Category: Reviews & Interviews

Rachel B. Glaser is a rule breaker, which is a terrible way to start off talking about this, Pee on Water; bland as more haughty platitudes, but, whatever: when I was reading this book, the most promising short fiction I’ve encountered in near forever — I was, like, What am I going to write on the Internet about this rakish, precious creature; or Where am I going to put, in my understanding, the way this thing makes everything feel, in this room, on this bed, holding these stories, in the world. Two possibilities, in the matter of even figuring out how to open my mouth about it, occurred eventually. One mentions the technical mutant-ness (product of an implicit, albeit devious, acumen) of the book upfront or one’s smitten foremost with the charm, wit, emotional derring-do, hilarious truth, and clever bruises in the thematic treatment of woolliest angles of this human [...]

A tenth grade student of mine recently commented that he felt anaphora to be a crutch weaker writers use. He didn’t see the point of repeating a word or phrase over and over again, especially if he didn’t agree with that word overall. I couldn’t really agree with him out loud since the entire lesson was built around anaphora, but I didn’t exactly disagree either. Like most poetic devices, anaphora’s strength lies in how its use draws something out of the writer that she might not have otherwise have drawn. In that way I can see how something like anaphora can be seen as a crutch, a way to trick one’s self into writing because they have nothing to write about. Of course, to a young writer like this student, with so much to say about his world, the idea that someone might need to be self-coaxed into introspection might [...]

“Whatever it was I had to say,” Charles Wright writes on the first page of Littlefoot (FSG 2007), “I’ve said it.” Two years later, in 2009, Sestets, his most recent book, came out. “Instead of going over poems today,” Charles said one day a few years ago as our small, always-awestruck-in-the-presence-of-Charles-Wright class gathered around a seminar table at the University of Virginia, “I’m gonna read you some John Cage.” He then began to read John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing.” “I am here,” he said, “and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment. What we re-quire is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.” Thank god he does. If he had nothing to say at the beginning of Littlefoot, a beautiful book-length poem, then he certainly had much more nothing to say in [...]

Add to the list of great American poets that nobody is talking about. He has been writing quietly for over four decades and gained prominence among the Language school poets. is another masterful accomplishment that further explores his unique form. Since the 1980s, he has been composing copious amounts of syntactically-innovative poetry. It might appear, at first, that nothing has changed since his acclaimed works of the 80s, like At Egypt and , and his current work. The Coolidge poem is easily recognized: at least several pages long, written in medium-length lines, lacking a subject, narrative cohesion and distinct imagistic content, and, most of all, containing a disjointed, fluid syntax that ignores grammatical norms. Like any Language poet, most readers will, at least at first, find Coolidge’s work to be a garbled mess and devoid of lyricism. Most Language poets, like and , deliberately abandon traditional grammatical norms and generic [...]

Yahia Lababidi remembers late nights in his dorm room at George Washington University, tossing in bed as the voices of Wilde, Rilke and Kafka reverberated around him. Words or phrases, even the tiniest snippets of philosophy, would teem, pulse and swirl to a boiling point, until he could no longer resist formulating his own response, entering the conversation. “They were literally bouncing off the walls,” he told me, “I would go to bed with a stack of napkins or receipts, and I would never put my glasses on because if I put my glasses on it would scare the thought away. The fox would not leave its hole if the hunter was outside.” But he persisted, and his haphazard notes, over time, became numerous and provocative enough that multiple professors and mentors encouraged him to compile and try to publish them. The result was Signposts to Elsewhere, published in 2008, [...]

~ The way I see it, history as a subject reads best when it is both documented and re-imagined (In Cold Blood, Ragtime, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men come immediately to mind); when a literary revelation emerges as a result of source material from the scene and from the bigger world get all mixed up. Artistic freedom applied to the narrative of seeing the world gives historical events a kind of literary sense beyond the mere recording of something that happened in time. By nature, history is haphazard and at its core, personal. And I can’t think of any American poet who knows that fact as deeply and successfully as C.D. Wright who has, in a number of books, combined poetry with other kinds of writing to make a history about prisoners in Louisiana (One Big Self: An Investigation a collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster), or America’s relationship with [...]

At a recent Poet’s House reading, Demosthenes Agrafiotis had some harsh things to say about haiku written in English. They fail not only because English can’t possibly pack as much information into a syllable as Japanese does, but the form itself is tied to a cultural imperative, a way of thought that one learns for so long that to even ponder how it works unravels the meaning. That said, is the closest thing in English, spiritually, to haiku that I can possibly think of. Sure, the poems are pithy and zazen, which is an easy link to the Japanese form. But these often tiny poems are ponderously gargantuan. Brian is a modern western ronin, wandering the new nature of urban living (as urbanized development has taken the majority of the Earth’s surface, it might as well be the modern rendering of nature) and living the poet’s path, sharpening his pen [...]

We’ve all justified seeing a particular movie or following a TV show by saying “It’s terrible, but it’s just entertainment/pop/etc.”–I know I have. There’s that niggling feeling that we should not have enjoyed that film/show as much as we did. But this justification is an easy-out, something that is surprisingly accepted among even the most erudite and critically astute circles. Indeed, it seems acceptable even in modern critical discourse about film. For Armond White, this is an indefensible critical blasphemy. And as difficult as the line is to hold (and exhausting, to be honest), I find I must agree with him. I’ll get into that in a few paragraphs, but first I want to look at –which I hope to will serve as the foundation for a general exploration of White’s idea of criticism and argument for why I think White is an important critic. While reading through Keep Moving, [...]

Last time, we saw that in his critical introduction to , Gene Tanta wants us to approach his poetry both as immigrant poetry (which means a couple of things) and for its aesthetic value. I postulated that he accomplishes a dialectic between “local” and “universal” through strategies that extend and enrich Deep Image and surrealist poetics. Let’s see how this happens. First, look at how these thirteen-line “ghost-sonnets,” as he calls them, are built: The cavalry is always peering down into the ravine whenever you’re not looking. Someone is burping. Someone is shirt-shinning the author’s coffin. Someone’s nose or finger or toe is playing in the underwater roots downstream. Under the lean and starry sky the fortune-teller took your money, saying: You seem far away, like a cuckoo clock on a sunken ship. If it consoles you, you’ll die on an odd breath or an even breath. Architecturally, this poem [...]

Almost every poem in Matthew Zapruder’s third book, Come On All You Ghosts (a statement that is both joke and plea) starts with the word today or implies it with a declaration involving an observation almost generic in sound and meaning: “Today a ladybug flew through the window. I was reading” “Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway….” “I woke this morning to the sound of a little voice” “Sometime around 11 p.m. the you I was thinking of” “Today I read about the factory” “This morning I rode my gray metal bike” “Today I have the feeling that no matter” “Today I am going to pick you up at the beige airport” Of course, that recurring intention of today gets predictable after a while, but Zapruder uses it to compose poems that sound like what the love child of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara [...]

Gene Tanta begins his first book of poems, Unusual Woods, with a 20-page essay that takes shots at T.S. Eliot, Harold Bloom and others. Why does he do this and what is he trying to say? Surrealism and one of its American progeny, , have never been fully accepted. Their stock has taken a dip in the last few decades. But they are still with us, and they shape our contemporary poetry scene arguably as much as any of the other big guns of modern poetry: Whitman, Imagism, Symbolism. What Gene Tanta has done in Unusual Woods is take the project of Deep Image poetry, which is to recuperate and shape myths from the images buried in our collective unconscious, and make it local rather than universal. In particular, he is assembling images from various fragments of his Romanian immigrant “area” of the collective unconscious. (The is of course a [...]

In , Mathews lets the loose cohesion of his poems suggest profundities that seem unlikely coming from often mundane subjects. His poems are cohesive because of formal structure and theme, but it is a deliberately incoherent kind of cohesion. The effect is delicate and oblique, and it is growing on me. Mathews likes wandering off the topic (or, really, having no real topic, no subject of discourse), a familiar strategy of and other New York : For me the identification of trees has always been a puzzle, one not really made easier by consulting the tree book inside my house, where no trees are. I can certainly remember the caramel color of beech leaves in fall, the cropped silhouettes of plan trees along the highway . . . the purpled boughs of Judas trees where no swallow ever perches. But do swallows ever perch? It seems that every swallow I’ve [...]

new book of poetry, , is a metaphysical meditation on identity through time and the search for the real amidst ghosts, memories, and illusory images. As in the artful illusions of theatre and movies, to which Klein alludes frequently, lighting can change everything in these poems—here people darken or there is an overwhelming bomb-blast of sunlight. Love and loss seem to be the fundamental elements from which these poems originate. Klein leaves little, if anything, out of his depictions of the essential facets of a certain kind of writer’s life, the trials of a childhood filled with shame and pain, its fair share of neglect, and the realization, even if only for one ghastly instant, that your parents wished you were different from what you are. There is endless questioning of reality and identity; there is the friend with whom you committed the requisite mistake of sex; there is more [...]

Brooks Lampe reviews Andrew Joron’s What a desperate trance!—The skyboat resembles a flying vulva; the city, the arc of an abandoned soliloquy. Andrew Joron represents a small, almost indistinguishable enclave of contemporary poets who know (and appreciate that) they have been influenced by surrealism. Versus the rest of the contemporary poets who do not know they have. Surrealism has been a controversial topic in recent decades, and there have been few poets or scholars willing (or courageous enough?) to acknowledge their indebtedness to the movement. (But not Thank God.) The biggest problem, supposedly, is one of identification and definition. Suffice it to say, in broad strokes, surrealist poetry demonstrates: Radically disjunctive imagery (usually through mismatching terms from unrelated semantic fields) An analogical vision of reality, wherein irreconcilable things are conceived in relations and thus are (potentially) made reconcilable Undertones of Hegelian dialectic, Marxism, revolution and utopianism At its heart, surrealism [...]

Writers in the scattered nation of good poetry are, in general, perfectionists. Many greats have been known to be tight-lipped about their process and to publish only what they deem categorically best. , on the other hand, doesn’t seem worried about perfection. He publishes so prodigiously that it’s hard to imagine he spends any time revising his work. I remember standing in a bookstore a couple years ago grazing among the poetry publications and discovering that he had poems in approximately half of the literary journals—good ones, too. I remember feeling a mixture of jealously, skepticism of various stripes, and stunned admiration for Hicok’s unique voice. I’ve read a fair amount of Hicok’s poetry since then—and had many opportunities, as he remains a prolific poet. The unfair comparison that occurs to me is . But Hicok is anything but the James Patterson of contemporary poetry (if you feel like posting [...]