Short Takes on Two Recent Books

The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Each poem in this book is comprised of three speakers, the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, and each speaker always speaks in this order, although the Dog does not always get the last word, so to speak.  The Old Woman speaks of human concerns, the Tulip is the voice of Beauty, and the Dog speaks for the animal.  Yet they also speak of what they are, woman, flower, dog, just themselves, if those selves could all cogently speak. The trio discuss God, Love, Death, the nature of Man.  I thought I'd had other books by Ostriker on my shelf, but I can't find any now.  I do remember using her book Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America when writing some papers in grad school. This one will remain on my shelf--I love the interplay of the three voices, how their conversations open up the world, and how, when you listen to speakers who are good at arguing their case, your loyalties and opinions shift and change like leaves in the wind.

Here is one of the shorter poems in this collection:

Soften and Melt

The man man made me soften and melt
said the old woman.

The bee made me shiver like a rag
said the dark red tulip.

The bitch made me push
said the dog.



Bay of Angels, by Diane Wakoski


Why do we chew again and again on the bones of old wrongs?  Why are we (are some of us, many of us, most of us?) haunted by old love, love gone wrong, ancient betrayals, decades-old heartbreak?  This can be true, I think, even if our present is relatively happy and drama-free.  Wakoski examines her past with movies and myth as her companions, finding tropes in both that twine and echo in her own life.  In the last section of the book, "The Lady of Light Meets the Shadow Boy," she writes poems that are inspired by a new friendship/mentorship with the poet Matthew Dickman, yet these poems, too, are meditations on the past, and what both poets share from it. I am always in awe of Wakoksi's catalog of imagery: the natural world, the urban environment, jewels, cloth, flowers, cinema, the qualities of light, as well as her ear for prosody and her skill with line-breaks. This collection, along with her previous book, The Diamond Dog, indicate to me another flowering in this poet's career.  Some of the fieceness of her earlier work is not here, but she has replaced anger (which was exciting) with a hard-won wisdom (calmer, but perhaps more beautiful.)  I look forward to her work, always.

Here's the third stanza of "Some Beauty Needs a Dimness." The poet is describing how a winter scene would be different if the sun were out:

                                                Now the 
gold and green and orange snow blowers and shovels
would come out, a reminder of
worldly destruction; the kids in red gloves would
dirty the world with snowballs, the car mufflers
would blow out a column of asserive, lively particles,
some perhaps staining the snow blue. Even the light itself would be
cheerful and lose its sonority.
Edward Weston's pepppers -- wouldn't you shudder
if they were green? Would you ever want to see a Greta Garbo 
film in color?

Spring Reading: A Partial List

1. In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys, poetry by Campbell McGrath.

I bought this after seeing him read at the Harold Washington Library a Couple of weeks back. I love his long Whitmanesque lines, and many of his prose poems.  I am not enamored, and I am never enamored, of his poems or anyone's poems about poems and the writing of poems.  I want every poet everywhere to be limited to one poem about the writing of poetry in her lifetime. Write more than that, obviously, but then alter, obscure, and otherwise hid the origin of the poem.  Too much preaching to a choir of one, the self.  Too much  self-inflation.  I believe we must believe we are doing some of the most important business anywhere when writing a poem, and I believe we ought to never say that aloud. So when I run into stanza like:

But the poem one is about to start,
the poem one is going to write
immediately, very soon, perhaps next March,
is like a foghorn calling mournfully in the night.

It makes me cranky.  I feel like the poet has just gone ahead and admitted that no one cares about poetry but other people writing poetry.  That may well be true, but do we have to have that fact pushed in our faces like a grapefruit? It does seem to me that this "poems about writing poetry" phase happens as some poets, often poets of certain renown, begin to age.  Call it the Billy Collins syndrome. I like some of Mr. Collins' work just fine, but he has a lot of these "watch me write a poem" poems.

Thankfully, Mr. McGrath, has plenty in this collection to admire and enjoy. One of the standouts is "Sugar or Blood." He read it masterfully at the reading.  And indeed, on one level it is about a poet's task and responsibility in the world:

I realize that I have never said plainly most of what I truly believe,
I have shied from difficulty and misstated my deepest fears,
I have not borne full witness to the suffering in the streets of the cities
     I love,
I have not waled a picket line against the tyranny of greed,
I have been wily and evasive even on behalf of art, 
I have not praised the movies in tones equal to the rapture
I have known there...

But if gives place and purchase to a reader who is not firmly placed in the realm of poetry.
McGrath could have said:

My poems never say plainly most of what I truly believe,
My poems shy from difficulty and misstate my deepest fears...  and so on.  I'm glad he didn't.

2. Metaphysical Dog: Poems, by Frank Bidart

An aging master, still at the top of his form.  I'm not sure who else in American poetry can construct a poem on the page with such grace, care and beauty in the making, and linebreaks that are at once both inevitable and surprising. In these poems he is not using the persona poems he made his name with--the persona here is a "Frank Bidart" who is lonely, broken-hearted, lion-hearted, determined to continue to wrestle with hard truths and the unsayable, which nevertheless he continues to say. "Poem Ending With a Sentence by Heath Ledger" is one of the best things I've ever read.  

3. City of Your Final Destination, a novel by Peter Cameron.

It's such a pleasure, sometimes, to read a novel you have read several times before. Like spending time with a well-known friend. I love this book, about a grad student who travels to Uruguay in an attempt to convince the executors of an obscure writer's estate to grant him permission to write the authorized biography. The grad student, Omar, is from Tehran originally, his family moved to Toronto, and now he lives in Kansas. The executors are the dead writer's wife, his mistress, who lived with the wife after her pregnancy, and the dead writer's gay brother. Omar's arrival is a stone thrown into a pond, and the depiction of the ripples is touching, tender, and funny. Cameron spares his characters not at all, but he loves them enough to make us love them too. His prose has the strength of early Hemingway: to use plank-plain sentences and construct something not showy, but utilitarian and beautiful.

The School of Orpheus is not in any Building

Ann Wroe wrote the book on Orpheus, that magician, demi-god, philosopher, priest, poet, singer, that inspiration, that tragedy, that Argonaut, that sacrificial lamb. Her new book, Orpheus, The Song of Life, is dedicated to everyone who protested, "But Orpheus isn't real."  Using everything from texts from antiquity to poems and paintings from the present day, Wroe demonstrates that an archetype, despite all the blurring of boundaries and definitions  (Was Orpheus based on a real person?  Was he a king?  A Poet?  Did he study at Alexandria?  Did he live in Thrace, or the mountains further north?) despite all the questions, Orpheus is a Being, an Idea, with a lasting influence, a man real enough to inspire uncounted poems, songs, operas, mosaics, paintings, plays, and happenings.  As for scholarly works about the big O, I very much doubt that a better one will be coming along soon. Wroe is learned and erudite, a writer whose mastery of her prose makes the reader feel, this reader, at least, that he's found a text that becomes both a home (comfortable) and a way-station, a place that has the potential to be the start of any number of journeys. Whether you are planning on a trip to Hades to retrieve your one true love, or you want to discover ways to be the enchanted singer of your age--and who at one time or another has not wanted to have a voice that moved the very trees to dance--this is the book you need.  Poets of all sorts, here is Anne Wroe on Orpheus:

  The public square was always foreign to him. His school was not in any building, though the boys sitting now on temple steps, smoking and listening to their iPods, may jiggle with the sense of him, as he slides through shaded doorways on the waves of balalaika music kicked up from passing cars. The forest was always his place, or among the rocks; in secret, and most often in the dark.

Here she is describing how Orpheus sang a song that made a forest uproot itself, great trees following behind him like eager dogs:

    He led them, then -- scarcely daring to turn, in case they froze behind him -- swaying and stumbling from rock to rock, their canopies full of sky and threshing wings, until they reached Zone on the Aegean Sea. There, in an open space, they arranged themselves in a double ring as though they meant to dance in a spiral, like the planets around the sun. But though he urged them to dance, though he challenged them, laughing and splashing, to follow him into the sea with their hundred hydra arms, they moved no more. Having staggered so far, astonished by the wide blue glare ahead of them, they felt the music leave them, and rooted there.

     He could only lead them so far. That is still the case.

I am eager to find out where Wroe's terrific book might lead me.

Orpheus playing for the beasts. The unicorn looks particularly enthralled.

Three Reviews (in the form of plays) of "50 American Plays" by Matthew and Michael Dickman

 The Fourth of July

MATTHEW DICKMAN.
          Wonder twins--power of absurdity.

MICHAEL DICKMAN.
          Wonder twins--power of brevity.

MATTHEW DICKMAN.
           Wonder twins-- power of vaguely political leftist polemics.

 MICHAEL DICKMAN.
          And fun, wonder twin.  Don't forget it was fun to write.

MATTHEW DICKMAN.
          Activate wonder twin power!

MICHAEL DICKMAN.
          Activate wonder twin power!


(They touch power rings and immediately explode into a finale of Fourth of July fireworks)



Castor and Pollux Consider the Moon

CASTOR:
          Wasn't there an oil named after me?

POLLUX.
          We are boxers, and horsemen.  And sailors.

CASTOR.
           Do I get to be the immortal one this time?

POLLUX.
          We are twins, and so share our immortality.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY.
          (Having just arrived from Idaho)
          I'll box both of you at once. Greek pussies.

CASTOR.
          He thinks he's the immortal one.

POLLUX.
          Maybe he is.  But we are the divine twins, born of the silver moon!

CASTOR.
          That was an egg.

POLLUX.
           No, no, I'm sure it was the moon.  Our glittery mother!

CASTOR.
          Our mother was a princess who was raped by a swan.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY.
          Are we going to talk about the past or are we going to drink like men?
          (Whispers)
          It's like they are going to start making out at any minute.

POLLUX.
          You so badly want to see that.  But we are talking about our mother.
           Isn't there some tradition where people thought she was the moon?

CASTOR.
          In at least one tradition Ernest Hemingway is actually Zeus.


POLLUX.
            Yes, Hemingway's tradition. Listen, we will box you if you take the form of a swan.



Vignette

(Two men walk in to a bar. Allen Ginsberg and Gertrude Stein are drinking there in silence, companionably.)

MAN #1.
          Hey, aren't you Gertrude Stein?  What are you doing back in America?

GERTRUDE STEIN.
          America is not in America.  America is an idea kept under a gentleman's cap. America is a cupful of brass tacks, in a lady's handbag.
(She sips her creme de menthe, and coughs)
          America, go touch yourself with your atom bomb.

MAN #2.
          Allen Ginsberg--that woman is stealing your line.  And she isn't even saying it right!

GINSBERG.
          (Taking his head off the pillow of his arms)
          That's no woman, that's my wife!

(Frank O'Hara walks briskly across the stage in search of a martini)

MAN #1.
          Frank O'Hara in the bar too?  What are the chances?

MAN #2.
          Frank O'Hara is on stage in all of these plays. Or sometimes behind the scenery, prompting our lines. That reminds me.  (He goes over to the jukebox and selects a song)

          (When "Chances Are" begins playing, the two men look at Stein and Ginsberg, now deep in quiet conversation.  They shrug, and begin to dance with each other.)


         

Seven Notes on "Your Father on the Train of Ghosts"

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is book of poems written in collaboration by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher.  I kept thinking I was going to write a wonderful and insightful essay about this book, as I have been reading and re-reading it for the past month or more.  But time flies by, and other brillances attract my attention.  So I figure I'd better just do this in the form of notes before I never write anything about it at all.

1. At 221 pages of poetry, this is a bigger volume than most.  The size is both impressive (Look how much these two poets have created together) and, since it runs counter to expectations re: the length of most contemporary volumes, a tad daunting. (Jesus, that's a lot of poetry to get through.)  While no poems come to mind that I'd want to see cut, the sheer volume makes it more difficult for me as a reader to have a favorite, or favorites.  Maybe that's the point of including so many poems in one book. It says, "I will not be anthologized. These poems are a chain and every link is important." Or maybe, "Roam at will. Stop here at this poem, or don't. There are a lot of rooms in this house, and you don't need to sit down in all of them."

2. Here are echoes of voices I heard while reading these poems. Charles Simic.  Mark Strand, particularly his earlier work. Frank O'Hara, if his "I do this, I do that" poems described vivid dreams, instead of the activities of an afternoon. John Ashbery blurbs the book, but the individual poems, for me, jump around far less than the typical Ashbery poem, which often wants to contain the entirety of everything ever thought or said in it. More modest than Ashbery poems?  Or maybe just boxed in a bit more.

3. It struck me reading these poems that the kind of surrealism I appreciate in them is an American surrealism.  The French surrealists, at first, were struggling to bring the dark unconscious into the light, and it was an undertaking drawing on Freud. All those secrets, and forbidden desires, and animal unknowns: a surrealism  meant to give a voice and shape to the subconscious.  I think surrealism is more often used these days to explain or to depict a known but hard-to-grasp emotional reality. Another way of saying this: these poems are not going to discomfort the reader.

4. I think that in collaborative projects there is often a self-congradulatory tone, or a hyper-preciousness that appears on the page--look at us, look at our cleverness, look at this process and how arty we are being by engaging in it.  This tone is NOT at all present in YFOTTOG. You can't "see" the poems being written in front of you.  If the writers are teasing and delighting one another with in-jokes, if they are delighting in their own creation, they are keeping this to themselves.  The voice in these poems is remarkably singular, and even. I don't think anyone would have known if these were collaborations if the authors had not told us. As a writer, I am very curious about Mr. Waldrep and Gallaher worked together.  As a reader, I think the poems speak for themselves.

5. Students of poetry, behold the importance of a good first line!

On the Reading Shelf

I have been delving into Jenifer Karmin's amazing aaaaaaaaaaalice.   And Michael Dickman's Flies. Just got Your Father on The Train of Ghosts and am looking forward to reading more from it. Which reminds me that I want to re-read G.C. Waldrep's Archicembalo. And I think I am ready to tackle Anne Carson's Nox.  More about these in the future. In other news, the tulips on the back porch have opened today, and despite the plastic tag that promised white flowers, they are red as a cape worn by a little girl on a path in the woods.

The Last Wolf

I was in a hotel room in Washington, DC for a bookselling conference. After a couple nights of poor sleep, I came back from dinner and dozed off at 9:30. I woke up happy and convinced of my good night's rest.  It was 12:10 a.m. I was as awake as the sun.  So I started to read the book I'd brought with me, the book that despite being at a bookselling conference I'd not had time to read.  The book, a memoir by Mira Bartok called The Memory Palace, about how she lived with and fled from and returned to her schizophrenic mother, is so achingly sad.  Here is a passage that is not typical--She does not in general go for the poetic digression:

     "A friend in town says she heard the last wolf when she was ten and lost in the woods. Twenty years later, she heard it again. The loss of the wolf is like the loss of a mother. Somewhere she roams in memory, in darkness. Our bond with her is inexplicable, before the beginning of time. She is fierce love, she is sorrow. She is a howling in the wilderness we can never see, calling us home. She is what we fear--and what we long to return to--the heat of the cave and animal closeness, before all civilization and reason."


I have been rereading Grimm's fairy tales recently. The Memory Palace reminds me of stories of lost princesses, and witches under curses, and the wolf in the woods.

Mira also has a website that lists sources for grants and artist residencies, for all you art types out there.