Poetry Round-Up!

I meant to review a lot of the books I read this summer that I never really got around to.  For whatever reason this is weighing heavily on my conscience. In order to move on with my life and purge these books from me, here’s a little ole poetry round-up (i.e. shorter, half-assed reviews) to satisfy both of those needs.

Spell by Dan Beachy-Quick

Despite what Ted Burke thinks, I’m of the opinion that poetry about poetry can be some of the best, and the most ambitious. Dan Beachy-Quick’s Spell is ambitious indeed – a veritable carnivale of narrative experimentation and meditations on the nature of the written word, strung through by intertwining images and ideas, all bound together by a poetic rendering of the classic Moby Dick (Here I’m afraid I must admit that I’ve never actually read Moby Dick – no high school English class tyrant ever forced it into my head & I’ve never been much of a fanatic for the classics on my own. So admittedly I’m at a loss for how Spell plays on the original. I will say, however, that it made me want to go read Moby Dick).
The various kinds of form Beachy-Quick employs range from sprawling, disparate free verse to lists filled with definitions, tight couplets to strange exchanges. The overarching organizational structure is complex: six chapters divided into smaller sections which may represent the voice of a character, a particular topic (“The Head of the Whale (An Epistemology, a Psychology, an Economy, a Flame, Tooth, Bone, a Theology of the Blind, a Murder, a Deaf Ear)” is one of my favorites), or Moby Dick, Moby Dick, Moby Dick. My favorite part of this structure is the gradual revelation of the poem Ishmael intends to tattoo in his back – at the end of each chapter the next stanza appears, blanking out the ones that came before and after; a true threading-through. Another important chapter is one entitled “The Anvil, a (The Author of this Poem, a Character No Longer, Drops His Guise and Responds to His Editor’s Question:
Why?)”. “Why?” was the question that I had at the beginning of this book as well. Although this chapter doesn’t quite answer that question, it gets personal here. The narrator – proclaimed analagous to the author in the chapter’s subtitle – addressing each poem to the “Editor,” venting his obsession the whale, hang-ups on writing and the growing, icy divide between him and his wife. These poems to the editor are where Beachy-Quick is at his best; consolidating form and emotional content, moving from abstraction to individual.
Lyrical, filled with images of contrast (black ink on a white page, white whale in an inky sea etc.) and the negotiation of self, Spell is beautiful if sometimes too obsessive. I have to admit, though, my skepticism when I began that came out pleasantly surprised.

Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel

Frederick Seidel is a dirty old man. The only thing that outweighs the pervasiveness of strange perverted imagery (“China the vagina,” one of my favorites) is the constant, looming presence of death in every poem. They contain neck-snapping transitions between folly and dead (really, really dead) seriousness. They mix brick-faced statements, social/political commentary and allusions, factually-stated anecdotes of everyday life and friends’ obituaries, all pervaded by a morbid sense of fatalism. Much like the world’s current state of affairs, everything is so fucked up it’s funny. Here is a pretty good example of what I mean, from “Drinking in the Daytime”:

Anything is better than this
Bliss.
Nursing on a long-stemmed bubble made of crystal.
I’m sucking on the barrel of a crystal pistol
To get a bullet to my brain.
I’m gobbling a breast, drinking myself down the drain.

I’m in such a state of Haut-Brion I can’t resist.
A fist-fucking anus swallowing a fist.
You’re wondering why I talk this way, so daintily!
I’ll tell you after I take a pee.
Now I’m back.
Oilcoholics love the breast they attack.

I’m talking about the way poetry made me free.
It’s treated me very well, you see.
I climbed up inside the Statue of Liberty
In the days when you could still go up in the torch, and that was me.
I mean every part I play.
I’m drinking my lunch at Montrachet.

The rhyme thing almost scared me away at first. He does it a bunch. But I think the sing-songy feeling of it adds to the absurdity and stark contrast between the silly and the deadly. Nothing is sacred here – Seidel begins the book with “Kill Poem,” where the heads of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. are mounted on the walls as trophies. His sense of humor is fucked, his sexual appetite is fucked, his political opinions are fucked. So what does all this amount to? I think it comes to a brutal sense of the futility of everything. Not only that, I think this book accomplishes what so-called “Terror Art” sets out to accomplish but never does.

The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

This might be one of the most amazing books I have ever read. Anyone who cares about language NEEDS to read it. Immediately. This is the epitome of what language is supposed to do. I closed the last page and looked out the window of the train I was on to a world suddenly more beautiful for its cruelty and brevity.

The cover advertises itself as “A Novel in Verse” which is probably the most accurate way it can be described. The form is mostly prosaic but the language is undoubtedly poetic. The book is based on a Greek myth in which Herakles comes to a red place and kills Geryon – the many-armed, red-winged monster – and his cattle and little dog. What’s the most “postmodern” thing possible you could do with these two characters? Make them contemporary gay lovers, obviously! To be honest, I don’t know how she pulls it off so successfully – a huge part of it is due to the language she uses. I want to include quotes but the book is in Kate’s car so I will add in some quotes later.

Spar by Karen Volkman

Pretty & well-written but boring.

Hagiography by Jen Currin

Hagiography reads like a collection of fairy tales. As dark as the Brothers Grimm and by far more image than narrative, the fragments of Hagiography carry us through pungent neighborhoods filled with things to taste and everything becomes personified. Everything is a character, everything has a part of the action. Here’s one I really liked called “Constellations, Creatures With Two Legs:

Bluish in the whiskered face of dawn,
I lift my cloak to the sky -
face after farce – April’s marriage
to August. My love who was
the size of a thumb. Bottled
and given to idle phrase-making.
A phantom in a noisy place
before her army slowed its place.

Now a mermaid tattoo, a blue monkey, a bird
frightened by change,
seeing a black squirrel
in the car’s shadow. Dogs on film
and no one wants to hold her hand
in exile.

Inscrutably involved, your hands are basil.
You fall into a fugue that could be a garden.
Once upon a forest I cut myself
and claimed I was the knife.
My love who knew the taste of mountains.
Red clover tea. Kiss on the knee.

Sickness was the star sitting too close
on the divan. Vanity sipping the baffled waters.
The dead and living waters
we pour over our heads. Our shoulders
brush. Our spirits will not
marry us.

You can see lots of things are happening but they’re happening more in the way that you think of things happening rather than the way they actually do. It is more the memory-recollecting than story-telling. Currin has a lot of recurring images as well, colors come up and signify particulars – blue, for one, is the color of death’s boat. Salt, leaves, blood, spices, fish, ghosts, water, family members, astrology & fortune-telling all drop into the poems repeatedly like debutantes to a party. They become something for the read to latch onto and look for, acquiring the aura of holy objects as the book progresses.

One other thing that really interested me was the gender ambiguity throughout Hagiography. One poem addresses “My dear husband/wife,” in another X and Y (chromosomes being inferred) act as characters. A definite parallel can be drawn between the ambiguity of gender identity and that of self-identity, which I really enjoyed.

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