Adam Robinson and Other Poems (Narrow House, 2010)

I’ve read Adam Robinson and Other Poems more than twice: some of the poems when they appeared in journals, the collection as a pdf, the collection printed out, etc. I read his poem about a bus (“I’m going to have sex with these people”) while riding a bus. The introduction calls the poems “disenchantingly meta” but I’d leave off the “disenchantingly” part. Take the poem “Skip This Poem for the Next One” for instance. It contains intertextual references to other poems in the book such as “Hey go give ‘Brahms’ another shot/Maybe there is more to it well no promises.” The “well no promises” is an example of a deftness that appears throughout the collection, a colloquial, tongue-in-cheek (maybe even breathless) quality that is nevertheless honed.

Adam Robinson… is very funny. Adam Robinson gets away with things that would seem difficult to do well, such as inserting a quote from David Orr at the New York Times. The quote describes the “trendiest contemporary style, which relies heavily on disconnected phrases, abrupt syntactical shifts, attention-begging titles, quirky diction…two scoops of John Ashbery and a sprinkling of Gertrude Stein.” By incorporating such a potentially undermining quote, the quote itself becomes subverted, conscripted for the poem’s purpose. And Adam Robinson reminds me more of Kenneth Koch than Ashbery. There is a humor and exuberance that dazzles, or that engages long enough to gut-punch you. “Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Leading Authority on Flotsam” begins with the quasi-comedic routine “What’s up with bottled water man” and presents a series of absurd, humorous images, before ending with

“You see what I’m saying broham
What’s the deal with bottled water
Sometimes as a whole we’re smart
And sometimes as a whole

We’re going to die in four years”

Ghost Machine (Caketrain, 2010)

Reading Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine, I was conscious of at least two things: the techniques employed in the poems and the thoughts/feelings/reactions they (the poems) generated. It’s difficult to say whether the poems in this collection would do anything to anyone’s heart, but thankfully the heart is just meat. I’m not suggesting that Mirov agrees with this assertion.

Communication is distorted in Ghost Machine or it fails completely. The speaker “can only misquote what the voice tries to say,” “can’t tell the portal what’s on my mind,” and “the best way to proceed is to disconnect.” The speaker “wakes up in a construct.” The “construct” complements mentions of electronics (“the brainwork’s shadowy circuits,” “a TV flickers in my heart”) and references to email and texting that actually seem natural rather than inserted for the sake of gimmickry.

Dreams also figure prominently, and dreamlike constructions. One of my favorite lines happens to be quoted on the back cover: “I plan to be another language in the body of a deer.” The line’s origin, “Sleepless Night Ghost,” is exceptionally strong, as are the sources of other lines that excite out of context and provide texture to Ghost Machine’s creations. Dreams are announced as such, or are suggested, as when “she puts her face inside a bed,” “I walk through a whale carcass,” “I unweave a braid that grows from my stomach,” and “My penis looks at a table.” I don’t require plausibility from every line (or from any line, really), though those who do will hopefully find consolation in the invention and linguistic provocation of “can cities grow in your stomach?” or “I talk to a face inside the breeze” or “some islands turn grayish and blink.”

In the poem “Kid Dream Title,” a “huge brain controls the waterfall.” A brain is at work behind Ghost Machine, as is a set of observant eyes.

Time of Sky & Castles in the Air (trans. Sawako Nakayasu, Litmus Press, 2010)

After reading Time Of Sky & Castles In The Air I couldn’t help but feel thankful for Litmus Press and Sawako Nakayasu. Only in the afterword do you learn that because Kawata has been deliberately excluded from the limelight, she has no interest in her poetry being translated and had no interaction with this translation other than giving her permission. This makes for an interesting first translation of both books into English, and, since I know absolutely no Japanese, one I needed to take at face value. With that said, these poems read amazingly well in English, and some of the syntactical structures that Kawata has been praised for in her native language are clearly rendered here.

This book is actually a collection of two of Kawata’s books, published 22 years apart (Time of Sky in 1969, Castles in the Air in 1991). The only reason for their being put together appears to be their incongruity to the rest of Kawata’s work. Her other poetry is far more narrative, unlike these, her first book and her dream journal.

Time of Sky is comprised of 90 very short poems (2 per page) dense with abstract imagery and incongruous syntactical arrangements. The poems take on an aphoristic quality—eventually the rhythms feel as if you’re quickly tearing pages out of self-help calendars, the only problem being that instead of quotes from Dr. Feelgood you get stunning and sometimes terrifying pleas, like “O whip/Beating its wings toward the invisible sky/while dragging out that final-hour scream.”

Kawata’s anxiety is palpable, caused by a constant fear of death or a general otherness as a perpetual foreigner (Kawata is Japanese born but has spent most of her life in Italy). The poems pulse with that energy, and bleed more often than not:

The diamonds tear the sky apart and convulse the blood by daybreak to the very last drop

Another:

Traveling the endless noonday street in the eyes of myself traveling the endless noonday street in my eyes

Castles in the Air is a dream journal Kawata kept over 15 years. The dreams operate with that peculiar logic and focus on her anxiety, desire, identity, sexuality, and even normative sanity. I found this book less intriguing than her first. The writing is decidedly more straight-forward syntactically than Time of Sky, but does feel like an honest portrayal of real dreams and invite the reader to play with possible interpretations, even if their ideas are consistently thwarted by the subsequent dreams. One dream in particular (“With an Infant”) is emblematic of the whole:

A man is chasing me – so in order to escape I try to have a
relationship with an infant. The idea is to drive the man away by
having him see me make love to the infant. The infant understands
the situation completely.

Litmus Press primarily publishes books of poetry and translation, and the annual poetry and translation journal Aufgabe. The deadline for the 2012 issue is 1/1/2012. For submission information about both Litmus and Aufgabe, click here.

Nanostars (Greying Ghost, 2010)

Opening anything from Greying Ghost is like getting a 7” from some DIY punk label, pouring onto the counter (table, lap, control board) buttons, yellowed fairy-tale playing cards, collected scraps of comics, whatever other flotsam they choose to include alongside poetry pamphlets from the GG Free Pamphlet Series, and of course the chapbook you bought. Sifting through the contents, I felt like I’d bought a Lifetime record from Jade Tree and spilling out with it was an Owls patch, a Trial by Fire button, and a single from Kid Dynamite.

That’s all to say that you might accidentally toss aside Michael Bernstein’s Nanostars (like I initially did) while searching for it. This tiny hand-made bad boy runs probably under a hundred words divided into 14 sections/stanzas/units. Each contains a word or phrase in the corners of the stanza with a fifth word or phrase in the middle. The whole business feels like erasure poetry, but I’d like to think of it more as what you see after getting punched out, or maybe tossing a bunch of books into a high-speed Tilt-a-Whirl and reading the words that get puked up on the back wall. Here’s one from the middle of the book that is as indicative of the style as the rest:

bruises                                                              instress
                             boom for days
catwalk                                                            heaving

The idea is to read this book however you want (up/down/left to right/right to left/diagonally), and I think that you should. The title alludes to metallic nanoparticles used for their optical properties in “chemical and biological sensing and imaging” (ScienceDaily)—nanostars scatter direct light throughout a solution, suggesting the presence of and identifying the molecules present, the objects of inquiry.

To call this more than one poem would be funny. It’s arranged in such a way that each section, and then the sections together, direct you to absent words, or gaps in its language, or allow you to arrange sounds in such a way that all gaps are filled. That is the experience of reading it, inhabiting a sort of boundless space full of glances toward but not quite at the real substance of the thing. Those glances comprise its strange but undeniably memorable shape.

Greying Ghost publishes small, unique chapbooks and the poetry journal Corduroy Mountain. They will begin accepting submissions again in the fall—click here for more information.

Ghosts and Doppelgangers (Lowbrow Press, 2011)

With Twitter, the news-feed, the rolling marquee news channel techniques, ADHD composition of television programming, it is hard to distinguish, most of the time, whether we are over-stimulated or bored. And if we aren’t bored, is it because we’re so bored that we don’t realize that we’re bored? Ghosts and Doppelgangers by Brad Liening indicates that this conundrum is comprised of all wholly true statements, the design of a fierce clusterfuck.

To explore the terms of this situation, he creates celebrity personas to satirize both the exciting and banal. Whether he is Lil Brad getting his sexy on, the President of the World with Mickey Mouse as his Secretary of Defense, or Brad Liening (the man, the legend—before he became ‘Lil Brad’), his tone cannot be rivaled. There is something inherently likeable about it, which I think is precisely the point. Many of the poems take on a listing quality, items to be checked off upon completion in the droll life of whichever chosen character. Even in his most megalomaniacal moments, we are immersed and deeper still:

My brain?
Totes made of stars.
When I die, exactly how foxy
will I look?
Answer: so foxy.

Stanzas like that and deadpan lines like “I’m a handsome guy with a real big penis” create a Kanye West effect—you think, “Man, this guy is a douchebag” but allow it—invite it almost!—eagerly and joyfully. Because he makes you laugh and puts out good fucking records. The ego is performative in Liening’s work—not to say that it isn’t in Yeezy’s case, I’m just saying that the crafting of these poems and personas gives obvious clues to the latent importance. It becomes apparent that this progression into starstruck ego fascination and the Adderall desperate rapidly shifting zeitgeist is paving the decline for us. Never breaking from his brilliant tone, we meet this heartbreaking line: “All our finest dreams and desires / were frozen with Walt Disney’s head” and know in our heart of hearts it is only one part facetious.

This book of poems is like methadone—2 years ago I kicked a heavy Perez Hilton addiction and have since filled the void with even stranger and perhaps more potent internet behaviors like Craigslist missed connections (not to be confused with ‘causal encounters,’ please) and viral YouTube videos in the Cam’ron’s U MAD? moment on Bill O’Reilly vein. There is something about each of Leining’s personas that encapsulate all of those things: the strange and overpowering obsession with celebrity, aspirations for recognition and fame, the hairline crack between ordinary and fascinating, the readiness to subscribe to spectatorship. Line after line, you feel incredibly duped but in a good way. It only stings for a moment after the poems slap you across the back of your head and scream smugly into your ear, “Son, you’ve just been Liening’d!”

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie (University of Akron Press, 2011)

The spleen of Poughkeepsie is not a reference to an internal organ that filters blood; spleen is commonly defined in a poetic sense as melancholic or of foul mood. In the case of a city anthropomorphized, spleen becomes the spirit of a place, which inhabits and affects more than an individual; the place’s experience with itself is both micro and macro, all the while self-reflective and “human.” Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie by Joshua Harmon is toying witth Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: prose-like poems attempting to capture the essence of the modern Parisian spirit and landscape, as contradictory as its attributes may be. Instead of Paris, Harmon choose Poughkeepsie: a small river-city situated alongside the Hudson River, the last stop on the Metro-North (the train connection to New York City), site of Vassar College and the early 90s murders committed by Kendall Francois.

At the risk of revealing my bias, I grew up no more than 10 minutes from Poughkeepsie and find its demeanor quite charming like an alcoholic boyfriend who picks bar fights every night but also cries during Sleepless in Seattle. I can attest to Harmon’s veracity in his description of the discordant and seemingly depreciated place, a place inclined “to build a life from happy accidents / of scrap metal and dumb luck’s dumber // purpose.” The way he captures the city thankfully avoids sentimentality or exaggeration all the while not allowing its lugubrious mood to be overlooked or underplayed. A poem in “Tableaux Poughkeepsiens” ends with a desperate question “as in, ‘Can we just get rid of / Poughkeepsie little by little?’ which I imagine is met with a morose answer, suggestive of a city in a revolt against itself.

Harmon employs a cinematic technique at times, allowing the reader to only see what the lens captures and the voice throughout is quite conscious of its limitations:

The camera pans up to the sky above the apartment stack to track a swing of pigeons, but, in the foreground, millennial sunlight falls on the faces of nineteenth-century houses with security bars over their windows. Admission requires no more than a knack for speaking the language, but no one comes here out of a sense of resignation.

The poet is aware that he can only show you so much and while manipulation by way of cinema omits, it also illuminates. This move magnifies the dichotomy between beauty and decay, hope and despair.

Le Spleen is driven by allusion—the aforementioned Charles Baudelaire (of course) but also Homer (“Poughkeepsiad”), Robert Lowell (“For the Poughkeepsie Dead”), and several others. “Tableaux Poughkeepsiens,” purposefully or not, is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot in many ways: the movement of a Poughkeepsie year guided by the seasons much like “Four Quartets,” the bleakness and desperation for change famously found in “The Waste Land,” and the description of modernity and the cityscape in “Preludes.” The poems are all absent of titles and can be read as a continuum or alone without prompt, some are blocks of prose while others are broken into couplets. In the poems with the inclination toward traditional form, the unconventional line breaks within words can feel forced, but when successful, the genius is insurmountable.

“L’envoi” closes the collection as a reflective exercise to grapple with the end of the journey through the spleen. He addresses the city perhaps as no one else has in Poughkeepsie’s history. A city that suffers from failed attempts of gentrification and revitalization (“Can we imagine another world? Pity keeps it going.”), there has not yet been a solid solution nor has anyone acknowledged the morsels of obscured beauty lodged in its make-up. The solution may always have been to speak to the city itself—so Harmon begs and clarifies:

and when I ask you

to lie down it does
not mean forever dead…

Poughkeepsie is kept as a memory at best, to the flâneur in question (and perhaps the poet: Harmon says in his bio that he “no longer lives in Poughkeepsie”) and to all flâneurs of its streets and avenues. “L’envoi” skillfully begins with another epigraph from Baudelaire: “Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville…” (“I have not forgotten, in the city…”—if my minimal French does not fail me). A memory is typically incapable of dying; it is what gives life to moments that are long passed. With this logic, in spite of all its spleen, there is an underlying hope and confidence that Poughkeepsie will rise again.

Joshua Harmon’s Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie is published by University of Akron Press (Akron, Ohio) and he was the 2011 winner of the Akron Poetry Prize. Unfortunately, the 2012 submission period for manuscripts has just lapsed (May 1 through June 15) but (obviously) the contest is annual and the details can be found here.

Voir Dire (Rope-a-Dope, 2009)

Voir Dire in its very title implies that the poem swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. What happens, though, when the truth is proven unstable in the exact moment its truth is realized? Justin Marks writes to quell the anxiety that stems from the revelation that truth is subjective, time is fluid, and this is all inexplicable and beyond our control.

The central preoccupation of Voir Dire is the state of flux created by the movement of time. The unpredictability and unruliness of it can be exciting: “It’s an adventure / inside my body right now, / not knowing what will happen,” while other times the inability to maintain authority over his own life is recognized as a nuisance: “I wish sleep / was a switch I could simply throw. / Sobriety and intoxication as well.” Time is represented throughout the poem in many ways: generational distinctions, lineage, the transition from child to parent. Marks’ awareness never wanes although his grasp on the truth (and, most notably, how he understands himself) is constantly shifting.

The poem progresses with vivaciousness and whimsy while he explores the idea of transience. Potential energy builds in the enjambment and imagery, much like a flame just about to rise off a match from the friction of a strike:

One of the more satisfactory
experiences of my life

was moshing so hard
I broke my retainers.
Twenty five years ago.
The pendulum and gears
in an antique clock still
keeping time.

Thematically, a satisfactory experience in the speaker’s life must revolve around destroying systems erroneously appearing to maintain order. “Moshing so hard / I broke my retainers” is extremely appropriate language for the resistance: the brashness of youth depicted by socially accepted and collectively organized violence, breaking something regarded as “nerdy” (to be read as orthodontic apparatus) but also interpreted as the all inclusive piece, the speaker’s encasement. The retainer could be the body and the body presumably a vehicle, just as the old clock encases time.

The exigency to record observations via poem is part panacea for the aforementioned existential anxiety and part creation of something that is impervious to tampering. For instance, it might read as non-sequitur to arrive at “I’m completely addicted / to my email” but email functions as a carrier of information at an accelerated pace, it is as current and connected as the speaker can be, although paradoxically detached by design. The ability to recall emails gives the voice itself corporeality (“The immense joy I receive / when reading my sent emails”), an unfettered post-delivery monologue forever lodged in a sent email folder. Of course it is irresistible to have said something and then recall it verbatim again and again without ever losing the pacing, the exactness, the intent; the current take on it is the only element that changes.

The poem itself is printed on a large fold-out page that looks like it could be a newsletter, a broadside ballad, or a message in a bottle, slid into what resembles a red envelope. In an attempt to open this book in the conventional way, you will find nothing; you must disengage the parts from each other. Not knowing these production details and opening to what appears to be empty pages is a clever fake-out. The reader then is confronted with perhaps the only objective truth: the blank page. To begin the reading experience like this and end on the line “This day / barely begun,” we see how time alters truth, how both are used as a tool to control chaos, and how these tools themselves are inherently chaotic. We understand “the limits of [our] linear mind[s].” And as Marks poignantly reminds us: “There are no answers, / only variations / in understanding.”

Rope-a-Dope Press was started in 2007 by Robert daVies and Mary Walker Graham. Rope-a-Dope is a tenant at The Distillery, a renovated rum distillery in South Boston that provides space to “artists, artisans, and small businesses.” Read more about it here. Also check out The Manilla Broadsides

Sorry, Tree (Wave Books, 2007)

Reading Eileen Myles’s Sorry, Tree feels almost like the kind of eavesdropping you can’t tear yourself away from no matter what level of overheard intimacy, names you don’t recognize, or partially explained situations. Myles doesn’t shy away from anything, writing with complete abandon about sex, moms, society, dog shit, the sounds of things. “Culture” is a poem that freely and honestly encapsulates the bent of Sorry, Tree. Its opening lines read, “It accepts all / marks & none / So I’ll just write / into it.” The poem goes on to explore what Myles experiences as ‘culture’: the plane rides, the friends, the sickness, the cities.

But she throws a wrench in, unadorned, no line or stanza break to warn you: “Okay I’m talking about an invisible / Culture. I wish I could help.” This nuanced vacillation in the poems keeps them interesting and dynamic.

Myles writes through desire. I got a sense of that before I came across maybe my favorite lines in the book in “For Jordana”:

I think writing
is desire
not a form
of it.
It’s feeling
into space,
tucked into
language
slipped
into time
opened,
felt.

Placing often one word or a very clipped phrase on each line slows you down, begs you to feel that desire. This works both as an exercise in pacing for the reader and a way for Myles to surprise us again with her sincerity and scatterbrained spontaneity. Not often do you see a poet jump from place to place, subject to subject, character to character, with not so much as a stanza break. This gives the poems a wavelike momentum.

“Everyday Barf,” it turns out, was written as a presentation to a panel on “the poetry of everyday.” Included at the end of the collection, it’s a fitting way to close out the book. I read it as a sort of appendix to the poems that preceded it, a stream-of-consciousness narration of events and thoughts strung together intuitively. It’s a map of the poet’s process—like the poems themselves, it mostly lacks “transitions,” but suggests that we don’t necessarily need them, at least to get her jist.

Myles, who has been widely published (more than twenty books of poetry and prose), recently won the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Fiction for Inferno (a poet’s novel) (OR Books, 2010). Sorry, Tree is a publication of Wave Books, a Seattle, WA based publisher that combined with Verse Press in 2005. Wave Books publishes poetry by new and previously published writers, and places emphasis on writers’ interactions with the readership through readings and events (which is cool). They are not reading unsolicited manuscripts at this time.

The Garbage Eater (Triquarterly, 2011)

“The physical means nothing beneath / the small fear of dying, which fears / only unworthiness more than death.”

The closing stanza to the opening and titular poem of Brett Foster’s collection Garbage Eater ushers you into the book with an abstraction that earns its significance by acting itself out in poem after poem. Foster obsesses over the physical, describing each element of a scene in vivid detail. Death inches its way in, and those details become markers for deeper contemplation—similar to what the garbage eater from the title poem adheres to in a daily life of complete material sacrifice. The subject of worthiness or unworthiness permeates the poems and connects the past and the present, questioning everything.

All are affected and entrenched in a present tense that can trace its roots to places and people and experiences so far removed yet still evident under the busy surface of reality. Through Foster’s eyes the scenes of his life—set in Boston, California, New York City, and other recognizable places—are puzzles to be taken apart and reassembled, attention paid with equal weight to the individual pieces themselves and their place in the big picture. A homeless person with a sign asking for prayer provokes a two-page treatise on spirituality and the politics of charitable giving. Watching flies in an Olive Garden becomes a claustrophobic obsession tied to the strangeness of the faux-Italian surroundings and a piece of complimentary cheesecake.

However “everyday” or personal the collection may feel, the poems are polished in an academic manner, not often offering surprise or folly. This is their gift as well, since most of them are lessons encased in a shell of the quotidian—parables of religion, mythology, history, cultural commentary, all rooted and illustrated by the observations of the poet. He dabbles in forms as well, throwing in a rondeau, elegy, frasca, aubade, and sestina. Those are just the ones labelled as such; many others have inventive, organized forms all their own.

Foster is an assistant professor at Wheaton College, with degrees from University of Missouri, Boston University, Stanford, and Yale. TriQuarterly Books of Northwestern University Press published the book. The press, which is connected to TriQuarterly literary magazine, publishes contemporary American poetry and fiction as an imprint of NU’s larger press, which also publishes academic work. They are not, however, currently reading manuscripts.