "Codex," typographical dissonance directs the
poem back into the surface of the page: "Agog before the remainder a
choked overture, HE TRIES TO PULL THE SKIN FROM ITS INCISIVE GRASP,
'he fumbled and gaped'." Later work, such as Into Distances
(1993), clusters prose paragraphs into arch parables or demi-essays,
after which (in "Involuntary Lyrics") Shurin returns to verse.
Pattern, recombination, and a kind of lovely noise---like teletype
from the collective unconscious---mark the musical structures of these
books of forms.
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This polyphonic volume opens with a selection of technically deft and
diverting, but arguably rather mild lyric poems. More intriguing is
the work that showcases Hartman's activity as the author of
Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (1996) and the
creator of DIASTEX4, a computer program written to automate Jackson
Mac Low's chance text-selection procedures. In "Except to Be: First
Quire," "Seventy-Six Assertions and Sixty-Three Questions," and "The
Masque of Measure," Hartman offers explorations of the prose poem and
miniature essay in which philosophical meditation (on voice, alphabet,
anatomy, genealogy, etymology, photography, constraint writing, and
materials such as brick, glass, and ice) is joined with disjunctive
syntax to brilliant effect: "The court of color is atmosphere. Light
in the spring marches, but place is the true science. While metabolism
types us, the oak has worked through brick, and the breath knows
ghosts." Hartman is an encylopedist in both the classical and the new,
informational senses: his subjects stand at once for poetic metaphor
and for the erosion of metaphor in an endlessly diverse networked
society. This volume confirms not only that the form of the essay is
revitalizing U.S. American poetry, but that at a time when computers
can be programmed to compose formula verse all by themselves, creative
programming itself becomes a form of writing.
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"And many frightening sights abroad/Till morning in the land of Nod":
thus advances Fanny Howe's tenth book of fiction, under cover of a
nursery rhyme. Such an opening would be a groaner, if not for the arch
and caustic skepticism of what follows: "Meanwhile the father thought
his wife was seeing through him. The fact is, he had for many years
been subject to depression and his only way of surmounting this was to
seduce with intense, focused stares certain women whom he then
agonizingly embraced, pawing at their inner thighs and breasts,
begging them to massage his sex...." This is the story of two sisters,
the older of whom gets all the attention (from their mother's former
lover, no less), and their parents, who go by "the father" and "the
mother" -- though, not cut out for more than merely reproductive
relations, that's about all they are. The historical time is World War
II; the geographic and geopolitical locale, Ireland. Which is
important; but the movements of this novel disturb the apparent
universal of family, as well, in its repressive back-formation. If
Howe is relentlessly unsentimental, this is not to say she's
disengaged; on the contrary, like Lydia Davis, or Diane Williams, or
her nouveau romancier antecedent, Nathalie Sarraute, Howe
configures a feminist aesthetic that admits no distinction between
feminized sex and masculinized intellect. At the same time, she makes
no attempt to reconcile her female characters' heterosexual desire
with her (and their) disgust at the impossibility of its object. If
it's men, therefore, who suffer most severely from Howe's wit, the
result is never anything less -- though it is also more -- than comic:
"And she rolled to the north and stood looking down at him for the
first time ever. His smile crossed his white teeth exactly when a
donkey brayed outside in the dawn."
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Selection from an oeuvre such as Palmer's can be problematic:
it brings much "lost" material back into print, but in doing so it
also impairs the gestures of a poet who has worked in series within,
and sometimes across, such volumes as Blake's Newton (1972),
The Circular Gates (1974), Without Music (1977),
Notes for Echo Lake (1981), First Figure (1984), and
Sun (1988). It's impossible to overstate Palmer's importance to
a contemporary Language-centered---and perhaps more urgently, to a
post-Language-centered---poetics. If his work has inspired a
certain Wittgensteinian orthodoxy among parts of the current
avant-garde, it's not his fault: while acknowledging the influences of
Zukofsky and Creeley, Palmer has always drawn on the more sensual
traditions of French Symbolism and Surrealism, and maintains a
dialogue with his post-Tel Quel contemporaries in France. Like Susan
Howe, Palmer combines a radical attention to the surfaces of
words with a dramatic transformation---not reduction---of their
reference. The result is not a revolution, but a signal revision of
our tradition. Those who have so far managed to remain ignorant of
Palmer's work should find this volume a good place to start.
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"When something is in the very process of shattering, all internal
conflicts cease," writes Swensen, and the poems collected in this
impressive seventh book present a meticulously nuanced exposition of
this statement's strange logic. Each poem rings changes on sets of
words, images, narrative fragments, or syntactical motifs, many of
which recur throughout the book. The result is a rhetoric of
juxtaposition and association that simultaneously arranges and
deranges the idea of presence---of a speaker, of a reader, of a body,
of another's body, of a grammar, of the natural world, of the divine.
When Swensen writes, "The beauty of the world is an immutable thing
and there is nothing that touch can't cure," she isn't sounding the
tonic chord of lyric resolution, she's merely charting a point in a
continuum. Her method infuses much of the book with ideation: "He was
playing with his child out in back of the house when the child
suddenly got enormous and he couldn't recall the word." And while Noon
doesn't seek to prove that language (poetry) is redemptive, Swensen
seems to affirm her existence among life's cross-currents in the
book's opaque final lines: "Some rivers burn---they say this isn't good,
but I'm no one to judge, and I think it's got its points."
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The poems in this extraordinary debut are (like its title) sinuous,
refractory, highly structured, yet in a way implosive, too, their
asymmetric blocks holding in balances always about to give way. The
current struggle to define a post-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics finds
evidence here, where elements of traditional lyric ("Morning glory
tangles a simple landscape") merge in the same poem---sometimes in the
same line---with Wittgensteinian turns and the poems'
assertion of visual presence on the page: "We don't Let's
not/ Talk about We Look at that sculptural rock that
rock that." Neither surface nor depth, the poems
invite---and reward---re-reading, hinting at buried narratives, or
interpolating naturalistic scenes, without becoming "clarified" (and
hence reduced) as such: "My presence was a violence in wings./ Their
flight was a thought/ I could not follow,/ an assumption."
Formally---in their breakings of form---the poems are intricately
irregular, full of disrupted patterns and a kind of syncopation that
admits more than the well-wrought urn, without leaving the thought of
it entirely behind. It is no longer, at this point, a matter of
finding a voice: Glazer has made one from that "thing we look for /
because it's there."
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A truly epigrammatic prose can be difficult to pull off in
English---not least because it's a French specialty, to which
Anglophone writers must find their way indirectly. The thirty-one
fictions contained in Dunce Cap average between one and five
pages in length (and they're small pages, in Burning Deck's
pocket-sized edition); their economy is at once playful and finely
controlled, reticent and expressive. Bundy's miniatures include terse
monologues ("Meanwhile---I stand,---or think I stand---in the middle
of the road, ---eagerly, ---oh tenderly..."), cameos, prose poems, and
parables with wry, Stevens-esque titles ("Restrained Theory on the
Disappearance of Women," "Primary Rule for Writing Popular Romance,"
"Unsolicited Commentary"). Bundy is at her best in these last, tracing
the persistence of desire with a mournful wit reminiscent of the best
work of Lydia Davis: "I stood still on the path for a minute, thinking
I heard a creature moving behind us, or alongside us, and my heart
beat rapidly, as if I were in a movie. I looked up through the
branches to the sky." A mysterious infant interrupts a narrator's
morning walk; an essayist objects to the pampering of chihuahuas; a
group of diners interrogate a steak: such configurations verge on
allegory even as they deflect it with ironical apostrophe and mock
high diction: "He stood by the fence and sucked on a stone and called
it companion, and was notorious." The real virtues of Dunce
Cap, however, are formal. It reads like the contents of a costume
jewelry box---each item oddly wrought, in a novel way, bearing a
philosophic modesty that's rare such in self-conscious "play."
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By and large, the growing corpus of academic scholarship on the Beat
writers has not been matched by writers' own critical reappraisals of
the American '50s. Crimes of the Beats gives those years the
attention they deserve, and its contributors take Kerouac, Ginsberg,
Burroughs, et al. very seriously indeed, as measured by the harshness
of their rebukes. In parodies, memoirs and feuilletons---some
viciously dismissive, most confidently critical, and a few
semi-reverent---such contemporary avant-gardists as Lynne Tillman, Ron
Sukenick, Lance Olsen, and Sparrow reexamine the literary myth-making
of the writers who rolled "along the highway of dreams," as Tillman
puts it in the voice of Kerouac, feeling "the cool American breeze
rush crazily over my American skin." Kerouac the egoist, Ginsberg the
mercenary, and Burroughs the reptile take heavy blows here; Gregory
Corso, Diane DiPrima (whose erotic memoirs are parodied to devastating
effect), and Amiri Baraka come up for pokes and jabs too. The tone is
generally light---this is no manifesto---but a serious and considered
critique of Beat ideals surfaces often enough amid the mockery. Those
ideals were spontaneity ("I Tried to Write Spontaneous Prose but All I
Ever Got Was Tired," counters Carl Watson), sexual profligacy ("What
if [Neal Cassady] wasn't the greatest fast-speaking, bebop-loving,
accelerator-pressing, woman-leaving hipster who ever lived?" asks
Sparrow), and a romanticized Buddhism ("Transcending the ego," Tom
Savage observes of Kerouac's dipsomania, "was not intended to mean
destroying its container"). Perhaps the most potent revisioning in
Crimes of the Beats, however, comes in the pieces, such as
Tsaurah Litzky's "Reflections on Beat Sexism," that confront the
all-too easy identification that a work such as On the Road
offers to one half of its potential readership.
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Former Poet Laureate Strand's ninth volume opens on a few notes
reminiscent of 1993's Dark Harbor---speculative, layered
nocturnes that seem to signal from a great distance---then veers off
elsewhere, elaborating on the surrealist whimsy of some of Strand's
earlier work. A familiar rangy, disconnected humor colors the poems,
like someone murmuring from the depths of a beloved cocktail;
familiar, too, is the irony poised over ecstatic gloom, which lends
some of the poems a terminal cast: "...how will the warmth of
the fire,/ So long in coming, keep us from mourning the loss?" Strand
is at his best when gesturing toward the baroque; lyric resignation is
courted, embraced, and then undermined by a sensibility that seems
finally unsettled in itself, yet never utopian: "The self...
can never be/ Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one."
Blizzard of One offers less digressive modes, too, as in the
Gestalt reading of "Two de Chiricos," or the glassy narcissism of "Old
Man Leaves Party." And then there is the roman à clef---well,
no, not really---of "The Delirium Waltz," an elegy for friends: "I
cannot remember, but I think you were there, whoever you were...."
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A tentative, moody toughness carries the poems of Ira Sadoff, which so
often hang fuzzily poised over the borders of our tradition. That
tradition, for better or worse, is the lyric, and in his sixth
collection Sadoff wrenches it into odd shapes, suspicious of its
epiphanies even as he courts them. At heart, though, Sadoff is a
romantic, and many of the poems here drift on a tide of bitter
retrospection that finds form now in a talky humor---"Go to the zoo.
Just pay attention,/ for Christ's sake"---now in a kind of stoical
despair: "Until the end, when we're indecipherable,/ composed,
seraphic, speechless." In the passage of time, whether it registers
images from the war in Vietnam ("When I Come Home"; "In the Dream") or
from more private erotic conflicts ("Solitude Etude"; "Biographical
Sketch"), Sadoff locates both the origin and the terminus of lament.
And though the public and political struggles of the 1960s anchor the
poet's open rhetoric---"I want to bury him in southern California/
with the Birchers and Libertarians," he writes in "On the Day of
Nixon's Funeral"---his intimate wars on the home front seem even more
devastating: "I spent years on my knees while she/ got off before me,
her eyes fluttering closed,/ her mind several men away...." While his
pointed rhetoric can occasionally shade into gruff machismo, this
sixth collection is most effective when Sadoff permits himself free
play with the demotic, achieving a persuasive blend of sentiment and
ironic swagger.
Mudlark straddles the
line between book and electronic formats with poise. A digital-only
publication ("Never in and never out of print"), it offers
print-formatted literary work (predominantly poetry) on a hyperlinked
architecture. The nine issues available were created "by chance not
design," the editor notes, in "the form of electronic chapbooks,"
offering a substantial selection of work by one or two authors per
issue. In addition, Mudlark publishes periodic "posters," or
electronic broadsides featuring shorter selections of work from an
individual poet. The work here leans slightly to the left, ranging
from telegraphic Creeleyesque lyric ("Twelve of One," Valerie Anthony,
issue no. 1) to mock-philosophical mock-epic ("A Conversation with
Martin Heidegger," Van K. Brock, no. 4), to work that courts an
imagistic or linguistic turn ("Island Road," Henry Gould, no. 6).
Attention is given, too, to the prose poem, verse fiction, and
essay-poem, as well as other uncategorizable hybrids; see, for
example, Joe Ahearn's evocative "Five Fictions" (no. 5), Sheila E.
Murphy's selection of "American haibun," "A Sound the Mobile Makes in
Wind" (no. 8), and Andrew Schelling's quietly spectacular "The Road to
Ocosingo" (no. 9, the current issue as of this writing), which will
delight (among others) admirers of Anne Carson's
Plainwater. The journal's design is text-centered, with
emphasis on the act of reading, though a current "cover" and "flash
poems," which act as electronic epigraphs, incorporate features of
both print and Web-based magazines. Many of
Mudlark's contributors have published in print book format as
well; but the confident and uncontentious digital presence of this
journal makes this no more than a moot point.
In its published form, this review was heavily edited, making
it more negative than its author intended. It is reproduced here in
a lightly edited version of its original form, for
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the author should not follow the original printed
version.
Leithauser is better known as a novelist than as a poet, and when his
poems are noticed, he tends to be lumped with the so-called
Neo-Formalists led (to the extent that they can be led) by Dana Gioia.
His fourth collection (and first since 1990) recapitulates the
"obsession with rhyme and meter" (Publishers Weekly
Interview, 1/27/97) that has made him a sometimes vocal partisan in
today's poetry wars. These poems insist on their own artifice, though
it is an artifice of deeply conservative stamp; if this sometimes
lends them an air of obstinacy, they also remind us that there are
genuine pleasures to be found in the strictest form. These are modest
lyrics of personal and genealogical history, focused sometimes
bitterly on the relations between men and women, men and nature, and
men and men: "It's termite's labor---dark, clandestine, slow,/ No
thanks and not a thing to show/ For it...." A young suicide leaves her
car running, lights on, atop the cliff she's thrown herself from; a
stranger saves the life of a wounded soldier (later, the speaker's
father) on a beach; a senile widow calls her new "husband" by the
former's name. Such kernels of adamantly novelistic narrative might be
said to beg the questions of poetry, once again; readers for whom
old-fashioned versification holds the glamour of a doomed traditional
cause will continue to applaud Leithauser's workmanship, here, while
readers who never doubted the historicity of poetic forms, in the
first place, might well wonder what all the fuss is about.
An elaborately ornamented poetry-multimedia installation-in-progress,
according to its creator "approximately half complete," which
re-examines Vasco da Gama's first voyage from Portugal to the Indian
subcontinent, refracting European colonialist tropes of navigation and
discovery through their postmodern electronic (internet-technological)
counterparts. Densely hyperlinked narrative poems serve as the primary
textual interface, by means of which the "reader" may call up frames
containing other poems, hyperlinked images, and prose documents
including extracts from an anonymous journal of the voyage and a
Victorian glossary of Anglo-Indian terms. "Abaft" and "Headward" links
provide the option of a nominally linear interface onto the work, but
it's best experienced by meandering through the myriad inter-text and
inter-image links, which at once offer an analogue and a critique of
"exploration"---enticing one away from the monological, teleological,
and exploitative reading of one who would colonize the text, or make
it one's own, while providing some of the same thrill of "discovery"
that ostensibly tempted the explorers. Project X 1497-1999 is
a meditation on literary form as well as on language, narrative,
history, and technology, with lines of compressed verse scrolling
sparely over the principal frame, while opposite, a second frame
overflows with complexly subordinated prose. The "story" thus unfurls
in several different forms---and versions---simultaneously. The
project is a register of the ways in which history, and its documents,
may be written through without being re-written, replaced, or
removed---that is to say, erased. Lopes's plan for the finished
project, which is semantically radical---"to create a fully
integrated, multi-layered website in which hypertext is taken to its
logical extreme: every word or phrase will be a link"---reverses that
erasure.
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Kizer's is a mélange of modes: activist, formalist, irreverent
prankster, faux prophet. This selection from a decade's work balances
vehemence ("Franco, I spit upon your grave") with enlightened whimsy
("In Hell with Virg and Dan," Kizer's translation of Inferno
XVII) and rehearses a technical repertoire including the sonnet,
villanelle, and pantoum. The finest poems in Harping On
produce a consonance of gravity and irony, as in "Reunion," which
records a meeting with a dominating bore: "I nod, I sip my wine, I
praise your view, / Grateful, my dear, that I escaped from you." There
is winning comedy here, too, in "Mud Soup," the tale of a recipe gone
wrong: "Tastes like mud, the finished product. / Looks like mud, the
finished product." Less successful, perhaps, are Kizer's visions of
longer historical waves ("Fin-de-Siècle Blues"), attenuated here by
the intensively, subjectively history-resistant idiom that describes
them. Taken on its own terms, however, Harping On contains
far more hits than misses, and evidences an ambidextrous gift.
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