Eunsong Kim & Don Mee Choi have reviewed the contemporary state of Asian American Poetry
Their piece is titled “Refusal=Intervention”
“Asian American Poetry” is not a manageable category—it is not a list.
Read the entire artifice from the AAWW
Our weekend book feature is Lohren Green’s Atmospherics
our weekend book feature is Jill Magi’s LABOR
You can buy it from Nightboat Books: $16
Jamaal May’s debut collection, Hum, both occupies and meditates on a series of intermediary spaces: both contemporary and historical. Imagine John Edward of Crossing Over making connections with machines, or a wayward mystical apostle of McLuhan turning to verse, and you’ll understand in part the book’s tone and project.
Except there may be no mystery at all in the beauty of language – in Hum, language is simple and charged (don’t think “common language”) because May is not afraid of vulnerability, while remaining necessarily wary of both over-sentiment and -artifice. Conversely, language is a machine which hums along dutifully with its share of fits and sputters. Note that sputters here are not missteps, but rather the necessary coughs and recalibrations a machine requires when adapting and dealing with its job, perhaps even its inevitable obsoleteness.
Take for instance the speaker’s desire to become another object, first a bolt of silk or
“…as brutal and impeccable as it’d be to soar
from a crossbow with a whistle and have a man
switch off upon my arrival, it is nothing
compared to that moment when I eat the dark,
draw shadows in quick strokes across wall
(stanza break, continued)
and start a tongue counting
down to thunder. That counting that says,
I am this far. I am this close.”
from “Hum for the Bolt,”
To become a machine, perhaps one allure of language and poetry, in many ways means to contain the power to “have a man // switch off upon my arrival,” a power May is not afraid of admittedly desiring. However, it is ultimately the desire to become a force of nature, both natural yet inhuman, that wins out. All of these – silk, arrow and lightning – are mediums and expressions of both mechanical and natural machines. Yet without saying so with a heavy hand, May shows that language is in fact the ultimate and only machine whose hum can encapsulate this desire, as it is the “counting / down to thunder” that gives the lightning its sense of magnitude.
Meanwhile, there is as much fear in Hum as there is revelry and desire. Six phobia poems are (“Athazagoraphobia: Fear of Being Ignored,” “Chionophobia: Fear of Snow,” “Thalassophobia: Fear of the Sea,” Aichmophobia: Fear of Needles,” “Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines” and “Macrophobia: Fear of Waiting”) are the lynchpins of the book and are dispersed throughout. To me, these poems represent the failings of the body and mind as a machine, an imperfect mechanism that works within a larger yet ultimately workable system. This system is accentuated by the fact that all six phobia poems are bracketed by two sestinas, both the second and the penultimate poems in the book (“Hum of the Machine God” and “The Hum of Zug Island”), both of which use the feared objects as the repeated terminal words at the end of each line (ignore, snow, sea, needle, machine and waiting). Hum itself is a machine, fueled by both incontrollable fear and the harnessing of it.
Seeing the machine-like quality that is the structure of this book, both on the global and local scales, is what ultimately set me thinking of Eliot’s “Tradition and Individual Talent.” The mere writing of an enjoyable sestina, let alone two that function under the same strictures is impressive. And the idea that fear is both generative and even structural is, to me, the kind of understanding a traditional poet, not a formalist or conservative poet, picks up on and ultimately creates with his work. This approach is what I love most about this important collection. Seen this way, the poem is not a puzzle nor an emotional outpouring, but a machine, capable of upgrade as well as retrofitting, sometimes held together loosely, other times it is bulky and unwieldy, whatever the job requires. May is, in this vein, a loving tinker who has very obviously built a relationship with his contraptions, while also seeing in the world its own dangerous yet beautiful mechanisms. This is not at all Romantic, but somehow still idyllic, as May shows in “Thalassophobia: Fear of the Sea:”
“…and today I learned something old
about the sea. Even the conch is a bit
of a blade, coiling itself around itself,
spiraling to a point, so that all we find
(stanza break, continued)
lovely in its folds forms
the outline of a dagger.”
Buy it from Alice James Books: $16
Zachariah McVicker is a first year MFA candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In his debut book Black Aperture, Matt Rasmussen is very demanding of his reader. He requires us to approach the book’s single, unrelenting subject—his brother’s suicide—with the endurance and devastating resolve of a fellow griever, refusing us the distance or the comfort of audience. His poems are upsetting and simple, darkly surreal, and their images linger long after the page is turned. In “After Suicide,” the second poem in the collection, his brother stands in the light of the fridge, milk pouring out of the bullet hole in his head as he keeps on drinking.
But despite his single force and vision, it is not Rasmussen’s aim to steamroller us under the poem-by-poem rotations of his grief. And neither, it is important to point out, is Black Aperture merely an exercise in therapy. Instead, he nods towards his intentions in the collection’s first poem, aptly titled “Trajectory”:
the spent day exposing
a flame that propels it.
The bullet, spinning
to maintain a shallow arc,
carves a hot thread
through the wind (3-8)
In approaching Black Aperture, it is in some ways helpful to think of Rasmussen as “the spent day,” his brother as “the flame that propels him,” and the book itself as the “bullet” curving in a steady but “shallow arc.” There are, of course, problems with this as a cohesive metaphor for the collection, so Rasmussen gives us others along the way. In another “After Suicide,” he writes,
In the hallway of life
you were a rose with no stem
and I, the janitor sweeping
away the fallen petals. (1-4)
This image works better in some ways, because although the book does follow a bullet-like trajectory, never wavering from the subject and arriving abruptly at a stark acceptance, the poems are infinitely varied. Rasmussen takes his one subject and, like petals from a flower, disperses it: his brother’s suicide becomes a prayer in an airplane at night, a dream of the Land O’ Lakes girl, a sonnet where the now departed tells us that “No island is an island…./There is no new land,/ just the same body broken open” (“The Wave,” 12-14). In the final poem of Part I, “Chekhov’s Gun,” we think we are the audience to the suicide, but we realize at the end that we are the gun, waiting to see if he will pull the trigger. This is what Rasmussen does to his reader with his brother’s death: he engulfs us so absolutely in the poem, in the stillness surrounding violence, and in his own obsession, that we are inseparable from him and his brother and from the book.
Both the strength of Rasmussen’s original vision and the methodical intelligence of its execution also justify the book’s few weaknesses. What springs to mind, most notably, is the number of poems about poetry, with titles like “I Am Not A Poem” and “A Poem In Which Leaves Again Figure Prominently.” In another book, this trope might feel pretentious or overdone, but here, it is part of the journey. Black Aperture is an excavation: the author brings a single event into high relief and examines it with all his senses, from every angle. This is a book of obsessions, from the idea of wearing his brother’s hands like gloves to the image of a man alone in a field, and poetry itself is necessarily one of them. Addressing the relationship between poet, poem, and subject is another petal on the floor that this janitor must sweep away; despite this justification, though, these poems mark where the cohesion of the book is least strong.
But then there are poems like “X,” the second of thirteen elegies all bearing the same title:
I am the pistol
saying, I will only
say this once.
Do not open
the tiny door
in the back
of your head. (7-13)
This is what Matt Rasmussen does best. He suspends us in a terrible moment with his slow couplets, his line breaks, his monosyllables, until we’re thinking with him and the eerie image he arrives at feels all too natural and possible. In this way he’s like a lyrical Magritte, showing us a ruinous new truth we understand as soon as we see. But he also knows better than to systematically overwhelm his reader with darkness. He includes the occasional moment of triumph, as in “Reverse Suicide,” the second-to-last poem in the collection. For one uplifting page, he takes away the causality and lets the surrealism that has ruled this book from the beginning work in his favor. Seasons run backwards at the end, fall unraveling into summer as
we pour bag after bag
of leaves on the lawn,
waiting for them to leap
onto the bare branches. (17-20)
Black Aperture is all the more wrenching for this image of anticipatory joy, because once having read the ending of “X,” we are unlikely to forget it:
I see
what’s too awful
to be true—
that house
with its one lit window,
my brother’s
punctured skull—
yet is. (27-34)
Emma Hine is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at NYU. She received her BA in English from Washington University in St. Louis, and she is originally from Austin, Texas. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Bitter Oleander.
When was the last time you played a game of telephone? The concept is easy to abstract: this is how a signal degrades over multiple transmissions. The abstracted version of telephone misses the fun of watching your friends lean conspiratorially towards each other, the anticipation as the message makes its way around to you, the hot breath in your ear, the decisive moment—to faithfully convey what you have heard or willfully contribute to the message’s distortion. Finally, the big reveal and the swells of laughter that usually follow. Why is it so much fun to get it wrong? I think we live in an era and a nation in which zeal for efficiency and clarity (that albatross) have such total sway that we are desperate for play, imaginaftion, Dickinsonian slant truth.
I found all these in Jen Besemer’s Telephone, out 2013 from Brooklyn Arts Press. Here’s a poem in full, which gives an idea of some of Besemer’s concerns and methodologies:
to find wilderness in the scraps of cloth held in
fraying fingers : scarecrow-smiles in parcels of toys
: bird cries in sand hissing fast & soft into a pail : an
open mouth from which pours light like a thousand
greyhounds : territories without maps : borders to be
crossed & kissed : to find whole cities in the erasures
of a manuscript of interrogations : rough magic of
thwarted desire : denial : with pain :: (70)
Here Besemer takes a multivalent view of the signal loss that reads to others as chaos. What is it like to live in the death spiral of empire? Need we sing dirges on the way down? Perhaps instead we could “find wilderness in the scraps.”
What are the scraps? One formal answer is the colons which Besemer uses, like Alice Notley’s quotation marks in The Descent of Alette or Dickinson’s m-dashes, as an idiosyncratic system to arrest the flow of the reader’s eye. However, I believe that there is something more: the colon is the symbol of creation, textual
expansiveness, and particularity. Here I name a thing: there I break it into parts and examples. The colon conditions readers to expect this, part of why I believe Besemer gets away with the truly lavish multitude of embodied data (the word images does not quite do justice to Telephone’s sensory sweep).
Besemer’s poetry conjures the possibility of reintegration with nature and the body—not a romanticized version of either, but one which includes “how we become what we inhabit : how our surroundings become us : the moving negotiation of taking place : the breakdown of language for embodiment” (97). Besemer enacts this blurring throughout Telephone, in juxtapositions anthropic and zooic: “fabric-encircled missiles with shark-fins & claw feet” (78). Besemer engages the somatic as CAConrad has spoken about it; both in the sense of memory as a thing, and in the definition of soma as “to press and be newly born.” Besemer presses the self into the service of play, and as Lynda Barry reminds readers in What It Is, “Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that, and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves” (51). It should be noted that Telephone is broken up into sections entitled “call” and “response”. Besemer takes both parts, not in Pessoan affectation, but in such a way that this structure speaks to the real multiplicity of the self: who rides the bus, who works, who returns home, who texts, who absorbs toxic compounds, who dreams.
While hybridizing the material imagination, Besemer also hybridizes the cultural imaginary’s Grimm archetypes, peppering the text with castles, princes, and a sorcerer’s apprentice, but here the castle is “made of dust,” the prince’s kingdom amounts to “nine sentences,” and, as for the sorcerer’s apprentice:
this time when the music starts the sorcerer’s
apprentice will do nothing : will remain absolutely
still : will ignore his text message alerts & his software
updates & the slightly disturbing crackle when he swallows :
this time there will be no terrible accidents
: nothing to clean up or put right : no workplace
injuries or reports of unsafe conditions : no unpaid
overtime & hostile environment : this time when the
music starts the sorcerer’s apprentice will sit down on
the floor & rest his hands on his knees, just so :: (62)
Moments like these feel like graphs of the tectonic shifts in archetypes due to changes in lived experience, namely the global rise of economic precarity and environmental crisis. However, Besemer is not content to graph the shifts but attempts to reverse engineer them, through dreaming. An “epiphytic dream,” seeming to subsist off of air and rain, presumably because there is so little to nourish our dreaming (56). This is the act of an optimist and there is an optimism here which is neither naive nor cruel, as in Lauren Berlant’s definition. Besemer veers away from other poetic responses to the anthropocene, such as self-serious documentary and somber elegy which do not account for literary pleasure: “an exile into sincerity is your doom” (45). Can dreams be the map? Telephone left me in a mood of apocalyptic hope :
Buy it from Brooklyn Arts Press: $15
Zoe Tuck lives, writes, and reads poetry submissions for HOLD: a journal in Oakland, CA. Her chapbook Terror Matrix is forthcoming in the Spring of 2014 from Timeless, Infinite Light. Recent work can also be found in Textsound and Dusie.
Post-Katrina. I sat in a Starbucks in the Andersonville neighborhood in Chicago, working, I think, on ideas for a film project for a class I was taking at Chicago Filmmakers. I don’t remember, exactly, what I was doing there. I do remember that my thoughts were interrupted by the complaint of a man who had recently returned from New Orleans. He recounted the unpleasant details. He had been helicoptered in to some really filthy places. He identified as a journalist. He summed up his experience: “I realized, I don’t do poor.” A kind of self-evaluation, which, of course, also functions as an evaluation of the “poor,” in a one to one, man versus poor relationship. The dismissal of so many individual sufferings by one stranger still haunts me.
Five years later I worked in a kitchen with a cook from New Orleans who had relocated to the Midwest after Katrina. An infectiously cheerful guy, he hadn’t been back after the disaster, and talking about it transformed him dramatically if temporarily, in the way trauma seems to rewire a person’s ‘natural’ personality. Now, I’m in Southern Louisiana, an hour from New Orleans, in Baton Rouge, a city where hundreds of thousands of refugees landed when the waters rose. A transplant of another kind, the trauma of Katrina flashes across my consciousness via contact with frontline survivors with the surprise of household electric shock, the mundane everyday life suddenly and painfully charged by the live wires of human memory, something a neighbor says, a colleague at the university, another stranger, in the supermarket, on the sidewalk, surges of memory fire without warning.
Released in 2013 by Trembling Pillow Press out of New Orleans, Laura Goldstein’s Loaded Arc explicitly connects two flood stories. Rather than connecting the two as anchors fixed in time and space, as the “arc” of the title might suggest, Goldstein’s “unlikely romance” between Noah and Katrina charts an unruly constellation of affinities. Loaded Arc remembers two events separated by time but Goldstein recalls to conflate, breaking wave upon wave of memory, storytelling, music, charlatanism, and terror in a unified tableau that foregrounds the way that stories are as malleable as the forms they take. But what of our ‘true stories’? Are our memories as malleable as our fiction? Goldstein’s early line, “Any good form does fine” riffs on the common mnemonic used by music students for remembering notes of the treble clef: “Every good boy does fine.” Memory is clearly important here, but the tongue in cheek tone, the toggle from “every” to “any,” and the strangely blasphemous suggestion, in a poetic context, that ‘any form will do’ destabilize the function of memory as a means toward carrying places, people, and events of the past into our present intact.
An expansive pool of possible title associations sets the stage—a stage?—any stage will do. Loaded gun, loaded with meaning, mother lode, welding spark, rainbow, a universe, with an arc, long but bending toward justice. Or? Or, book as arc as proscenium arch, full to overflowing with stories and their performers. Goldstein announces performative awareness from the first stanza of the first section, “clear your throat before you deliver these lines,” and early on she explicitly cites a medieval mystery play, “Noah’s Flood.”
From the medieval oral tradition through the performance of George W. Bush, cast as a fully loaded father figure, Goldstein builds a story of mass complicity: “Parades of people provide the building flood… our people rise to the occasion.” No one is spared. Goldstein brings the collusion present with the publication of her own performance, implicating herself. Throughout, Goldstein reports and reflects on the performance of ‘media coverage,’ linking production and consumption of media, old and new, to religious conveyance, as in the second ‘act’ of the first movement or ‘scene’ (untitled except in three Roman-numeraled sections):
for hours I sit and watch TV
its slow flashing washing me
into sleep at the end of evening. this
is as regular as growing up talking to God
The communication event, separate from the physical flood, effects an eerie baptismal, initiating the washed or flooded into an altered post-cataclysm, post-communication state. Communication takes on a negative valence; watery resistance to orderly established ‘facts’ marry it with its sister, memory.
The four-line stanzas that occupy each page of the first sequence, echo with aphoristic familiarity (in spite of the fact that sense and sentence enjamb across the pages):
old standards come into play. It may be something
you’ve heard before. All spiders spin webs weekly
even every day. god will protect me if i do
the right thing. it’s always been that way
Diction and rhythm combine, as in “[a]ll spiders spin webs weekly” to connect words in ways that seem like something we should have heard before—words of wisdom, truisms. When parsing reveals the ‘hoax,’ a ‘false positive’ recognition, the poem begs the question of relationship between language, these symbols we’ve designed to communicate, and ‘truth.’ If contemporary art must defamiliarize that which has been taken for granted, Loaded Arc reminds us of the strangeness of lies. Not a little part of the strangeness results from the many ways “untruths” may unfold, from myth to dramatis personae to contested memory to the lie intended to divest a fellow creature of essential comfort for personal gain.
Loaded Arc ascribes unilaterally shared responsibility for our confused state, but we don’t suffer the consequences equally. The stakes are very high and the survival rate distributes along familiar have/have-not lines:
well we continue to build babel those who
can’t pay can’t stay rain rain and
they go away a ways to go two
of every no, ah, ah
Is there a silver lining softening the gloom in Loaded Arc? One back-cover blurb reads hope, in part “because the world / is for falling in love with…” But here, in Noah and Katrina, is dark romance; the kind to remind us that even “love” sometimes begs intervention. Is it possible to be suspicious and affirming?
Goldstein affirms the suspicions she tenders. Loaded Arc admits “hazy believing,” at least in penguins and ice. The world seen and told here contains music and light, but:
there are places in the head not
meant for light, destitute even, where patches of
darkness produce a vocabulary of endless rhyme
obscured ceaselessly by intervening themes.
Loaded Arc shines music and light on some really scary places—scary chapters in our history, scary patterns that sail from our stories of creation through to the present day, the scary faces of some of our treasured identifying capabilities, both socially and individually, such as acts of imagination and unique experience of time and memory. If there is hope here, it is in the text’s recognition that it may speak from a temporary immersion in desolation, as “there are places in the head not / meant for light” implies other “places in the head.” And surely these other places might be better?
Ultimately, Goldstein’s query into relationships between memory, experience, and story may be framed in a startling question: what happens when we live something that we thought was only a story? When the ultimate Western deluge myth seems to have foreshadowed a horrifying reality, we have to wonder whether all of our monsters and night terrors might be real. Loaded Arc plays out a possibility that we are summoning them into creation, as we summon into creation our own father figures, and the very problematic “super dome of heaven itself.”
Buy it from Trembling Pillow Press: $16.00
Anna Wilson’s poems, reviews, and interviews have been published or are forthcoming in the Chicago Reader, Gulf Coast, Meatpaper, New Delta Review, The Volta and elsewhere. A graduate teaching assistant and M.F.A. candidate at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, she writes and makes books, incorporating letterpress and other printing techniques, and handmade papers
