Poetry Reviews
By Grace Cavalieri
AUGUST EXEMPLARS 2015
Poetry Notebook by Clive James.
Liveright. 234 pages.
*Dome of the Hidden Pavilion by James Tate.
Ecco/HarperCollins. 143 pages.
Rel(am)ent by Jamison Crabtree.
The Word Works. 91 pages.
Only The Dead Are Forgiven by Greg Kuzma.
The Backwaters Press.126 pages.
Always by Julie Lisella.
WordTech Editions. 83 pages.
Muse by Jonathan Galassi.
Knopf. 253 pages.
The Complete Cinnamon Bay Sonnets by Andrew Kaufman.
Rain Mountain Press 73 pages.
The Father Of The Arrow Is The Thought by Christopher DeWeese.
Octopus Books. 95 pages.
The Essential Ginsberg, edited by Michael Schumacher.
Harper Perennial.418
pages.
Korean Sky: A Memoir by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson.
Shoulder Friends Press. 272 Pages
***************************
Poetry Notebook by
Clive James.
Liveright. 234 pages.
Every writer or reader of poetry will absorb this book with gratitude. James is
one of the
keenest minds of our time; his writing is pure liquid. His translation of Dante
in 2013 was the
easiest reading of all the translations because he’s a gifted poet and there’s
never a breach in a
line. Christian Wiman suggested these essays originally, to publish in Poetry
Magazine when
Wiman was editor. The essays have gone beyond that to other periodicals. James
gives us intros
he’s written for books and his interludes on the philosophy of writing. The
subtitle of Poetry
Notebook is Reflections on the Intensity of Language and is the most erudite
commentary on
poetry now on the market.
Notebook is an iconography of literature from Herrick and Jonson, Herbert and
Donne to
present. The great thing about this collection is that James knows popular
culture and peppers
the book with mentions from current TV and film, so don’t worry about library
mustiness. He
does a good bit on poets right after World War ll (Wilbur and Hecht his
favorites;) and we’re
introduced to some poets who are little known and under recognized, I didn’t
know the scope
of Michael Donaghy’s work in bridging the literature of America and England.
There are also
Australian poets whose names we may vaguely remember, but now will know.
There’s a no nonsense assessment of Pound here and a clear reverence for Frost.
These are
scholastic reminiscences from a lifetime of studying literature, serving as one
of Britain’s
leading critics. The essays are basically moral opinions textured with examples
and fragments of
poems. Luckily Larkin also is brought to life again for us and James takes us
further than our
circumscribed understandings. When a poet is introduced¸ every line is analyzed,
tracking the
poet’s eye. In 50 years of reading poetry, I learned as much from this book as
half a century’s
aggregate reading.
______
*Dome of the Hidden Pavilion
by James Tate.
Ecco/HarperCollins. 143 pages.
It’s a good thing when a new book is not the sum of a poet’s work but a
completely new turn of
events. I remember when The Lost Pilot won the Yale Prize and how many times I
read it. I’d
never recognize these poems as written by that same author although there is a
flavored style
of humor and grace. Also silliness, and the greatest force in poetry – the
levels of imagination.
This is a writer who doesn’t look back over his shoulder at his reputation. He
bridges over to the
rhapsody of the new, the unthinkable, making a rhythmic frame of art to play.
That he
personalizes with his humor should go without saying. The requirement of poetry
is that it has a
unifying principle: These poems are all prose poems with characters, dialogue,
supernatural
possibilities and extraordinary outcomes. They’re really funny.
Part of the fact of Tate’s success then and now is the vocabulary of the truly
free poet who
flourishes because he knows limits are just something to push through. He
doesn’t look back.
I Wrote Myself A Letter
I sat down and wrote myself a letter. And
Then I threw it away. I wrote my grandfather a letter and
I tore that one up also. I wrote my mother a letter, but
I kept that one. I was exhausted. Three letters in one
sitting……my father ran away
from home when I was three. My mother never told me why.
We never heard from him again. But I don’t think about
any of this. It was a beautiful day outside. Three little
mice tiptoed across the lawn. One of them had its arm
in a sling.
(Tate, a national favorite, (1943-2015) died before this book was released this
month.)
==========
Rel(am)ent by Jamison
Crabtree.
The Word Works. 91 pages.
Not since Franz Wright has a poet captured the dark so accurately and so
profoundly. The
book’s theme is the death of a brother, but this is no common grief. This is a
howl of anguish,
an unremitting cry of pain –a mastery of the many ways to snare and encapsulate
the
messaging of a broken soul. But the soul has not gone anywhere at all because,
unexpectedly,
as soon as we sonify into language, we can make art. This story of an
unimaginable loss is not
end-driven. This does not seem to be a poet who planned a chess game of grief.
Each page
unfolds as if no thought existed before. The poet lifts black veils, line after
line, creating
surprising combinations—utterances, lyrical and raw. It’s a living thing where
the last line, the
last stanza, is figuring out how to respond to all that precedes. Each phrase
evokes the next and
then the last is out of clear air. Real. Real. Happening in front of us.
Crabtree gets the balance
right. We couldn’t bear it if the poet didn’t know how to use page space and
esthetics to calm
the poem, and then to deepen meaning with murmur, before he pops it.
This is an emotional detective story. How is this page going to turn out? And
how can the writer
keep the momentum? Yet he does. He is available; He’s inspired; He has our
attention but he
does not care. He couldn’t care or he wouldn’t be able to keep going.
One life was gone. One life. And through the veracity of poetry that seems like
the most
important life ever lost. I could not stop reading.
Golem
IV.
Someone sings a love song
to the very river that drowned by brother three years back.
The seasons are vermin
sneaking solemn through the years.
He looks like you
so say.
He is quite handsome
so say.
softly. I am scared of the river which drowns each day,
scared of the thirst that draws me to it—
and to be scared is a sign
of a certain type of respect.
I remember him the way one might lay a wall.
Memorized him,
the way one might burn a field.
-----------------
Only The Dead Are Forgiven
by Greg Kuzma.
The Backwaters Press.126 pages.
Kuzma is the master of the long form. His creative imagination uses poetry as a
good excuse for
commentary—to connect—to evidence the rules of language as engagement. In “Small
Talk”
Kuzma reflects on his former mentality and spends a fluid six pages to build a
new relationship
with language and loved ones. Every poem is packed with incident but that’s not
what Kuzma’s
known for. He’s able to go along with very long writings to bring themes
together within the
facts of the poem. Try it. Try writing a six-pager and only then it’s apparent
how, structurally,
you have to pull on so many threads at once. Next, there’s a need to reenergize
every 4th line or
so, to keep presenting different insights to hold larger and larger meanings.
The long poem
constantly exposes new material to deepen the reading. Usually a brief poem
expresses a single
thrust. The marathon poem needs to have tiny dramas and a formed imagination to
keep
connecting dominant and subordinate ideas. Writing is a form of energy and Kuzma
has the
stamina to use the extended form throughout his long love affair with poetry,
and to keep us
interested.
The Place Where The Pheasant Bit Me
Did it call him
still? Beside him two more
angels lay in rough disorder of limbs,
lay where the dogs lay down
tired from their labors—and
brought him home this Sunday
as the sun set on the last day.
Look at my hands where his
spurs cut. See these scars to mark
me still when he is gone back
to dust. Here, a notch cut in my
knuckle, and then this scratch
along the heel of my hand, and
here, most deeply, in the web of
my hand, where the pen fits,
to hurt me as I tell his story.
------------
Always by Julie
Lisella.
WordTech Editions. 83 pages.
It is not all that easy to write purely and simply. It’s not always easy and
convincing to make the
Saints seem palatable in today’s adversarial climate. Lisella invests in her
beliefs, through
poems that differentiate the virtues of myth from faith. What I like most is
that the poetry
flows from one sensibility to another and, although diverse in meanings, makes
sense in a book
of purpose. The poems are a path— a critical journey where the poet writes her
way through a
world of elevated thought. Lisella takes, in her hands, cancer, the death of a
father, war,
marriage, motherhood with poems of self-determination—not to endure, but to
unlock the
secrets of a life in service to gratitude for this world and the next.
St. Francis Began His Journey
What color is the light in your head?
Yellow orange—the burning bush,
amber—the sun rising behind the glint
of the cave’s aperture?
Eating nuts, teas brewed
from plants brimming your ankles,
your wild, dirty hands
cupping morning’s pleasures—
you can’t stop knowing your body,
You pray in Latin for the moon’s rays.
You breathe pagan. You speak
Christian. You mark your path
with your scent. You know
you’ll have to return. You’ll
have to remember. You can’t change
the footpath, your legs’ stride, the frail
hold of your breath on the cave wall.
When the animals come,
and the women,
who will have their teeth bared?
-----------------------------
Muse by Jonathan
Galassi.
Knopf. 253 pages.
One publisher says that publishing would be so wonderful “without all those
wretched
authors.” Galassi uses the world of publishing to construe a satire centered on
rivaling
publishing houses and a fictitious poet “Ida Perkins”. She’s loved and beloved
by the literary
world. “Ida was everywhere. Her work was read on the radio, quoted in songs and
movies,
imitated, discussed, debated.” The delightful parts of this book are that real
authors, poets,
and events are woven through so Ida is more than a metaphor. She’s part of the
very active and
exciting scene. (Those were the days when a poet could be a celeb.) Galassi lets
us in on the
particulars of the publishing world, with a side glance into the offices of the
king/queen makers,
and the life and times of Ida Perkins, femme fatale and bon vivant. “Her
occasional stealth
appearances in New York and San Francisco in those years was widely reported on…
When Janis
Joplin sang “Marginal Discharge” at Woodstock, Ida was reputedly sighted in the
audience…”
(Galassi must have had a ball writing this. He has Ida shaking a tambourine when
Carly Simon
and Carole King recorded her song.) Writers take a whacking too with the
creation of Pepita
Erskine refusing to be labeled “black or a woman writer, or a left winger, or a
sexual renegade.
The letters and correspondences are terrific.
Dear Mr. Wainwright:
I want to thank you for sending Ida Perkins’s new book
THE FACE-LIFT WARS, which I have been nibbling at with
great fascination since its arrival. Miss Perkins is that
unlikely miracle, a Real Thing. Gertrude Stein, who as
you know encouraged Ida when she was a little girl, would
have been gratified to see how she panned out.
With Appreciation,
Alice Toklas
Ida’s final manuscript ‘MNEMOSYNE” is sent to a publishing agent not her own.
(The poems are
brilliantly awful and some come dangerously close to being poetry.) But Poof!
They reveal a
clandestine love affair with her longtime publisher’s wife. Surely this book
must be published
elsewhere! If you like books and publicists and literary characters and fake
poets who marry
several times and die in Venice what could be better? I read it at the beach and
it made my
vacation even better.
_____________
The Complete Cinnamon Bay Sonnets
by Andrew Kaufman.
Rain Mountain Press 73 pages.
From police brutality, from the outrage, the handcuffs: “…the cell stripped of
familiar
presences/ more than anything I know how to write—the last loneliness, it just
is, and it is, and
it is…”
The poems move then into 47 sonnets entering the tropics— life in the lushness
of natural
beauty— but it comes from flashbacks that can never be resolved. “…when I half
woke it was
nearly dark—/far off, strange men argued and threatened/ and for a moment I was
still in lock
up.” Kaufman gives us a crown of sonnets where the last line of Sonnet 6 becomes
the first line
of the next so Sonnet 7 begins “For moments I was still in lock up…” This
creates a mantra, a
chant, a momentum.
There may be images in the poems- surf, pelicans, farmer’s fields, all the
beauty of the earth,
but braided through is the horror of old age homes, broken hips, confinement,
danger in the
cell block. When in the Caribbean the poet becomes historian endeavoring to give
shape and
meaning—appreciation, where cruelty burns a perverse memory.
The sonnet structure is essentially to make a unified whole because Kaufman
wants to tie
things up—the ugly and the lovely— in a language we can understand. Kaufman does
this with
personal ease using poetry as in intelligent conversation. This is a stirring
book with more than
one focus of interest. The sociological becomes visual with image.
The book is a reckoning of life experience. It notices what is wrong and, for
that, the poet is an
activist. But mental disturbance is not the theme. It is making beauty in real
time data to
replace the ugly past.
#14
These are the notes. But who might sound them for me,
to offset the nights I drift between reflection
and nightmares that are limned with a certainty
I can’t refute—like perjured testimony, sworn
by the police, gaining a life of its own, calmly
and poker-faced, once the defendant
has been beaten, cuffed, carried away, quietly
charged, then mocked and left in a holding pen—
packed like that formed by my failures, or with young
black men lying on cheap coats instead of beach towels,
their hands at their crotches at times, eyes closed, drifting
elsewhere. And like everyone here I keep swearing
I will recount what they did to me at some trial,
that I might find those notes and my bearings.
___________________
The Father Of The Arrow Is The Thought
by Christopher DeWeese.
Octopus Books. 95 pages.
I had seen some of DeWeese’s work but only knew the edge of it. Now, at the end
of the
month, my column is due, and my energy is spiraling so I took to my daily
reading, not knowing
what to expect. This is the thrilling part of my job—to be startled awake and
refreshed by
words, thoughts, verbal mannerisms some philosophers never imagined.
DeWeese titles each poem with a topographical label: Field, Valley, Tide, Pond,
Lake Etc., but
make no mistake, these poems are not confined to geography. In fact I’ve never
seen a mind
quite like this before. Behind the words is a human condition that is not LIKE
the words but fully
understood because of them. “The Harbor” begins:” There is no amusement/ a pier
can’t do
better, / I mean you could think of anything/ and then improve it/ by standing
up / on some
timbers/ above the mumbled water. / you could take your children/ and leave them
there, /
come back a few years later/ and they would all be interns/ of one sort or
another…”
The poems are speculations, revelations, as if the writer has just been born and
cannot believe
his good luck; and what can be felt in the screwed up world. He’s a pioneer in
his own
consciousness. “The Swamp” starts, “The night is full/ of holes for breathing, /
a box cuts
through/ so stars can kill me. / they all point north/ like antique propaganda,
/ and when they
fall, / something falls in me…” Each of his poems is uniform in line length and
either 2 or 3
pages long. There’s harmony in his consistency but most of all I love the way he
thinks. He
attributes the trajectory of ideas to Paul Klee’s writings and quotes him
several times. Here’s
one:
Thought is the mediary between
Earth and world. The broader the
Magnitude of his reach, the more
Man’s painful limitation. To be
Impelled toward motion and not to
Be the motor! Action bears this out. (P.K)
DeWeese’s poems are immersions of his Being— breathing things—someone is coming
alive in
every line. The last stanza of “The Tide,” a 13-page poem (the only one of such
length) “…I am
here forever/ hungry in the changing light,/ midwife to a foul day/ that lowers
its clouds/ so I
might concentrate/ on the sleepless distance/ between where I am/ and who I’ll
be/ once I hold
my daughter./ I raise up high my badge,/ I deputize the rain/ to fingerprint
this water…”
We are engaged emotionally because the writer is. He calls it out playfully and
purposefully,
tiny thoughts and cosmic truths. This guy lets us know his thought process as he
constantly re-
sees himself. So we know him, in this book, as well as he knows himself.
The Forest
The forest is never full of us
no matter how much
we grow ourselves out,
breaching the corporeal framework
our brains keep insisting
must contain a limit
when we smuggle children
through the wild nights
we have believed in.
When I was younger,
I was taught to hug anything
the storm washed against me,
to suck away whatever heat
emanated its tiny steam
from this world of lungs.
I received instruction
from what I found outside myself:
a million leaves
loving themselves to dirt;
a million families
doing exactly the same.
…
_____________
The Essential Ginsberg,
edited by Michael Schumacher.
Harper Perennial.418 pages.
First a commentary:
I met Allen Ginsberg for the first time in 1976 after he’d been marching all
night protesting the
closing of Georgetown University’s progressive radio station, WGTB. I was taping
poets coming
through DC in preparation for WPFW’s launch on air in 1977. Ginsberg was
cantankerous that
day having been without sleep. He was with his partner Peter Orlovsky who tried,
without
success, to calm the atmosphere. I remember at one point Allen was so difficult
I stopped the
show and said, “Why would anyone want to be in a room with you for an hour?” He
was
shocked as if he had no insight that he’d been anything but accommodating. He
then did a 180
degree turn, cooperating and answering questions about his work. Not long after
that we
became compatriots working together on Voice of America and other broadcast
occasions. I
have his last record album signed to WPFW. We played Ginsberg on-air often and
he was
grateful.
This book is truly the definitive Ginsberg and one thing that must be noted
about Ginsberg is his
impeccable intellect. Howl may look free flowing, but it’s the product of hours
and hours of
reworking. Ginsberg was a first rate scholar although he made fun of the
Academy, “What do
you do all day, sit around talking about Post Modernism…” he said at one event.
Ginsberg was
the brightest of his generation, a spiritual empath; and he sought to change the
world to the
good. The Essential Ginsberg is described by Editor Michael Schumacher in his
introduction:
“… you will find a sampling of the range and topography of Ginsberg’s mental
landscapes. Here
are the long flowing lines found in Whitman… the prophetic voice of William
Blake… the bop
prosody of Jack Kerouac… dream notations, travel journals, autobiographical
fragments, chatty
letters to friends, details of his expulsion from Cuba and Czechoslovakia in
1965,
photographs…” (He writes about his two Masterworks ("Howl" and "Kaddish")...”and
how his
meditation practices informed and added texture to his work…” The book also
includes
Ginsberg’s testimony before the U.S. Senate.
This is American history seen/written through the eyes of a radical poet. The
book is all you
need know about how Ginsberg navigated his own literary movement in the 20th
century.
_______
NONFICTION of Note:
Korean Sky: A Memoir
by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson. Shoulder Friends Press. 272 Pages
The past meets the present in the life-adventure of a woman born in northern
Korea, who’s
lived in America for half a century. When the US and Soviet Union divided Korean
peninsula at
the end of World War II, a child holds her grandmother’s hand, walking across
the 38th
parallel to South Korea for her father’s choice of democracy and America, only
to live through
the Korean War. In ever widening circles, that same girl eventually comes to
Boston and
becomes a scholar in religion and teacher. Then, she turns into a writer and
filmmaker, combing
interests in her art to increase social consciousness. Along the way we meet
characters in both
cultures who transform the emotional infrastructure of this woman’s world. The
author blends
history, politics, and philosophy within a personal journey. It’s only possible
through “story,”
with psychological action, and journalistic honesty. The author finally finds
her “home “in a
marriage with an Iowa farm boy who becomes a scholar and political figure.
Vulnerability and
strength return words to a very high order in this Memoir.
Grace Cavalieri’s latest book is a Memoir, “Life upon the Wicked Stage.” She
produces and hosts
‘The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” for public radio.
All reprinted from the Washington Independent Review of Books.