April 2011 – Page 4 – Via Negativa

April 15, 2011 by Dave Bonta

The Doors of the Body by Mary Alexandra Agner

These poems hit the spot. Yes, they’re very well done, but that’s not the whole story: somehow, too, they caught me in just the right mood this evening, after a day spent slowly walking and driving the back roads of Central Pennsylvania looking at early wildflowers, each with a mythology as rich as the classic tales Agner retells here: hepatica instead of Minerva, spring beauties instead of Sleeping Beauty, bloodroot instead of Queen Tomyris, each with a miniature armory and a brave sail. I’m not always a big fan of midrash on classic myths, but I liked where these poems took me. Here are Penelope and Telemachus, yes, but also Irene Adler goading Holmes into a debate on sexual equality; an elderly Gretel who more than anything craves another taste of candy made from children’s flesh; a Circe who spills the beans on the soldiers she turned not into swine but into female lovers; and a woman in Salem on her way, it seems, to becoming the corn goddess:

My body is maize, bled far in the future,
now ankles aflame with runner bean scratches,
my toes dug in dirt, as I drop down the seed,
wrinkled white kernels. On the horizons, the drought
of adulthood, the sweet singing voice from inside the pyre.
(“Corn Field, Salem”)

As far afield as she ranges in these 22 poems, though, and regardless of whether she writes in the first or third person, Agner maintains a consistent tone — vatic, or perhaps sibylline, with a mixture of indignation and bemusement — and avoids the usual pitfall of such collections: she doesn’t try to make all of world folklore serve some grand new myth. Because you know, reenchantment only goes so far. Some tales could stand a little disenchantment, and Agner seems happy to oblige. Penelope, for example, isn’t exactly overjoyed at the return of her trickster husband:

Gone two decades, almost ghost
in my memory, I recognize right
away the hitch in your voice, inhaling
for time to find the perfect
lie. You’re home for good.
(“Yarns”)

Sleeping Beauty manages to escape her enchantment almost immediately:

Let the spurned witch-sister
and the so-called fairy godmothers
duke out what history is writ.
Poor planning lets fates devour
the happy story here-and-now.
Destiny wants purity and light
and most of all submission, so
the scullery maid fisted me to ecstasy.
The curse broke like the chiming of a clock.
(“Sleeping Beauty”)

A closer examination of delicate-seeming wildflowers reveals an earthier and more interesting reality of steamy sex and caustic chemicals, as I’ve had occasion to explore at some length in my own work. It makes sense to me that a close reading of traditional and sacred tales would turn up similar secrets. The world of dreams has its own self-consistent reality, and like the world of science, it’s a little beyond what our minds can easily encompass. And of course the sexist warp of most societies creates an acute need for re-dreaming. Agner includes an homage to all the anonymous female songwriters, poets, and storytellers, “Old Enough”:

Tying sayings up like string, rhymes of advice still practical,
sense so common, on all lips, attributed to no one maker and every maker.

A horse and a reed whistle and a vast continent are not disaster.
Eighteen verses of silk and loneliness outlast their maker.

Always so many more unnamed, unmarked and in their absence, perhaps unmade.
Anonymous, prime your pens and prick your needles. Name yourselves makers.

—Which reminds me of the translation we published today at qarrtsiluni: the only poem to survive, in a dead language, from an otherwise unknown, 12th-century female troubadour, Azalais de Porcairagues. Just one poem, plus a fanciful sketch in an illuminated manuscript! To anyone who loves the written world, it’s maddening to think of all the Mary Alexandra Agners of millennia past who didn’t even have that much to survive them. No wonder this slender volume with the glossy, perfect-bound cover seems so large and full.

I’m reading a book a day for Poetry Month, but I’m also hoping some folks will join me and fellow poet-blogger Kristin Berkey-Abbott to read just four of those books. Details here.

April 15, 2011November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to Love

This entry is part 27 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Dear fellow wanderer, familiar now as my twin,
more handsome than my shadow: all these years
we’ve stopped at the same wayside inn to share
quick meals, a cup of coffee, talk about our days
and where we’ve been— And yet we never linger
longer than an hour, perhaps two, before the claims
of the world descend again. But now I don’t know
which is more magnetic: that tilt of sky, the road,
plain countryside rampant with scent, tall grass
where the wind could lift our names higher.
Memory or dream, was that your kiss under my
eyelid’s flicker? I miss you even before you’ve taken
leave. This morning is full of the cries of woodpeckers—
part ululation, part rusty hinge. Your heart goes
with them, or forages among the stones with sparrows,
trusting in what it finds. You never say So long
or Au revoir, only Next time will be sweeter.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

April 14, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Rumble Strip by Howie Good

At the dentist’s office (“Summer is/ near enough/ to smell,// its teeth marks on the trees”), I reach into my pocket, find the pocket-sized book of poems I stowed there this morning, and realize with a start that it’s the official day for poetry in pockets. Serendipitous, or just creepy? (“Love bends/ like light// around/ found objects…”) I think that’s “Graceland” on the radio, but I don’t recognize the singer. (“The human cries/ of wounded horses.”) It’s been 11 years since my last visit, so they make me fill out a form detailing my medical history; I don’t have any. I’m tempted to select two or three of the chronic conditions just to make it look like I’ve read the form. (“Anything to restore mystery/ and unexplain the universe.”) But which ones to pick? They all look so attractive! (“Start from the premise that everything is broken.”) I’ve been coming here since I was a kid, and there was another dentist with the very same name, though they aren’t related. (“To polish a diamond,/ there is nothing like its own dust.”) There’s still the same beach scene on the wall and the same seagull mobile in front of it, both looking frayed and faded. (“The broken wave// repairs itself./ Life is contagious.”) Back home, I pour salt in my water and call it soup. (“Darkness// one drop/ in each eye// twice a day”) I sit out on the porch with the pocket-sized book, a little creased now from walking into town and back. (“The paper trembled.”) I remember the nest of stainless steel spoons beside the road — those damn kids and their wild tea parties! (“Oh, love,/ we’re beautiful// anarchy,/ birds nesting// in the holes/ made by grenades.”) As I pick my way slowly through the poems again, I listen to water rushing in the ditches, and grow certain that its cacophony of notes includes every word. (“The world is made/ of tiny struggling things.”)

Over at Moving Poems, I’m running a videopoetry contest using one of the poems from the book — which you can win a copy of if Howie selects your video as one of the top three. We’ve just extended the deadline for submissions to April 22. See the guidelines to read the poem (“Fable”).

April 14, 2011November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Salutation

This entry is part 26 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

My heart bows to the field streaked
by the sun’s rare currency this morning

to the worries that call my name
over and over like I am their favorite child

to the ridiculous kindness
of the wild turkeys’ chatter

to you who’ve called
me stranger, friend, lover

to you who’ve sung me to sleep
and kissed me in doorways

to you who’ve made space
for me on this window-ledge of words—

And you on the edge of the field, I bow to you
all in shadow, your patience outlasting us all

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

April 13, 2011September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Jeremiah, Ohio by Adam Sol

It’s not often you find a book of poems that’s both extremely well crafted and also a page turner. I just finished Teju Cole’s Open City last night, and figured that would be my novel for the year — not realizing the extent to which this book, too, is truly a novel, albeit in verse. And like Open City, while it may not be about 9/11 directly, it was certainly written in its shadow. Here’s how the author describes it in a Q&A on the publisher’s website:

Jeremiah, Ohio is set in the contemporary U.S. Jeremiah is a half-cracked would-be prophet who has been preaching at people in rest stops and diners in rural Ohio. By chance he meets Bruce, a twenty-something guy who has lost his way, and who half-jokingly decides to travel with Jeremiah, hoping he might gain some direction. They gradually work their way northeast, until Jeremiah decides to head to the “center of iniquity”—New York City. There’s some of Don Quixote, some of On the Road, and a lot of the biblical Jeremiah running through the book. […]

There is a story, as in a novel, with characters, settings, and even the occasional plot twist. Instead of chapters, there are poems, which makes the story a bit more impressionistic and musical. Bruce does most of the storytelling, and while his poems have some fairly strict poetic forms undergirding them, his language is accessible and familiar. Around Bruce’s narration are poems in Jeremiah’s voice, which is much more lyrical, dynamic, and unique. Jeremiah can’t narrate himself across a room, but he can tell you a lot about how it feels to be in it.

It succeeds magnificently: I was spell-bound by the second or third page and read it through in one sitting. And I’ll be reading it again. Why? Because, first of all, I am a Bible nerd and a huge fan of Old Testament language. Also, as an environmentalist, critic of American consumerist culture, believer in Peak Oil theory, etc., I resonate strongly with the “half-cracked would-be prophet’s” American version of Jeremiah’s furious denunciations. An over-educated social misfit like Bruce, I can definitely see myself enabling someone like Jeremiah under the right circumstances. As Bruce says in “Modus Operandi,”

I interpreted
Jeremiah’s rants
as half-politics, half-religion,

but what compelled me
was their warped music,
something necessary and unique.

And Jeremiah’s central complaint seems sane enough:

Have we not earned our mistreatment?
Have we not shimmied and chastised and bowled?
Have there not been city council meetings and testimony
that all should have attended
but instead we were found lolling in lounge chairs
or shopping for socks?

Engage, o my people! Be onerous and phrenetic!
Be vicious with your systems!

Who knows but that your world will shake
with the slip of an axle,
and your well-rehearsed unfeeling gloom
suddenly burst claws of fire?
(“Jeremiah at the All Saints Cathedral, Youngstown”)

Naturally, I paid especially close attention to the poems set in Pennsylvania. It’s at the Ponderosa Steakhouse in State College that Jeremiah reveals what set him off in the first place — the personal tragedy that opened him to a larger narrative of loss and desecration. Then on the Greyhound traveling east, the bleak landscape inspires him again to prophecy:

The hills are tired of wearing mud
the color of an old sock.
Yea, the wind
whistles warnings through the cracked windshield,

and we are pilgrims through a ravaged land.
Our eyes will find no comfort here.
Buried are the bones
of those who broke the first trails
from the Alleghenies, and forgotten their sons
who build shelters of pine bark. Indeed we must be
the last of the righteous.
It is for our sake the world still spins.
(“Jeremiah, PA”)

In a Scranton diner, Jeremiah apostrophizes a waitress:

Grace still struggles on this earth,
in her gray apron.
Woman of vigor!
Woman of lonely hills! Cracked
cuticles and a slipped disk will not be the sum
of your inheritance!
(“Psalm of Scranton”)

To anyone who knows the Bible, this equation of woman with suffering landscape should sound very familiar indeed. Though the mingling of King Jamesian language and modern speech may strike some ears as bathos, to me, Jeremiah’s rants were a pitch-perfect, jazz-inflected montage of vernacular speech with a kind of language which, after all, is never farther away than a few turns of the AM radio dial anywhere in America. I thought Sol really honored the spirit of the ancient nevi’im by updating them in this manner. He may have found inspiration in Cervantes, but Don Quixote is much more of a comic figure than Sol’s Jeremiah. I found the book humorous and moving in roughly equal measure.

Stylistically, the work is a tour de force, with poems in forms as various as acrostic, villanelle, prose-poem, Anglo-Saxon-style alliterative verse, and blues. I’ve enjoyed a number of other book-length narrative poems over the years, but I can’t remember the last time I read one so virtuosic — or so damn hard to put down.

I’m reading a book a day for Poetry Month, but I’m also hoping some folks will join me and fellow poet-blogger Kristin Berkey-Abbott to read just four of those books. Details here.

April 13, 2011November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to Leaving or Staying

This entry is part 25 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Dear heart, the rain dresses all
in changeling colors: leaves that molt—
part celadon, part yellow— then turn pewter
where they drift on water and water reflects them
back as shimmer. New leaves, parchment-thin:
they’ve shaken off their flimsy tethers; and it’s not
even the season for leaving. Everything is just
beginning. Or beginning again. Every day,
the air thickens with shadow, with shape, with
odor. My hands bear the smells of mint, the stains
of verbena. The skin on my back remembers
when last it was touched. Sometimes I teach it
to grow colder. Sometimes even the smallest
flush of color reverses, like a wayward fever.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

April 12, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Trill & Mordent by Luisa A. Igloria

This is the second of four books that Kristin Berkey-Abbott and I are encouraging others to also read and blog about this month. If you do so anytime before the end of the month, please send me the link and I’ll update this post to include it, right up here at the top:

[4/14] Kristin Berkey-Abbot: “The Hungers that Crochet Us Together”

[4/14] mole: “Braid”

[4/17] Velveteen Rabbi: “Luisa Igloria’s ‘Trill and Mordent'”

[4/20] mole: “Seasons (More on Trill & Mordent)”

Fresh from a dream of trees bent by the wind, I open Luisa’s next-to-most-recent book and read the opening lines about trees bent by the wind. This is surprising but not astonishing: many and varied are the images in any given dream and in any given poem by Luisa A. Igloria, so the chance of overlap isn’t as slim as it might initially seem.

A pair of trees on one side of the walk, leaning
now into the wind in a stance we’d call involuntary—
I can see them from the kitchen window, as I take meat
out of the oven and hold my palms above the crust, darkened
with burnt sugar. Nailed with cloves, small earth of flesh
still smoldering from its furnace. In truth I want to take it
into the garden and bury it in soil.
(“Regarding History”)

The day is dank and cold and I am forced to read inside, holding the book to the window to save on electricity. When it starts to rain, it’s as if the outside air is trying to answer the shimmer of text on page. I read some of the poems standing up to improve my concentration, but however I read them, these are not poems to give up all their meanings on the first or second read.

Someone walks with you a little
each day, and you feel that you begin
to know a little more—the way she holds
her head, the way he asks a question. You walk
a little more and listen, nothing more—until
the language of question and answer begins to sound
familiar as the plink of water, begins to resemble
the space cleared as a lamp is lit in a room, into which
the shy guest, crossing the threshold, can enter.
(“The Right to Capture”)

It’s odd: when I finished Space, in Chains by Laura Kasischke last week, I felt as if it had been two or three times too long. I loved the poems, but felt they were just too intense, too concentrated for a collection of that length. With Igloria’s work, by contrast, I just want to keep reading.

In a book I’m re-reading tonight, a poet questions
any plenitude that seems to come too soon,
or easily.
(“Manifestations”)

Even now, I am having trouble writing this because I keep stopping to read the book again. This isn’t because we’re friends and I publish her poems here; I felt this way long before we were even Facebook friends. There’s a richness of allusions and points of reference, an almost Borgesian love of all manner of arcana (as signaled by the very title of the book), which may in part be due to where Luisa grew up, the Philippines being such a crossroads.

At the beginning of the new
year, I slid open all the drawers
in my house and found a nostalgia
which was the color and odor of a different
season in another country—
preserved skeletons of flowers,
brittle as dry wings; sheets of hand-
writing, ambiguous as the sea.
(“Tree of Prophecy”)

Then too she is constantly varying the style, much as she does here at Via Negativa, following heavy with light, speculative with narrative, prose poem with airy three-line stanzas. I think of other favorite poets such as Jim Harrison and James Wright, and how much fun it can be to lose myself in volumes of their collected works — especially while traveling. How much longer do we have to wait for the Collected Poems of Luisa A. Igloria, vol. I?

In a hotel with cobalt paint and yellow trim, one room had only books and windows, and no clocks by which to tell the time. One room was a well within a shaded garden. Another had only silence for furniture. One room once held a prisoner of war—its walls covered with messages he scratched on stone with his bare hands before he escaped into the sunlight, disguised as a bird.
(“A String of Days”)

The rain drums its corrido on the four roofs of my house — a marimba with four bars. I brew a little more coffee to chase the sleep from my eyes, though drinking coffee any time after supper isn’t something I want to make a habit of. These are poems well worth burning the midnight oil to re-read.

You could lift the hem of rain and enter its grotto. Habit is what blurs gesture into allotment and enclosure. Fold it between times with a monk’s cord of silence, just a slick of candle fat. That way the next becomes sacrament.
(“Parsing”)

April 12, 2011November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Villanelle of the Red Maple

This entry is part 24 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Like a question surfacing in the mind of winter,
at last the red maple blossoms are open.
Rich red anthers, puffs of orange pollen—

they are why the white-throated sparrow sings
without stopping in the rain. How does such love happen
like a question surfacing in the mind of winter?

I trail my hand in shallow water, and dredge up
questions no one can answer. I have no weapon
against the richness of red, the puffs of orange pollen.

The lover asks, What need for questions,
when the soul has met its answer? Fire might dampen,
doubt flicker in the mind’s unfinished winter.

The bird sings its pure white carol in the leaves,
singing, singing— as if the heart knew no other burden,
only the richness of red, the tenderness of orange pollen.

I let it sing, I let you come to me as you have all these years.
I had been tired, I had been lonely. I wanted to open
like a question meeting its answer at the end of winter:
heart rich with red, its joys stippled like puffs of orange pollen.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

April 12, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Trojan Horse

What is this gift whose innocent acceptance precipitates the horror that we know is coming: our transformation after dark into mindless flesh-eaters? It doesn’t seem to matter. We cling to each other, the tattooed woman and I, instant lovers — until the knock comes from the top of the stairs and the searchlight finds us and we are history, one with the zombie masses swarming the gates. I turn in my sleep, not quite surfacing. Now we are in the Channel Islands, and there is a possibility of escape. Our helicopter looks for a place to land, fighting the wind, which is so strong all the trees grow parallel to the ground. In this conference room, we will be safe. Colonel Gaddafi and President Obama are here with their entourages, each making a great show of being relaxed and in control, preparing for a chess match that will end the war.

April 11, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Thirty-for-Sixty by Al Pittman

This is going to sound bad, but my favorite thing about this book is the way I can unfold the flaps on the sturdy paper covers, tuck them into each other, and stand the book spine-up in the shape of an A-frame. That’s the kind of sturdiness I expect from a book published in Newfoundland, as part of a Newfoundland Poetry Series, the last volume of a major Newfoundland poet and playwright published before his death by the press he helped found in Newfoundland. My faith was soon tested by the book’s contents, though, which I found to be riddled with typos, making it seem rather ramshackle by the time I got through.

The poems are narrative, autobiographical, and apparently designed for an audience that laughs easily, which is of course an admirable trait in audiences. A poem called “Gnomes” describes the blossoms of an unnamed tree at night:

They have red or purple
hair and green beards. And terribly
twisted faces. They have no bodies.
They are grotesque, gargoyled heads
hanging and swinging in the mild, wild
south-west summer wind.

As much as I like things floral and full
of leaves, I’d not go near those blossoms
without a weapon to combat their threats
now or any night like this.

Whoever strolls, staggers, or stumbles by
will be devoured before they know they
are gone or what it was that ended them.

And so on. This is the kind of poetry that gives the lie to the prevalent notion that Billy Collins’ work is unsophisticated.

For all its simplicity and grating slyness, though, the book did have images that appealed to me. For example, in the otherwise unremarkable “Wanderlust,” I liked:

Coming away from love is a difficult
descent from the summit of yourself
back to base camp and the basics
that await you there.

I liked the whole of “A River Runs Through Her,” in which the protagonist spies on his 83-year-old mother out fishing on a boat as darkness comes on. It ends:

Though she is my mother
I know nothing of this woman.
I know only that a river runs through her.

And I splash in her blood like a fish.

That last example shows one way to make simplicity and apparent artlessness really work in a poem: by introducing an unexpectedly bizarre or surrealist image and catching the reader off-guard. “The Joy of Cooking” was the stand-out poem in this regard. It starts off with the protagonist lamenting that he can’t always procure cinnamon in Newfoundland, and so can’t rival the seductive powers of Michael Ondaatje’s cinnamon peeler. Then it takes a sudden lurch into stranger seas:

For this uncertain occasion
I’ve prepared an adequate meal.
John the Baptist’s head has been marinating
in the fridge for three days.
Now it’s on the table and Salome Smith
and I are ready to dine.

It promises not to be another wasted weekend.

Tentatively she takes the tiniest taste.
Then the lovely Ms. Smith looks at me
(seduction written all over) and says
“This is delicious”.

Needless to say, if the whole book were like this, I’d be a much bigger fan.

I’m reading a book a day for Poetry Month, but I’m also hoping some folks will join me and fellow poet-blogger Kristin Berkey-Abbott to read just four of those books. Details here.