Review: Animashaun's Gift

The woman I used to live with used to receive, from time to time, gift boxes of fruit from Harry and David. These were among our favorite packages to sign for, and chief among the pleasures often waiting in the nest of packing straw would be, for me, the perfectly ripe pears. The gift of pears, in the title poem of Abayomi Animashaun’s first volume (The Giving of Pears, Black Lawrence Press, 2010) has the power to attract iguanas and angels, and, in the wake of death, to comfort maidens. Animashaun’s poems set out similarly to offer consolation and vision, to set these in the balance against violence and loss. Pears are easy to grow, but often difficult to ripen or to pick at the precise moment of perfect ripeness; the same might be said, and on the basis of this book should be said, of poems.

I like best the poems here that weave through a warped view of the quotidian the woof of striking language. In “The Tailor and His Strings,” for instance, Animashaun constructs a little fable of renewal (old men go to the village tailor for strings to tie around their chests, measured to fit “the diameter of each weakened heart,” and are rejuvenated by these figures for “music from youth”) with a linguistic plainness and precision that heightens the strangeness of the tale. And “The Visit” narrates a (literally and figuratively) chilling visit from Death that wrings from the speaker a shocking sacrifice in the name of filial pietism. Death warns: “Your father / Will lose his sight again. // It is not good for the dead / To suffer a second blindness.” The speaker must choose whether to save his father’s vision among the dead by giving up his own or that of his unborn son. The conclusion is quietly devastating:

In the dark world of the unborn,
My son, playing quietly by the sea,
Forgets the curved mechanism of light,
Inside a small fish.

Too often, though, the poems’ own vision is blurred by flat or imprecise language. In “Ancestors,” the pot in which meat cooks for soup, its aroma attracting the speaker’s dead grandfather, is “tittering on the stove,” the giggle as out of place in the soundscape of howling wind and the old songs of wandering spirits as it would be at a funeral. And when the speaker removes the meat from the pot, he “sever[s] it in two.” I’m sure the spirit of the grandfather is grateful for the sacrifice left for him along with a “bowl of cold water,” but the redundancy in the phrase at this climactic moment of the poem ruined my appetite. Elsewhere, I find some of the poems to be overly explicit in their drawing of morals. Does “History Lesson,” for example, need to juxtapose the intimate and the historical in precisely so overdetermined a way as this:

Did those leaders who went to Berlin
In 1885, when the sought to open a ‘dark continent’,
Did they know of my need to ravage your breasts
Holding you against the cold stove?

The strongest section of this volume is, perhaps, “The Other Testament,” in which Animashaun rewrites Biblical narratives with one eye toward the grittily demystifying vision familiar from, say, Bulgakov’s rewriting of the Passion in The Master and Margarita, and the other, maybe, on Christopher Okigbo’s “Distances” sequence. Even in these poems, though, I wish here were at once more circumspect and more craftsmanlike. Here, for comparison and your reading pleasure, are a couple of stanzas from that sequence’s third poem:

In the scattered line of pilgrims
bound for Shibboleth
in my hand the crucifix
the torn branch the censer

In the scattered line of pilgrims
from Dan to Beersheba
camphor iodine choloroform
either sting me in the bum

And here are a couple of stanzas from Animashaun’s “David”:

The old shepherd who brought the news
Said: he’s in the mountain, naked,
Armed with a sword and a catapult,
Raving about letting fly a stone,
Rocking a giant to the ground,

And stabbing him complete.
The old man, his head now buried
And sobbing uncontrollably, continued:
The man he murdered was no man at all,
But my boy of eleven, just learning to tend sheep.

Like Okigbo, Animashaun aggressively exposes a malignant hallucination deep in the scriptural tissues. But where the poet of a generation ago (Okigbo was killed in battle at Nsukka in 1967) draws power from implication and the economy of metonym, Animashaun spells out tragedy so that there’s little room left for the imagination. Where Okigbo weaves a subtle pattern of sonic repetition through his lines – the sibiliance of “scattered” continues through “Shibboleth,” “crucifix,” and “censer,” the short “a” of “scattered” is repeated in “hand,” “branch,” “Dan” and “camphor” – Animashaun relies on the shock of the situation to carry the lines (which leads, I think, to the reliance on the overcharged “raving,” on the adverbial modification of “uncontrollably,” and on the surface pathos of the concluding line.

I am aware of the danger of appearing to beat one poet of Nigerian descent with the work of one of the greatest English-language Nigerian poets, and it’s the rare first volume by any poet that’s going to stand up to comparison with Okigbo. It would be no more fair to put this book’s “Sunday Mornings at the Barber Shop” upside Derek Walcott’s visit to the Castries barbershop in Omeros, but comparison is one to clarify the shape and the stakes of a poetic project. Animashaun is laudably interested in big and important issues that get well beyond the self-obsession often on display in these days of the navel-directed poetic gaze. I look forward to his riper poems, to the work he produces when he trusts the subjects, their inherence in the objects and agents he examines, and the effects of language turned upon itself. Then, I think, the giving of poems might measure up to the power he here ascribes to the giving of pears.

On Prynne

Via Ron Silliman's blog (look to the right), a link to a whole bunch of people closely reading the sublimely challenging poems of J.H. Prynne. I find myself captivated by some of the poems, especially the work from the 60s and 70s, but am hard-pressed to explain either the poems or my interest in them. There is something genuine, a searching intellectual project taking shape in the selection and juxtaposition of phrases, an excavation of value in an examination of the linguistic means in which we limn it. Check it out.

The Discrete Charm of Ke$a

Or, really, of Paul Muldoon's erudite analysis of "Tik Tok."

Because the party don't start 'til he
walks in.

Review: Ursu's Poetic Prayer (or Prayerful Poems)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that poetic language differs somehow from the stuff we use in ordinary daily conversation. The latter derives from early hominid needs to communicate (“Orf, look out for that mastodon!”) or coordinate (“Orf, look out for that mastodon!”), or, according to more recent theories, from early hominid social grooming practices (hence so much of our current conversation as either empty -- “How ya doin’?” -- or nitpicking). The former bears a whiff of incense or altar fire or the irruption of the divine into the mundane. So much depends, of course, on how one or another poet or theorist glosses the “somehow” in my first sentence, but that’s the topic of another post.

For Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, the analogy between poetry and prayer is sometimes a theme and sometimes a practice. In the best poems gathered in Lightwall, a new collection translated by Sean Cotter and brought to you in a beautifully designed volume by the fine folks at Zephyr Press, Ursu unites theme and practice, essaying the ineffable by weaving webs of image, allusion, and figurative language.

Ritual language is most obviously thematized in poems that either are about or that invoke “spiritual athletes” – saints, ascetics, and contemplatives. The results are mixed. In “Concerto for Vasile the Monk,” Ursu narrates herself listening to Beethoven’s “Imperial Concerto” (I’ve typically seen the Piano Concerto Number Five in E Major, Opus 73, referred to as the “Emperor Concerto”) and, as she works, communing with the composer, telling him the story of the monk, Vasile, who saved a Coptic brother from the Ottomans by hiding him and carrying him to safety in a burlap bag. Beethoven announces a re-titling of this concerto, from “Imperial” to “Concerto for Vasile the Monk.” The poem links composer, poet, and Coptic monk in resistance to the authorities represented by empires and Ottomans. It is Beethoven’s presence, his assistance, as the poet prepares to write that positions him for this episode “from the lives of the monks," and Vasile claims that the monk he carried to safety was as light as the quill with which the brother wrote. Nothing in the poem’s own language, though, indicates where this kind of power might lie in the action of the pen. A mystical moment from the Lives of the Monks on the Holy Mountain of Athos feels more earned in “From the Lives of the Birds,” whose stanzas catalogue the conditions of possibility for different birds’ songs (clearly a figure for the song that is poetry itself):

Canaries only sing when caged.
The sky is far off,
an enigmatic safe.

But if you cage the tomtit
-- the anonymous
the ignored –
it wraps its claws around its throat
and chokes to death.

This attention to the birds rather than to the figure of the poet rhymes nicely with the anecdote that closes the poem: an elder apprenticed to a monastery but prevented by his humility from becoming a monk, covers himself with crumbs on snowy days and feeds the birds from his hands and shoulders and face, eliciting their songs with this offering of himself.

I wish more of the poems in Lightwall followed the model of the Elder of Elisa and subordinated the poet to the poem. I’m not a fan of poems about being a poet (it takes a lot to rise above that topic’s inherent limitations and produce a “Sleep and Poetry” or “Circus Animals’ Desertion” ) and there are here, especially in the section called “One Hundred Days, One Hundred Nights in Lewisburg” (where Ursu was a visiting poet at Bucknell University), many such poems. The powers of ritual language just aren’t convincing in a poem about reading poems in a former church:

Here, in America, in another church, turned into a theater
I read poem after poem
as though I were building
a cross out of words
With great care
with unending motion
But with peace, too, in my soul
climbing humbly
the ladder of prayer
Until all the walls of the theater
fill with icons
and burning candles.

I’m not sure I can quite buy “humbly” in this scene of transformation, especially when the stanza I quote is juxtaposed to the story of Cosma, the monk, who built crosses in the wake of Ottoman destruction of churches in the Balkans. More crucially, though, is the absence in the poem’s own language of anything that hints at the transformative power the language narrates. There’s no music, no metaphoric magic, that enacts what the poem attempts to describe. (This might be a matter of translation; I don’t read Romanian and can’t say how much the original might sing in ways that don’t make it over the barrier into English.)

The better poems in this book, to my mind, are those whose claims for poetic power are implicit and performed rather than explicitly named. “Gingerbread with a Mirror and Sibiu,” for example, allegorizes city towers, mapping a surreal city and a moral universe at once. In this poem, Ursu’s imagery and juxtapositions, the unexpected turns of her lines and sentences, effect a new and renovating vision:

The person who builds the shadow before the house
gave us his rope knotted
once for each of time’s hearts
then asked us to forget him.
Just like the cellist who kissed my ear
He told me he could hear the sea inside its shell
‘A place unspoiled by noise and kisses may your ear be,’ my grandmother said
while she chopped parsley and let it shower
our family’s soup.

Other poems, like “Poem with Birch Gate” and “Letter to My Son, Mihnea-Dan,” turn that vision on the histories – recent and more distant – of the poet’s Balkan home (the section of the book is titled “Balkan Golgotha)” while a series of poems on and addressed to Ovid exemplify the strong bonds of sympathy and influence Ursu shares with important predecessors (not only the Roman poet exiled to Constanta on the Black Sea, but also Cavafy, Elytis, and others). While I’m not sure (the Pill’s expertise on this score is, alas, limited) whether she is, as Matthew Zapruder has called her, “one of Central Europe’s foremost living poets,” I certainly see the basis in these strongest among Ursu's new poems for the judgment of Tomaz Salamun (my own favorite living Central European poet) that she “makes the Black Sea again” and “expands the places of myth.”

I'm not gonna make that lame barbaric AWP joke

The Pill is back from Denver, where this year’s AWP was held, and glad to be breathing once more the heavily oxygenated sea-level air of home.

It took a day there not only to acclimate to the thin air but also to get into the groove of the unheimlich. The uncanny, you know, is when something’s familiar but off. In this case, your correspondent, a long-time academic, noted the structural familiarity of the conference setting (I have measured out my life in partitioned hotel ballrooms) filled with content whose texture, taste, and odor were just different enough to bring about estrangement. E.g.: a panel on poets reading Keats, in which Stanley Plumly presented a smart, thoroughly researched paper on the form and structure of the odes (the Pill settles into the Spartan comfort of the straight-backed chair, set just too close for comfort to the rank in front of it, feeling right at home). Could still have been at home when Ann Townsend glossed “visionary” through the poet’s near-sightedness and medical education, but felt the shape of the room shift when one after another potentially suggestive connection or insight was tossed out but left undeveloped, so many intellectual larvae squirming on the thinly carpeted floor (along the with the unpronounced “ed” syllables that regularize Keats’s iambic verse). Ah, back in Kansas when David Baker took the podium and performed a deftly deconstructive analysis of Keats’s habit of correspondence and manner of corresponding (though the bright colors of Oz flashed through from time to time, as when Baker, abjuring the word “discourse” because it was too redolent of “our theory-soaked departments back home,” cast a weird aspersion over his own scrupulous reading).

“Theory,” it turns out, is a noxious substance in which many departments, critics, readers, and institutions are soaked, steeped, stewed, brined, or drowned. It was with something like alarm that I realized, at a panel on “Flarf and Conceptual Poetry” the next day, that I am equipped with those gills enabling one to breathe the stuff. I kept them out of sight. Well, except for the hour and a quarter of Flarfers duking it out against Conceptualists in “papers” that were really performances, and that included some of the best poetry – juxtaposition, lacuna, music – read in the panel sessions, from the opening gambit of K. Silem Mohammad, the moderator, who wondered whether Flarf (the intentionally bad) and Conceptual (the intentionally boring) might be “the poetry of our time because they are the poetry we deserve” to Vanessa Place’s lines “flarf still loves poetry; conceptualism loves poetry enough to put it out of its misery” and “the best flarf is virtuosic; the best conceptualism is failure.” I find myself confirmed by this stuff, both on the page and in the room, in my taste for modernist rather than postmodernist experiments, for surrealism, say, over and against dada. And, look, this stuff is indeed masturbatory. But let us remember, Gentle Reader, that masturbation is quite pleasurable, and, as play with the erotics of language, these performances are too. And don’t even get me started on the ethical gains possible in this Levinasian unsaying of the said . . .

But my gills are showing.

There is a lot of poetry to experience at the AWP, from readings by big names in big rooms to readings by groups of poets (western poets, alumni of various creative writing program poets, African Diasporic poets, this or that Press poets). What, then, to make of the fact that the poetry that most captured your humble correspondent, that, really, grabbed him by the lapels and shoved him up against the wall and demanded his lunch money, was read “offsite,” at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, by the winner of the Wick Poetry Center’s first book award, Edward Micus. Micus read from The Infirmary, and these are poems that needed to be written, that need to be read. The feet of Micus’s ladder are firmly planted in the foul rag and bone shop, but we’re not talking about unmediated cri du coeur. These poems are worked, and they gain intensity from the carefully constructed frames that enclose, the painstakingly built fires that energize, their already potent contents (war, illness, torture, suffering). I was scarred for a day or more (hell, I might still be) by Micus’s prose poem, “In a Room Somewhere in the North of Nicaragua,” and moved by the resigned humanity, couched in unexpected developments of the image of a soldier’s marijuana smoke, that concludes “Robertson”:

A hot shrapnel scrap
kissed his kneecap
sent him back to Burlington.

Jesus – what a war –
to leave him hanging here

back in the world
his brain uncured
still smoking in its skin.

The poetry on offer in Denver was not confined to the panels and readings. Indeed, the heart of the conference is the book fair, a fluorescent-lit warehouse of an exhibit hall (the Pill overheard someone say that s/he had overheard Poet Laureate Kay Ryan say the book fair was like a Costco for the small press world, and, you know, once PLKR puts an image like that in your head, it’s there to stay). It’s overwhelming and a little disheartening: so many poets writing so many poems and publishing them in so many finely produced books and smartly edited literary magazines (and, Reader o' Mine, there are so many finely produced books and smartly edited literary magazines) for so few readers. It feels like a closed loop, a universe whose contraction mirrors the expansion of the bigger one in which we’re all spinning entropically toward heat death.


The book fair is not only chock full of books, many of them looking pretty good on a quick flip-through (though many others look as though it were more important to the author that the book existed than that it might be a book someone would want to read). It’s also a Costco stocked to the rafters with metonyms for the contemporary po-biz. Item: MFA student poets in last year’s Brooklyn chic – porkpie hats topping off faux-thrift-store tweed over untucked old-skool striped business shirt – picking up skads of Xeroxed submission guidelines, deaf to the offers of half-price copies of the mags they hope to publish in or cut-rate copies of books published by the presses they hope will invest $20K to bring out their slim volume. You don’t gotta be Derrida and Lacan, you don’t gotta be Wimsatt and Beardsley, you don’t gotta be Brooks and Warren to explicate that text. It’s a bad sign in the system, a bad sign for the system, because where I worried a paragraph ago that nobody was reading these writers except each other, what becomes apparent after a few hours in the AWP book fair is that too many of them are not even reading each other.

Review: To grow tired of London is to grow tired of life

Is it a problem that friends reviewing friends is business as usual in the po-biz? The Pill thinks it probably is. Nevertheless, here is a review of my friend Sara London’s new book, The Tyranny of Milk (Four Ways, 2010). At least I’m telling you this is a review of a friend’s book (I'm thanked in the acknowledgements, and I'm happy to admit to having encouraged the poet), which is more than you’ll often get elsewhere in this racket.

Is it a problem that friends blurb friends’ books? Oh yes, Gentle Reader, it is indeed. (I should say that I don’t know whether the blurbers of this book are friends of the poet.) But where we often think of the blurb problem in terms of nepotism or mutual back-scratching, it seems to me that the problem is just as frequently a matter of misrepresentation. And here, I think, on the back cover of London’s book, I’m provoked to wonder whether the poems are well served by the blurbs. Terrance Hayes emphasizes the poems’ verisimilitude, writing that London “recollects, recovers, recounts,” and characterizing her work as “clear-eyed utterance” (we’ll leave to one side the distinctly mixed character of that metaphor). This downplays the way London’s poems effect estrangement through her games with language and line. Cleopatra Mathis is closer to the mark; she captures the defamiliarization in the poems – “odd subjects are adroitly turned in the light of the familiar, while the common and ordinary are rendered strange.” This suggests, though, the surreal meeting of umbrella and sewing machine on dissecting table, that is to say a matter of content or topical strangeness, where what London really gets the weirdness from is the turn of a phrase, typically around the bend of a line.

I’m getting all cranky about the blurbs because they threaten to blur the real achievement of vision and voice in this book. Or maybe it’s just that they don’t quite articulate what I really admire about these poems: the bait-and-switch game they play with confessional conventions, and the way that game replaces the prurient interest in intimate revelations with the purposeful satisfactions of linguistic and prosodic play. To put it another way: while these poems might seem to be about the plight of a bed-wetter, say, or the sting of a mother’s tongue, or the tensions within a marriage, they are more properly seen as about how these things are filtered through, or, better, constructed in language. The vision is the voice, and these poems press the point that we see as we speak.

London's mechanics of estrangement are worth dwelling on a little. She sometimes achieves her effects by taking up the point of view of the naïve child or outsider, as when, in “Terra Incognita: As Butch Thunder Hawk Tells It,” she narrates a Lewis and Clark party member’s nose-blowing from the perspective of perplexed Lakota, or when, in “Tell Me,” a cultural alien sketches the mysteries of love and loss. In these poems, and in others whose speakers are not so distinctly estranged or estranging, London also exploits the inherent weirdness imposed by line-breaks in a loose counted verse (three or four words per line):

In my country
you might over-
hear the story
of the woman
with eleven children,
who never once
achieved orgasm
(“Tell Me”)

“But what
I remember most
are the polished
solid arms
of a dark chair
I was told
to sit quietly in,
the blond eyes
open
in the cold wood
(“First Wake”).

Elsewhere, London brings linguistic compression and indirection to bear, transforming embarrassment and awkwardness into the strange riches of insight. Here is “Mother,” one of twelve sections in a long poem entitled “Wetter”:

When she pinched
the plastic-headed
Safeway safeties,
pinning me into
lipoids of lemon
terry, she
sometimes pricked
her thumb,
sometimes
my thigh
fast with
blood toward
some destiny
of desert or sea.
No, I said, diapers
are not for me.

Notice the suspensions wrought by line-breaks (to what are those plastic heads attached?). Notice the foregrounding of sound by the densely packed alliteration both intralinear (“lipoids of lemon”) and interlinear (“thumb . . . thigh”), and assonance (“sometimes,” “thigh”), and, especially, combinations of sound repetition (“Safeway safeties”). Notice the quick shift from the literal blood of a pinprick to a figurative blood attached to destiny, the shift from the most intimately domestic space of a diapering to the symbolic vastness of desert and sea. Now, we can see this as a poem about the social difficulties of incontinence, or we can, as I think we should, see it as a poem about the transformations and control enabled by verbal craft and attention. The concluding utterance (the disavowal of diapers) is earned by the demonstration of continence that leads up to it.

When I got my copy of this book, I flipped through first of all looking for a poem I heard Sara London read some time ago. I have to confess that the poem stuck in my head partly for reasons that had little to do with it; I was sitting, at that reading, beside a woman with whom I was falling in love, and as I listened to the poem I couldn’t help noticing the way this woman was methodically unraveling the sleeve of her ragged hoodie. These two things had been joined in my head for years, and I figured, all that time, this was just a matter of simultaneity and the strange salience details take on in the context of a crush. What a revelation it was, then, to see that maybe they’d been intertwined for reasons having to do with the poem itself, or with its epigraph, for “The Odds” begins with a quotation from Cato: “There are [those] that fayneth it to hange / by an heere or twynned threde.” The poem is an eloquent apostrophe to a dead squirrel and a meditation (here’s where the title comes in) on the odds of missing the grasp in the midst of our play, our “lunging for love.” The odds, it turns out, are pretty good. Or bad, depending on how you look at it. The poem is also a fit metonym for the book as a whole, an exemplary instance of London’s own play (“A snapping branch this noon / snagged my skyward glance”), the vision synthesized by a voice modulated, channeled, engineered even, to provide something like, as the speaker in “Bad Manners” imagines, “a shadow lyric // sounding on the far side / of our carefully cantilevered love.”