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.

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.”

Review: Duhamel's Bankruptcy

There are, I suppose, reviewers who like going all Francis Jeffrey on poets and their poems, but I’m not one of them. This scrupulous blog, however, is dedicated to the impartial – or explicitly and admittedly partial but, one hopes, not unfair – reviewing of whatever volumes make it, by whatever means, over the digital transom. So it is not with pleasure that I am saying here that Denise Duhamel’s Ka-ching! (Pitt Poetry Series, 2009; exclamation point in title) is terrible, but that is indeed what I am saying.

I’d like to say that I dislike this book because, like so many others I dislike, its poems are simply autobiography rendered in chopped prose without the tension of formal conventions, without attention to language in its languageyness (self-reference and simultaneous multiple meanings and sound over sense and materiality, for example). I can’t, though, because Duhamel does a lot of things here that, at least when they’re done well, I like. She writes prose poems, for example, and she writes some sestinas, and she sometimes plays precisely with these characteristics of language. This makes things a little tougher. Only a little, though, because the way Duhamel handles the prose poem, the sestina, and the self-referential and material aspects of language is so simple and cheap that the poems are drained of the energy that comes from any sort of challenge to the reader.

The book’s themes are money and chance (two things I think poets might profitably [ahem] explore more often), and the volume opens with “Play Money,” a sequence of prose poems titled in which each successive poem is titled with a higher dollar amount. I say “prose poems” because the book is labeled “Poetry” on the back cover and is published by the Pitt Poetry Series, but there’s nothing about these pieces that foregrounds language-as-language or that warps or estranges the narrated reality as good prose poems do. I might call them very short stories (the kind of thing you can find here), but even that seems to grant them a little more literary status than their structures (straightforwardly anecdotal, with maybe a clunky O. Henry twist) or characters (caricatures) merit. They’re really memoirettes about pretty typical money-related experiences (a heroic penny-pinching CEO pinches a penny, a deadbeat roommate steals and cheats, our hapless heroine doesn’t get a job). That last one is representative in its reliance upon cliché at every level:

I had resisted going to the MLA conference, a meat market for fresh English PhDs who were stiff in their new or borrowed suits, vying like dreary Miss Americas for tenure track lines. The judges were the gray-haired full professors, crinkled, withered – five o’clock shadows on the men, orthopedic shoes on the women. They yawned through candidate presentations and had long lunches paid for by their institutions. But I really wanted the job and going to MLA showed I was serious.

One wishes some of the desire to be taken seriously had led to the invention of fresher images and phrases. “Meat market”? Really? Job interview as beauty pageant? Nobody’s thought of that one before. Boy, she nails the gray eminences of the literary professoriate, though, right down to their metonymic shadows and shoes. Am I motivated to complain about this one because, well, some of my best friends are gray-haired full professors (some, indeed, both “crinkled” and “withered”!)? Probably. But only because my experience of that world does not resemble the clichés with which Duhamel attempts to capture it. (Now, if she'd written about black skirts, black leather jackets, and black-and-white kaffiyeh . . .)

What I find more annoying even than such an “I resemble that remark” moment is the way the poem (“$700,000”), like several others in the book, commits the cardinal sin of complaining in poems about how hard it is to be a poet. Now, I know that poems often include moments of such self-reference (Keats’s fears that he might cease to be, for example, are largely vocational), but there’s a world of difference between the worry that one’s early death is going to prevent him from filling books with all that’s in his head and resentment over how one couldn’t land the tenured sinecure that would have underwritten a poetic career. An analogy, if I might be permitted such a trope: the former is like this, while the latter is like this here.

And even when the poems about poetry and being a poet aren’t complaints, and even when they take the refreshingly estranging form of something like a sestina, they fall flat by taking a simple joke too far and, like your uncle at the wedding after too much champagne, explaining the punch line. Here, exhibits A and B:

from “Delta Flight 659”

I’m writing this on a plane, Sean Penn,
with my black Pilot Razor ballpoint pen.
Ever since 9/11, I’m a nervous flyer. I leave my Pentium
Processor in Florida so TSA can’t x-ray my stanzas, penetrate
my persona. Maybe this should be in iambic pentameter,
rather than this mock sestina, each line ending in a Penn

variant.

And from “I Dreamed I Wrote This Sestina Wearing My Maidenform Bra” (Gentle Reader, nostalgic as you might be for the ads on which it riffs, you and I only wish I were bullshitting you about that title)

In the thirties, A-cup breasts were called nubbins,
B cups snubbins,
C cups droopers, and D cups super droopers.
In the fifties, a bullet bra could make a bombshell
Of most women. Pointy torpedo cups
had every Hollywood starlet hooked.

OK. Credit where it’s due. All the “pen”s took some coming up with, and there’s a pun embedded in the brand name of the speaker’s pen in the first excerpt, and the play of figurative and literal language in the fourth line of the second excerpt refreshes the dead metaphor of “bombshell.” But the “pen”s seem suited more to a parlor game (or a drinking game) than to a poem about the relationship of poetry to politics, and the last line gives away the gimmick with five stanzas still to get through. And one can only wish the poet dreamed of writing in ways that might more effectively delight and instruct.

I mean lift and separate.

But the book is not without some more successful poems, and it’s not surprising that these are the poems in which the poet writes about things other than the poems she’s writing, turns her attention to persons other than her poem-writing self. “Basically,” for instance, separates children into two kinds (the ones who torture and the ones who rescue) and lifts each up in turn to understand how “all children are exhausted by the cruelties / of the world and fight sleep because there is still / so much to do.” Which reminds me just how tired I am right now, tired of the “torture” one feels compelled to undertake (so many infelicities to point out) in order to “rescue” readers from the unconscionable puffery that soils the back cover of this paperback I’m going to put down, now that I’m done putting it down.

Review: Gizzi's Deep Deadpan

Michael Gizzi, New Depths of Deadpan (Burning Deck, 2009)

As promised in the last installment of this adventurous blog, a review of a slim volume by a real live living poet currently, perhaps right this very minute, writing poems. The back cover copy consists entirely of questions, the first of which glosses the collection’s title and provides as good a key to these poems as any: “Should the two archetypal masks that represent Comedy and Tragedy pass through each other (imagine a total eclipse), might not their overlapping intersection be an expression of deadpan?” The poems, which tend not to pose questions but, instead, to juxtapose declarations, wear just such an expression, playing with the multiple meanings and opposed affects that cohabit words and phrases in ways that at once grin and grimace.

Take “About Face.” Please. The title combines military command and modifying phrase, the imperative to reverse direction and the invitation to consider the visage. This sets two stages on which the poem acts out. First, we get reversals: “No sooner am I out the door than I want to be home reading.” And second, though the seriality I’m suggesting betrays the simultaneity the poem actually performs, we get reflection on, via reflections in, pre-fabricated chunks of language, as when the speaker compares his face to a “full-grown narcissus” (flower and flower’s namesake), says he cut off his nose (not to spite his face but to identify himself) and professes his love for “being busted in the mirror.” There’s a resulting insight from all that the poem narrates: “Then someone opens an eye in my head. Murmur of subtitles.”
The pun linking vision and subjectivity (eye/I, captain) is a Romantic truism, but the adverb that opens this last line links it to (self-)reflection in the complex mirror of cliché, and the closing sentence reels the life of one’s own mind in a language suddenly foreign, one for which we require the helpful trot of translation.

But see, I’ve done this thing that writing about poems like Gizzi’s often does. I’ve made it sound patently un-fun. These poems, though, are fun, and funny. Like this here cautionary example a friend and collaborator sent, making clear the importance of knowing where strings of words come from. Sometimes punnily funny, though by this I don’t mean to demean as we often do when pointing out a pun. Every line in “Cloistered in an Oyster,” for example, riffs on the reality of mollusk life as it’s embedded in phrases like “mother of pearl” and “oyster bed,” in words like “shuck” and “clammy,” but leaves the leer of Tragedy just visible behind its Comic lightness. And still more fun are the poems, like “Raging Balls” or “Attention Deficit Flypaper,” where things get a little blue (another word whose connotations combine the limning of loss and the gladdening of glands), that come admirably clean about the masturbatory character of this linguistic play (though with the strong sense that both masturbation and play get bad reps by not being taken nearly seriously enough). Check out the latter of those two poems in its entirety:

The Italian matriculates with the usher under the chapel.
Masturbation covers a small portion of the audacity of lust.
Like an aphrodisiac in daycare, he cut his eyes on onions.
Some days he wants to cry, but antidepressants won’t let him.

Gizzi does a lot just with sound here (suggesting a connection between matriculation and masturbation, for example), but the real fun, it seems to me, is in the various ways we can read a phrase like “Like an aphrodisiac in daycare.” Similar to such a substance in its infancy? As if such a substance were distributed to a gathering of infants? And the choice we make here determines the simile’s modification of the main clause. The first way might suggest that he, in a kind of erotically related infancy, instead of cutting teeth cuts (that is, develops) his eyes on the tear-inducing fumes of onions, while the second suggests that “he” is hamstrung by an incapacity to act on urges chemically induced (or, as the last line tells us, inhibited).

I’m having fun playing with these lines, but there’s no reason why I should have all of it. There are plenty of copies of New Depths of Deadpan to go around. Go get your own, and see what you can make of “Clouds Nine” (mild insult to Rumi-quoting New Agers?) or “Hours Dismembered” (Herrick and Marvell mashed up with Damien Hirst?), or “Night-Blooming Gramophone” (in just what way do “Rats know what good sex is”?). And then tell me in the comments section.

Review: Carl Phillips's Latest

A few years ago, I wrote that Carl Phillips is the best writer of unrhymed tercets in the contemporary American poetry scene. I also said that wasn’t faint praise. I’ll stand by both of those assertions now, on the basis of “The River in Motion and Stillness,” in Phillips’s latest volume (FSG 2009). Also on display here is Phillips’s penchant for long sentences broken over lines and caesurae:

As if with the satisfaction of a near-impossible task
brought finally, and with no little struggling, to absolute
accomplishment, he lifts his ruined face up from beside

the other’s face, just as ruined, despite the sun being at that
angle that makes what ordinarily gets taken for flaw
very briefly what it also is: a loveliness, and something

strange, original . . .

The ellipses are in the poem, and, like the self-interrupting course of the sentence, they suggest the unending character of the experiences and perceptions Phillips recounts. Part of what makes Phillips so rewarding to read is precisely this tension between interruption and continuity, a tension held not only by the suspensions of sense over those syntactic and stanzaic breaks but also by the interplay of sounds. Listen to the simultaneous variety and insistence of “a” sounds in that sentence, the short “a” of “As,” “satisfaction,” “task,” “and,” “absolute,” continuing through the second stanza even as Phillips shifs to the long vowel of “face” (twice) and “taken,” “angle” and “strange.” There’s a similar alternation or interweaving of sibilants and fricatives, the hissing whisper of the lines providing a sinuous soundtrack over the modifying and qualifying phrases. The lines and their music perform what the poem’s title promises, motion and stillness.

Most of the poems in Speak Low are not in unrhymed tercets, but there are plenty of other elements that link the book to the poet’s previous nine (nine!) collections. Phillips was trained as a classicist, and this volume, like his other books, refers often to classical myths, histories, and texts (“Late Empire,” “The Plains of Troy,” “The Centaur,” “Fair Is Whatever the Gods Call Fair,” “Reciprocity”). These references suggest analogies between the violent emotions and actions of the old world and life and love today, but it’s hard to tell which is the tenor and which the vehicle, which of these we’re being led to understand in light of the other. “Happiness” meditates on the tears not of Achilles but of his horses at the death of Patroclus and imagines the beasts “hovering around their disbelief . . . as a bee will hover, // fooled at first, over freshly spilled semen,” the shift from past to present tense (and the context of the volume’s other poems on lovers and their discontents) locating the simile in today. The comparison’s ostensible aim is to illuminate those horses, but it’s contemporary weepers we really learn something about, just as in “Naming the Stars” Helen in the Iliad says something applicable not only (and not, for the poem’s purposes, chiefly) to the role of defilement in Homer’s world but also to the part it plays in ours.

Defilement; there’s another continuity with Phillips’s earlier work. This poet, more than any other living poet I can think of (and in company with such immortals as Catullus, Shakespeare, and Thom Gunn), forcibly holds our faces to the violence inherent in what we call (to make ourselves feel better? more human(e)?) love.
There is pain in these poems, there is torture, and these are inextricable from, are, maybe, constitutive of, desire. The speaker of “Now in Our Most Ordinary Voices” characterizes himself with references to sentences he’s “spouted” (“To know is to live flayed and Ambition / means turning the flesh repeatedly back – toward the whip”), as if to distance himself from these statements, but “Late Empire” and “Early Dreamer” and half a dozen other poems here seem still to proffer without apology similar sentiments.

So that it’s a relief, not because I doubt or disagree with Phillips’s intrication of love and torture (quite the contrary), and not because there is no pleasure in the pain he so tautly strings across the poems’ staves (there’s plenty of that), but because even after an enthralling storm, a compelling thriller, or a strenuously orgasmic bout of sexual combat the mind and heart and body seek rest and quiet, a return to equilibrium, to come to the book’s penultimate poem, “Husk,” which turns the volume down and reels the lines back in (“a wordlessness prevailing the way / a wind prevails”) and resigns itself, allowing us to resign ourselves in turn, with its concluding line: “So what, that we’re falling?” Falling, and fallenness too, have rarely fared as well as they do in Phillips’s classical handling, his careful hands.