Russell Dillon – Eternal Patrol

Forklift Books 2013

Page Length: 82

Retail: $15

 

There was something nearly traceable

within us, horse-like and holy.

Without this field, there would be

an unnamed vacancy between trees.

…

Here: A photograph where your face

is obscured by blurring snowflakes.

Gloam-lensed, a moment before

inviting me into your papier-mache home.

…

Maddening how, in this home, in this storm,

I fear most the lightning and not the rain,

the improbable over the certain. A sound

from the map room: mellifluous, stupid river.

 

“Each Combustible Fluid Ounce in its Divorcing” (12-3)

 

Russell Dillon’s debut collection from Forklift Books, Eternal Patrol, radiates bioluminescent longing and maniacal ache. Dillon’s poetry fuses the energy of ecstasy with the reflective intensity of a mind that catches itself thinking helplessly into an abyss of terrible beauty. It is poetry that proceeds from the force of its diction: image-driven and unencumbered—it roams the lyric landscape like a hand over goosebumped flesh—gently electric, felt and feeling, vulnerable and terrified to life by the force of contact.

 

The inaugural release from Forklift Books, an imprint of indie mainstay H_NGM_N Books and the perfect-bound extension of contemporary American poetry’s OG of DIY, Forklift, Ohio, Dillon’s book sets the tone for a press that straddles the fuck you aesthetic of punk culture and the bleeding heart, rose-ravaged hands of the Romantic literary tradition. Certainly present in Dillon’s work is the unmistakable legacy of Dada, Surrealism, the Beats, and, most prominently, the “Last Avant-Garde” of the New York School of poets: Rimbaud, Tzara, Breton, Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and John Ashbery. Dillon’s poems often speak plainly and powerfully, imbued with energy derived from bright, sprawling diction.

 

Let’s get something straight: the quivering bolts

of your empire portray a certain innocence

but are not nearly a match for the fits of your sky.

Yes, the four doors of the heart fly open, slam shut,

though the motion’s symbiosis is never quite explained.

 

“More Mid- than -Western” (25)

 

And yet Dillon’s participation in this lineage highlights a distinct strain of avant-gardism: the reflective vulnerability of Apollinaire, Robert Desnos, Frank O’Hara and, perhaps the closest kin to Dillon among these greats: James Schuyler, whose meditations often defy the stereotypical chattiness of the New York School, which Ashbery once cleverly conceded as superficial, “all the way down.” There is very little of the superficial in Dillon’s poetry: it radiates from the core of things out into the plains of observation.

 

The air, and its oceans, they want to break into you.

I’m bringing this, and my ignorant translation of light.

It is Christmas morning. Your mother is crying,

 

and so are you, both trapped or dead beneath this ice,

within these pressures, these peekings, these tiny bits of glass.

 

“Eternal Patrol” (63)

 

Dillon’s poetry is a fever dream from which he refuses to wake, except to pull the reader into his warmed blanket fort filled with wonderfully grave play. In this regard, he is yet another bright-burning acolyte of Dean Young, his generation’s single most influential poet. But while some Young-ites err into the only-momentarily-interesting crack and sizzle of dizzying association, Dillon, like Young himself, divines within chaos the drone of mortality.

 

A horse throws its show, and all over is the sky.

I have been given a lot of drugs lately, but have taken very few.

I never feel the weight that I am when reading it from a scale,

but oftentimes the weight that I feel goes unmeasured.

…

Seeds, water, and good soil, yet still the earth does not roar

when we slam into it with our shovels. Rather, it resists us by

not turning. On one side of the bridge there is a suicide view,

on the other an out-to-sea-ness that is attacked by larger boats.

These tasks, and everything about finance, are quite foreign to me,

but when the fires start, I understand completely.

 

“Damage Damage” (64)

 

Dillon moves with his feet to the earth, even as he wanders it restlessly with his head stowed in innumerable clouds. This ambulatory, meditative intensity largely eludes the tradition of the avant-garde and finds its source instead in the great English Romantics: Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and John Clare. Like these poets, Dillon relies on pastoral imagery and the refuge of Nature as a place of both chaos and order. More contemporary examples of this, and more proximate to Dillon’s own poems, are James Wright, Gary Snyder, James Galvin, Robert Hass, and Louise Gluck. What unites these poets is the conviction that the real is really real and that poetry can make it so. The result is a brutally elegant navigation of high-stakes beauty, a notion perfectly captured by this collection’s title. When a submarine goes missing, it is said to be on “eternal patrol”—the image conjured is a vessel roaming beneath the surface of the sea in perpetual investigation of the unknown depths from which the living can never return. Dillon’s collection is such a vessel: as unexpected and awesome as a creature that has evolved to see in perfect darkness.

 
And then there was our great envy of the painters,

how it all became an agreement with our sisters,

that light alone would reveal their breasts

to be our mothers’ breasts, like a map into

the backstreets of a small town burning.

There are terrible places in this world, but

people know our names there, so we return.

 

“Collect Call from the Hague” (29)

 

Russell Dillon’s Eternal Patrol feels its way through the dark: reaching for anything that might offer orientation. What makes this wandering artful and potentially salvific is that Dillon’s hands can see what they feel, and that the mind to which they’re attached has the words to make real for us their feeling.

 

 

Waadookodaading Drum at the Wisconsin State Department of Agriculture, Trade & Consumer Protection Consultation with Tribal Leaders meeting at the LCO Convention Center, 10/8/14; or:
MVI_8407

 

I can’t stop watching this YouTube video:
of seven little Indian boys

with their switches in hand
and they begin to sing. How can you stand this?

I would ask my mother at each Pow Wow,
young and heartless, before it became a homecoming,

their pitched wail, fevered yips and arpeggios,
how the longer you stayed

they were like wolves, then crows,
then, eventually, the river, too.

Oh yes, the river moves like this,
sometimes broken by tributaries,

but carried by momentum, sometimes
the floodplain and one stick at a time strikes

and all pick up again together
like a shared lung. We who stand at the corners

of this carpeted space, most likely
another casino convention room

if it’s anything like ours, we shift
our feet, we grind our heels

in time. We witness. And now, how
can you leave? How can you

look away? We don’t all know
the songs, but we know the materials.

We know to love the language
spinning from their throats.

 

 

 

Beat Me to Grandma’s, I Dare You
What storm do I inhabit?
Evening

but not quite dark, so that were you
a small runner stream along this path

I’d see when you crossed me
and surely avoid it. Can night still me
in my lung’s worry,

you ask, your mouth full up
with peaches and spotted apples.

My basket was
so full.

You’re a time bomb, you say. But I am the one
with the butter knife hidden

for when you disrobe,
saliva and five-day whiskers
in a negligee like you’ve

lost your damn mind

screaming you were the one,
you were.

 

 

 

Sails Like White Clouds
Air shimmered, those moments
before they found us, their sails,
our small bony fish crisping
at the fire. Each of us breathe,
narrow our eyes, the fog above
every waterway like fingers
in our mouths, but here
we shift—into bears with
open jaws, our pupils alien,
their hands heavy on the rifles.
Smoke twines from the fire
and other fires, the thatched roof
splinters to ash. They say
deliverance, we say go,
and take the blankets with you.

 

 

Kenzie Allen is a descendant of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin, and she is a of Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, The Iowa Review, Boston Review, Indiana Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere, and she is the managing editor of the Anthropoid collective. Kenzie was born in West Texas and currently lives in Norway.

During 2016, we will shine the spotlight of our public esteem & rapt attention on two poets per month. This month’s first poet is Kenzie Allen. 

 

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world – what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Kenzie Allen: One of the things I love about poetry is that ideally it becomes a fractal. The smallest parts of it, sentence, line, word, can each be a poem. Like a good sketch, there’s space and negative space in the poem, what is depicted and what is inferred, and the drawing’s refinement upon initial impressions through revision. Poetry draws upon music, the visual, performance, and ultimately is a celebration of language. It’s also the creation of an archive, to me, a history of thought to draw upon and enter conversation with, a measurement of the time and environs, and a space of persuasion, as well, a declaration of existence and as such, also a political act.

I’m also driven by that expressiveness in terms of my culture, my tribe and larger Native community. I’m looking up to people like Roberta Hill, Ernestine Hayes, Mark Turcotte—people who have guided my steps and given me things to strive toward in language and spirit. And my other mentors along the way, Kerri Webster, Laura Kasischke, Khaled Mattawa, generous people who are also great literary citizens. I want to be around in that same fashion, and connect to my fellow generation of artists and the next. And I love being part of the publishing side, reading submissions and curating content, and connecting to new authors in the process.

 

FFF: What are your influences – creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

KA: I’m pretty obsessed with people. Human drive and desire, cultures and power shifts, the things we come up hard against or which propel us forward. When I draw, I draw portraits. When I shoot photographs, I center on people, or on the tiny details which reveal human presence, or on my own human gaze. I sing not simply out of a love of music but out of a love of expression—I want to feel things and I want to connect to others through that expressiveness. I think poetry can also represent a space of healing or processing as well.

I started out in anthropology, and the ethnographic mode is still something I gravitate toward in many aspects of my work. But it’s also a source of conflict (the history of Anthropology, indeed, most academia, is also a history of colonialist movement). But through that influence and lens I’m dealing with cultural conflict, colonialism and stereotype, experiences in forensic anthropology, and the estrangement of relocation.

And bars. I do write a number of poems about/in/all over bars.

 

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems – as author and as reader?

KA: Words fail us. They fail to adequately impart the nature of grief, the pinnacle of joy—we’re all trying to communicate all the time but so, so often, words fail. So it’s a process of trying to get it right, or closer, all the time.

I love landscapes. But mine don’t turn out in the same way as a landscape painting would, with the saltbrush bushes leaping off the page and setting the reader in their own starkly particular corner of a town or meadow they know by heart. So maybe mine are human landscapes, cultural geographies, or memory-pinpoints. What’s important to me is story. Voice. Insider and outsider language; the peculiarities of association and what the body can and cannot tell us about where it has been and what has haunted it.

What’s cool? That shiver of perfect imagery. What I crave—for my chest to cave in and my ribs to ache, and yes, to cry. To feel things. To flinch. Dorianne Laux once said writers are sometimes described by the bystander as “unflinching,” but that in reality it is the writer’s job to flinch, to be moved by the world one witnesses, to have an emotional response and write from that space, with that sense of urgency and vulnerability. I can’t think of anything better to aspire to.

 

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something – an experience, a piece of art, anything really – that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

KA: I moved to my tribe’s reservation later in my life, and integration is a slow process. When I was 15 or so, I was given an Oneida name by the woman who developed a verbal dictionary for our language, Maria Hinton (whose name was Yake yale, meaning, “She remembers”). I refer to her sometimes as “Namegiver” in my work, for that is what she was to me.

She was one of the first people outside of my family who really embraced me, who cemented my identity, who wasn’t concerned about my quantum or my having grown up elsewhere. She knew who my family was, and she had given my mother her name (at the time, my mother’s name meant “She who travels”) and confirmed that we were Turtle Clan. I sat with her and we talked and talked, and I spent time with her each time I came to Oneida, even carrying an umbrella for her during one of our Pow Wows to shield her from the sun. I was still dying my hair red, I was still learning how to undo the pressures and confusion of my upbringing away from our community, but she put me in that place of honor beside her as we walked the long circle of Grand Entry.

I told her about my life, played flute and sang for her, and then she is to dream for three days, and the spirits will bring her the name in dreams. She had all the names and their associated clans written out on little index cards by hand in her shaking script, and they’re all different, because the names don’t go back to the spirits until they are no longer being used. One day while I was visiting the box of index cards fell over and I spent the afternoon alphabetizing them. She wrote out my name in this same fashion, Yakotl’ʌ:notati, which means, “There is music as she goes along.” It felt like coming home.

I’ve gone along quite far now, from Texas to Oregon to Michigan to Norway, and I carry that music with me. My grandmother was an opera singer, and my mother was She who travels. So I carry them with me, too. And of the three clans, the Wolf clan are the path finders, or law makers, or those who guide us in living our lives as the Creator intended. The Bear clan are the keepers of the medicine. And the Turtle clan are the keepers of knowledge, the earth protectors and the storytellers. So this has become a part of my legacy, to do what I do, to create and learn and teach.

 

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

KA: I was only allowed to bring one book with me given everything else I had to pack on this latest trip to Norway. I brought Stephen Dunn’s newest, Lines of Defense. He’s just one of those poets I go back to when I need to feel some comfort.

 

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

KA:  :D Ahhhh!!

 

 

Kenzie Allen is a descendant of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin, and she is a of Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, The Iowa Review, Boston Review, Indiana Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere, and she is the managing editor of the Anthropoid collective. Kenzie was born in West Texas and currently lives in Norway.

Fox Frazier-Foley is author of two prize-winning poetry collections, Exodus in X Minor (Sundress Publications, 2014) and The Hydromantic Histories (Bright Hill Press, 2015), and editor of two anthologies, Political Punch: The Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) and Among Margins: An Anthology of Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet Editions, 2016). She is founding EIC of .

It is Easy to Say Yes to Something That Wants You

 

In Angela Veronica Wong’s 25 little red poems (Dancing Girl Press, 2013), sparse, thought-bubble-like poems without titles deliver us into a dark thematic forest of growth, desire, and destruction. The wolf—always a symbol of appetite and lone freedom, and sometimes of destruction—pads atop the pages, along with a bone–white moon, and winter branches. Wong is no Little Red Riding Hood, however, and at times, she is the predator, the danger, wanting to rip at her own flesh or someone else’s.

Wong writes destruction beautifully, even if it is against herself. The destruction, or need for it, blends with the desire and the pain. As in poem #3:

…I want someone to bite down and hold on bite down

and chew through to bite down until it breaks until you can

find me a violent surrender endo becoming exo somewhere a

mess of marrow and bone bits.”

Wong suggests that, to feel alive, we endure a tearing up. In turn, this will bring about our rebirth: the heal following the break. Wong’s speaker is comfortable in this role of being bitten; and yet it makes sense, later, when she is the one pursing potential prey.

In Wong’s universe, growth is mysterious and un-pretty, but necessary: filled with tears and blood. The physical body blends effortlessly with the forest body. I envisioned these connections while reading: seed/flower, root/weed, baby/mother. The physical and emotional attachments grow inside of us, literally:childbirth, but outside the body as well. We grasp to understand our place in wildness. Wong goes into the woods: uses roots, flowers, trees. They are gangly, strange and unkind. She touches on pregnancy a few times, the ultimate growing of a belly with child to depict stretching into the eternity of discomfort. In poem #9:

want is the color

of ripe tomatoes engorged

on the vine, glistening skin stretched

over plump body, pregnant juices pulling

downward.

The above passage describes the growing tomato—too plump for its own fortitude, robust and yearns to break from its vine. Wong also uses the color red gloriously through this collection: not only the engorged tomato (like a belly,) but a red tongue, blood, the red smudge on the cover of the chapbook could either be the back of retreating red cloak into the forest or a bloody fingerprint. The red is everywhere. Red, such a staid symbol of lust and anger ravages into its next state: desire. And with desire, comes gray areas, a swinging pendulum.

The reader starts to question if growth and desire are separate. Wong entwines these themes of growth and desire, sometimes braiding in images of destruction—as in poems 12 and 12a:

 

#12:

you

as the unknown

you as the tree trunk

I wrap my legs around

and climb.

 

 

#12a:

 

Let’s be truthful,

for once.

I have never

climbed

a tree,

never once latched

myself on a trunk

writing stories

onto my arms,

never balanced on a branch

casually testing it’s strength…”

 

Wong compares the tree trunk to the torso of a lover, exploring intimacy, testing boundaries, but also getting scratched by the rough bark. The growth of the literal tree is also the growth of the relationship. Wong’s simple language of the girl curling up in tree that protects her but also cuts her to the quick is so evocative of any fairy tale. It is natural and familiar (like the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog, how when the Frog transports the Scorpion across the river the Scorpion still stings the Frog, drowning them both, because, the Scorpion says, it is my nature.) The girl cuddles up to the tree that could forsake her—meanwhile, the wolf lurks in the forest, hunting.

Wong moves into the wolf parts in the middle poems, which begin to discard grammatical convention—some lack punctuation, others are without proper capitalization; these poems are little wildlings. However, through their gestures at discarding artifice, they start to present themselves as facts. Is becomes clear that the reader is Little Red and Wong is the wolf. She seduces us with her short crisp inviting lines, barely covers her sharp teeth so we come in. The wolf does not disappoint. The sparsity of poem #16 reveals we all bring predisposed fear to the wolf. We know what the wolf did, what the wolf does. It eats.

 

#16:

 

what is a wolf

without a past –

 

And that’s it! It is true— we are but the choices we have made thus far, the treaded paths, the people we spend time with, or the ones we have left on the ground. It is the spaces between the words of poem #17 that are frightening and beautiful at the same time:

 

 

my neck is daintier than I hoped his

 

hands wrap a

 

round twice

 

was      surprising   tasting

 

his

pond

hockey

 

salt                   and                  ice.

 

The reader begins the poem thinking hands are wrapping around the speaker’s neck and that she in danger, but instantly the next line reveals the speaker is doing the tasting—almost as though she has used her neck to draw him in.

By the second half of the collection, Wong’s speaker is the pursuer, escaping death. When her speaker pounces on a body, we can’t be certain whether her urge is sexual or murderous, but it doesn’t seem to matter: to this predatory consciousness, they may well be equivalent impulses. The speaker herself acknowledges to her prey that “our roles switched.” In poem #22 she writes:

“…like the gods I spring forth, rising out

from death to trick-or-treat again

or is this the true fuck:

me in you with no help

from animal, vegetable

or mineral, me

for once,

the one

swallowed…”

 

Wong rips into these poems with power, irrelevance that shakes the page. She brings us girls in cloaks, snow, fauna, bloody footprints. We do not know who we will meet or how we will get out. But there is no turning back.

 

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in the DC area. Recent chapbooks are out or forthcoming from Grey Book Press, Dancing Girl Press and Shirt Pocket Press. Her first full length collection is forthcoming from Lucky Bastard Press. Recent work can be seen at Jet Fuel Review, Pith, So to Speak, Entropy, Right Hand Pointing, and decomP. Visit: .

 

 

 

Because I Did Not Die

By Nicole Santalucia

ISBN: 978-1599540948

October 2015

Bordighera Press

Reviewed by Brian Fanelli

The Cannoli Machine at the Brooklyn Detention Center, the opening poem in Nicole Santalucia’s Because I Did Not Die, sets the themes—family, Italian American heritage, and addiction—that are a thread throughout the book. Santalucia’s latest work is bold in its subject matter, and shows a willingness to go into the cave and tackle past demons. The poems are unflinching in their handling of the personal, something fewer and fewer contemporary poets are doing in the decades following the height of the confessional movement that saw the ascension of Plath, Sexton, and Lowell.

Several of Santalucia’s poems deal with parents realizing that their children are addicts. The opening poem, for instance, finds the speaker’s dad in the Brooklyn Detention Center, trying to come to terms with the fact that his son is jailed. “This is the first time I saw my father afraid,” the speaker confesses. And yet, the only comfort he finds is the chance to stand in line at the cannoli machine with all of the other fathers. The Italian dessert, at least, is something familiar and comforting.

Throughout much of the book, the brother is a ghost, floating in and out of the family’s life, recalled through memories that the speaker has seen through glimpses. In the poem Golfing, for instance, the sport is used as a metaphor to refer to the brother. The speaker recounts running into the woods and imagining her brother’s ghost teeing off: “I never thought he’d be strong enough/to swing back at life.” The poem is also interesting because it shows the speaker adopting some masculine characteristics, perhaps learned from her brother and dad. The opening lines feature her swinging, grunting, and throwing the nine iron into the sand pit, traits usually associated with men. The slight gender-bending, which occurs in other poems, too, is one of the most fascinating aspects of the book.

The book also addresses a second or third generation Italian American’s attempts to better understand her heritage. Someday I Will Learn Italian recounts watching a grandparent learning over the stove, preparing pasta. There is a distancing between the grandparent and the children, and not only because of language barriers. Throughout the memory recounted in the first stanza, the children always face the grandparent’s back. After the poem digs into the speaker’s past, which includes stealing wine bottles at the grandparent’s funeral, the poem concludes by connecting the past with the present. The speaker sees aspects of the older generation in herself, including some typical Italian traits, such as talking with her hands.

Other poems shift between New York City and Binghamton, or Johnson City in upstate New York. The poems about those scrappy, often forgotten New York locations could be a snapshot of a lot of American rust belt towns, in that they capture the poverty and the sheer struggle to survive. The conclusion of the book’s final poem, Johnson City, reads:

There are blank toe tags and broken chairs

for sale on front lawns in this town.

This is Johnson City.

Old ladies sweep their porches

then the sidewalks

The K Mart has bedbugs

the people don’t know why they have syphilis

They wait for five o’clock in this town

they stand in traffic and wait for a miracle

Yet, this book has plenty of optimism, including stories of the speaker and her family surviving. Other poems celebrate gay marriage and the speaker’s relationship to her wife. Indeed, there are plenty of miracles in Because I Did Not Die, and Santalucia’s willingness to spill her guts should be commended.

__________________________________________________________________

Brian Fanelli is the author of the chapbook Front Man (Big Table Publishing) and the full-length collection All That Remains (Unbound Content). His third book of poems, Waiting for the Dead to Speak, is forthcoming from NYQ Books. His poetry, essays, and book reviews have been published by The Los Angeles Times, World Literature Today, The Paterson Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Blue Collar Review, and other publications. He has an M.F.A. from Wilkes University and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University. He teaches at Lackawanna College.

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Jessy Randall‘s poems, poetry comics, and other things have appeared in Boog City, McSweeney’s, Rattle, and West Wind. She is a librarian at Colorado College and her website is http://personalwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~jrandall/