Saturday, August 18, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
FOUR POETS WHO SHAKE US AWAKE:
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Review-a-Day for Tue, Aug 30: Juvenilia (Yale Series of Younger Poets #104)
by Ken Chen A review by William La Ganza
The photo on the cover of Juvenilia is a still from a movie directed by Wong Kar-Wai. It shows a man with his back to the viewer, walking away down a muddy road lined with palm trees. The man in his tropical Chinese landscape stands in contrast to the title, Juvenilia, which evokes childhood toys, as well as Yale, with its clipped lawns. Yet the man's clothes are Western; in Juvenilia, Ken Chen looks at the past as a contemporary American inhabited by ancestors and images from China and Taiwan, by moods and voices, and their expression both free and constrained.
On the surface there is play, like the title of the first poem, "My Father and My Mother Decide My Future and How Could We Forget Wang Wei?" This title is ironical and cheeky: Wang Wei, an ancestral patriarch, can never be forgotten. Humour seems to be a way of coping with the obligations toward parents and grandparents: "My grandfather is packing up his organs" we are told, invited to laugh at the dead old man's expense. The ghost then takes a taxi. We laugh again -- then are calmed by the grip of patriarchs on the poet's destiny:
So did you listen to him, my Father says taking his keys out of the ignition. You should
become a lawyer but your grandfather says anything is fine. As long as you're the best.
-- p. 3
The mother, complicit, "stays silent." The poet, belittled, regresses, "I sit and suck my thumb." Mother, who is "like the moon which rents light from its past," is sycophantic to her husband's dead father. She tells him his "painting... was beautiful," to which old Wang Wei replies in the style of five-character Tang verse complete with sibilant assonance:
In the silent bamboo woods, sitting along
Playing strings and bellowing long.
Chen the poet is playing and seems to be enjoying himself. He moves in this poem from the outrageously long and ironic title, to a movie-script style shot description with the sentence "Dissolve." And to fantastic narrative, to ancient Chinese pastoral, and personal narratives, among others. The venerated Wang Wei's verse is immediately followed by words iconoclastical to both Tang poetic conceits and the new culture they have adopted:
But America is allergic to bamboo, my father says to Wang Wei. They
love skill sets, cash and the first person singular,
the language of C++ not our English.
Underneath the play, however, is the pain of being rejected for not being of either the old culture or the new: for having imperfect English and "forget[ting] Chinese he never remembered," like what he listened to when his mother played "the Peking opera" on the radio. There is his parents' divorce, and the disillusionment that his wise and patronizing father is perhaps not as sure-footed and well-orientated as he seemed:
My father unlocks the door and says, Dropped the keys in the toilet. But that's what
life is like. You're young... you don't understand the world
There is also the threat that patriarchs might invest the self to the extent of annihilating all agency. A dead patriarch can seem real, "as though a ghost could die into a man." This ghost-man can then decide one's life:
And Wang Wei asks Who are
you?
And my Father says, Decide.
Death and its inevitability, the vicissitudes of love, adapting to the American culture, and the aliveness of dead ancestors are themes throughout this collection. These concerns are engendered in childhood and their persistence underpins an ongoing dialectic between the adult and the child. All these themes are present in "At Taipei station, I saw this city undress!": the dead grandfather "manages to crawl into / a glass jar that we slide into a birch box." The undertaker remarks, "This is only what will happen to everyone," and the poet warns, "Adjust your eyes to the unlit room." The portent of death and the pain or mourning appears in the form of "Graffiti... Who kill my soul?" in which the grammatical transgression reflects challenges of literacy in their new country, the U.S.A.
In "There are two types of trees in winter," the legacy a family elder leaves the family before and after death is difficult for family members to deal with. It is "as if merely by existing, we erect a history of regret ready to be lived ahead of us." While the poet's father is "on the phone with his girlfriend" and suffering from ailments "[w]e never talked about," the unspoken family, ill at ease, seems to be expressing itself via the poet's skin, in the form of an "ineffable pox across my arms and torso." "Taipei novel" appears to be about the meeting of the poet's father and his lover. A woman who has "cheated on her husband" is physically but not morally attractive, being "lonely and perfect, if we do not count her self." The glorified individualism of the US is also unattractive to the immigrant lovers, whose "hatred for Top Gun was commensurate with their hatred of humidity." In contrast, the woman admires the man's "humourless joy and his earnestness", and when she "touched his knee... they both felt guilty." Away from her, the father lives in regret, as the poetry contains a vivid, tactile image:
When I am alone, I feel pentinent, my heart damp like cold metal
This line recalls the autopsy in "At Taipei station, I saw this city undress!" during which "they have some problems stripping the veins from [grandfather's] chest."
Juvenilia presents an unsentimental view of childhood. In "The Mansions of the Moon," the poet-child sees adults "together, growing alone"; in "Yes, No, Yes, The Future, Gone, Happy, Yes, No, Yes, Cut, You" the poet's sense of humour as seen in the title dwindles at the line "You are so good at being happy," pointing to the sadness that can underlie joy, and at the ruthlessness that can underlie communications with those we love. The poet asks, "Are questions like relationships?" and the answer:
One can use a question mark for many things. For example: as a
sickle for cutting people's hearts off.
Finally, the poet turns to sarcasm to comment on family elders who, despite their life experience, have disillusioned those who are supposed to esteem them.
The earth is a millstone that sharpens us into saint
Disillusionment leads to nihilism, as when his parents separated and denied all promise of reunion:
Since the separation was irrevocable, the enemy was hope.Which left him with a nihilistic joy.
In "The Invisible Memoir," the narrator seems to find some peace in nostalgia for his "Uncle's house -- the happiest time of my life," just when all seems lost:
My gold sword sunk into the ground.
My spirit lost among the long weeds.
Then in the cool night. Then in the quiet sky. Then the moon
blossoming open.
My mind goes back to those old hallways, but now only
the light glows hollow on the waters of Ch'in-huai.
The poet's mother is "homesick," the family no longer understands the Chinese language, which is like a "white space" in the mind. The exiled person is like a headless body. We are told that "decapitation" carries a "great sorrow" because after death "the body will appear in the realms below without a head." Memory can be cruel when the longing for and absence from one's country of birth is revived: "I had forgotten about all of this -- my self, this exile." One needs to look away from the pain, and in this mood the poet reaches to the lyrical traditions of Tang verse, particularly to Li Lu, the "inventor of the confessional voice in Chinese lyric poetry." In his contemporary conceit, however, there exists a background of poisoned beauty, as suggested in "the smog moist over weeping willows," and of inevitability, as in "This is the sorrow of leaving no other taste in my heart." In pathos, the poet reaches for his optimism, for a moment of happiness as he contemplates his place in the universe:
Again in pleasure.
I am starting to think -- that when the sun
is setting and you are resting alone, it's better not
to look south to those streams and hills. Leaving
them was easy -- but going back last night
was hard. The waters flowing away. The flowers
breaking the ground. Spring has also left.
That heaven, this earth.
William La Ganza, , a contributing editor of Cerise Press, currently lives in Paris, France. An Honorary Associate at Macquarie University in Sydney, he specialises in language pedagogy. He has authored a chapbook of poetry, Meeting Her in Paris (La Petite Maison, 1998), and regularly reads short stories and poetry in Parisian bookshops.
This review was first published in Cerise Press. 
Cerise Press, an international online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works.
Co-founded by Sally Molini, Karen Rigby, and Fiona Sze-Lorrain in 2009, Cerise Press hopes to serve as a gathering force where imagination, insight, and conversation express the evolving and shifting forms of human experience.
To contact Cerise Press, please email editors@cerisepress.com.
The Summer 2011, Vol. 3 Issue 7 of Cerise Press features Railway Shed 1895, Dunston, a photograph by Tina Carr & Annemarie Schöne.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Review-a-Day for Tue, Aug 2: Tourist in Hell (Phoenix Poets)
by Eleanor Wilner A review by Christina Cook
So, your black roller bags are packed, your Tartarean, I mean tartan, ribbons tied to their handles so as to readily identify your own from all the other black roller bags on the airport luggage belt to Hell. You've double-checked for your passport and Air Hades tickets. You're ready to go. And halfway into Eleanor Wilner's seventh collection of poetry, Tourist in Hell, you find yourself at one of the most memorable stops on the trip. "Encounter in the Local Pub" opens in a pub that is not only in a foreign land, but also a foreign time, as signaled in part by the sixteenth-century "lanthorn" and reference to a play written by the fairly well-known playwright of that era:
As he looked up from his glass, its quickly melting ice,Strong, surprising images such as these abound throughout Wilner's book. In any other collection, "bisected glowing demonic" goat eyes might seem a little far-fetched. But in Wilner's masterful care, they push us just short of the limits of suspended disbelief, where we stop in awe of what has moved us there. Naming the book Tourist in Hell certainly goes a long way toward laying the framework for no-holds-barred images. Moreover, things are not as they seem in this collection, and the poet employs a number of elegant techniques to keep us right along with her, never losing a traveling companion. One such technique is to concretize the abstract, as she does, for example, later on in the same poem:
into the bisected glowing demonic eyes of the goat,
he sensed that something fundamental had shifted,or was done. As if, after a life of enchantment, he
had awakened, like Bottom, wearing the ears of an ass,
and the only light was a lanthorn, an ersatz moon.-- p. 66
his thoughts only a sagging bundle of loose ends,These metaphors are right on. I, for one, know exactly how it feels to have thoughts that are "a sagging bundle of loose ends" and am not ashamed to admit that my heart has often been "a naked animal in search of a pelt."
and the heart a naked animal in search of a pelt,
that once fell for every Large Meaning it couldwrap itself in, as organs are packed in ice for transit
from one ending to the next, an afterlife of parts ---- pp. 66-67
Another technique this passage illustrates is Wilner's use of line breaks to hook the reader into the next line, the next stanza, the next poem, keeping us traveling right by her side as she tours the tropical land of eternal damnation. The heart "that once fell for every Large Meaning it could" sounds like one that sits in the pub promiscuously trolling for tall dark and handsome meanings. But read on to the next line, and the meaning of the sentence changes: the heart "that once fell for every Large Meaning it could / wrap itself in, as organs are packed in ice for transit." This is no big heart blazoned with an "A." Rather, it is a small animal in need of protection and sustenance.
Such powerful, meaning-twisting line breaks can also be found at other scenic stops in Hell, such as in the poem, "Site Visit":
(...)above on His throne of cloudsMore than a line break, the emphatic stanza break between "who must be guilty of what was done // to them" is nothing short of brilliant, in terms of its collective use of word choice, word arrangement, line break, and sentence structure. The sentence is our Virgil, in this case guiding us into deeper questioning of the standard beliefs about "sinners," which constitutes the object of the sentence. "The burning flesh of those" leaves off with a line break which invites us to finish the sentence in the expected way: The burning flesh of those who sinned. As the sentence moves into the next line, however, it invites us to question this traditional judgment: the choice of "must" in "who must be guilty" is far from a judgmental "who is guilty," and the semantic arrangement of "what was done," does not assert the blame that "what they did" would. When the sentence then continues onto the next line with "to them," the shade of doubt grows into a shadow as large as God's indisputably Miltonic "obdurate cliff." The question that arises is: done to them by whom? The answer: by God himself. The sentence releases increasingly more doubt into the reader's received ideas about sin as it literally snakes its way down from line to line.sits Majesty in burnished robes, below
the fires roast the burning flesh of those
who must be guilty of what was doneto them, agonies it took genius to describe --
didn't we understand that the punishment fits
the crime? -- though the damned were from a distanttime: we had to search the footnotes for their names.
Hell is the dungeon where God's shadow falls,
cast by the monumental, obdurate cliff-- pp. 20-21
Shadows show up elsewhere throughout the trip, as one might expect in Hell, and Wilner conveys her vision of them in ways that continue to alter common perceptions, as God's shadow does in "Site Visit." For example, see how she retells the story of Jesus in "Magnificat":
When he had suckled there, he beganIt would take several pages to fully explicate the poem excerpted here, and almost as many to tease apart the layers of the excerpt alone. Indeed, many of Wilner's poems are as dense in meaning as they are powerful in imagery. However, we may graze the meaning of the poem by pointing to the way she retells the common touch points of the life of Jesus from an entirely different perspective, from his time at Mary's breast through to his crucifixion. Just as God casts a shadow in "Site Visit," Jesus casts a shadow in the beginning of this poem, only to be replaced by an equally menacing shadow by the poem's end:
to grow: first, he was an infant in her arms,
but soon, drinking and drinking at the sweet
milk she could not keep from filling her,
(...)soon he was
huge, towering above her, the landscape,
his shadow stealing the color from the fields,
even the flowers going gray. And they came
like ants, one behind the next, to worship
him -- huge as he was, and hungry; it was
his hunger they admired most of all.
(...)The day came when they had nothing left
to offer him, having denuded themselves
of all in order to enlarge him, in whose
shadow they dreamed of light: and that
is when the thought began to move, small
at first, a whisper, then a buzz, and finally,
it broke out into words, so loud they thought
it must be prophecy: they would kill him,
and all they had lost in his name would return,
renewed and fresh with the dew of morning.-- pp. 26-27
And who are we to speak, as if the worldWilner uses the same Biblical language to continue the human story that began with Jesus. In our increasingly secularized society, there is still a huge shadow that looms over us: our own. Just as Jesus' worshippers "came like ants," earlier in the poem, "we... speak, as if the world / were our diorama," waging war as if our fellow humans were no more than "tin solders," living in a world where the "Boardroom" has become our god. Whereas Jesus grew huge from feeding at Mary's breast, "the new giant" is eerily far less human, feeding "on air... on radio waves, in cyberspace."
were our diorama -- its little figures moved
by hidden gears, precious in miniature, tin soldiers,
spears the size of pins, perfect replicas, history
under glass, dusty, old fashioned, a curiosity
that no one any longer wants to see,
excited as they are by the new giant, who feeds
on air, grows daily on radios waves, in cyberspace,
who sows darkness like a desert storm,
who blows like a wind through the Boardrooms,
who touches the hills, and they smoke.-- p. 27
The above quote's reference to "desert storm" is not accidental, and brings up the corollary theme of war as a human-orchestrated hell that runs through the collection. The first stanza of the poem "Back Then, We Called It 'The War'" discreetly catalogs several wars in history, from ancient times through the Cold War:
And though, since that time, I have read many books,Wilner maximizes the impact of her references to specific wars by pluralizing them. Thus, while "burning libraries" will bring to mind the Alexandrian War, "fallen walls" the Cold War, and "killing fields" the Cambodian genocide which followed the Vietnam War, using plural nouns highlights the fact that these are far from isolated events in history. She further maximizes the impact of these horrors by framing them inside her mind, opening the poem with "And though, since that time, I have read many books... nevertheless, I do not understand." This framework sets up the speaker's internalization of these utterly nonsensical horrors, and through it, our own internalization of them. As a result, this poem is emotionally and intellectually demanding, as are many others in the collection. Indeed, midway through the book, the poem "High Noon" situates war as being directly inside us:
have followed the smoke trail of countless thoughts
rising from the burning libraries;
though I have inquired in the ruins of many cities,
in the writing on the fallen walls,
in the blank stares of skulls in the killing fields,
in places hidden and open:
nevertheless, I do not understand.
-- p. 22
The soul is not so clean and whiteOne would hope that a moral imperative against murder places human instinct above the law of natural selection which guides animal instinct, but the war within the human soul is muddy, as the above quote indicates -- both in terms of being dirty ("not so clean and white") and unsure ("not so [black] and white"). Later in the poem, we see a place where "the sun is forever at noon, no shadows / intrude." In the absence of a higher power whose shadow attempts to delineate right from wrong, such as God's or Jesus' or the Boardroom's, our souls are left to find a moral equilibrium on their own.
as Kleenex; as old Faust dramatized,
it can be sold for a dram of power,it wars within, and good
struggles with not-so-good, or vice
versa, the soul's creatures unsureabout what's natural in selection:
-- p. 41
This is a difficult truth to unearth on a short trip to Hell. However, the closing poem in the collection leaves us with hope, though not certainty, that such equilibrium may be arrived at. In "Tracking," the speaker postulates a place deep in the ocean where
...the giant Alba swims, ellipsisThe poem continues through to these closing stanzas:
of the deep, enormity, unseen, except on the sonar'sscreen, bright shadow of leviathan or a merlin trick, for
at such a depth, such crushing pressures -- it could not
live -- and yet. The transitive exists, swimming the fissures.-- p. 100
...while the greatThe shadow cast by this huge peaceful being is "bright," and as the gorgeous course of language unfolds in these stanzas, we see its glow literally consume the darkness and the shadows we saw on our quite stunning tour of Hell. It certainly will give us something to think about while we unpack the charred remains of our luggage.
Alba, scarcely a glimmer against the gloom,
swam on, its jaw wide, ingesting darkness like krill,
until it had swallowed all but its own glowing self,and, tired of the conceit, shed its tons of matter,
rose in time to see first-light ignite the waves,
back in the blue delight of dawn, its ravishing until.-- p. 100
Christina Cook's work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Prairie Schooner, The Dos Passos Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Harpur Palate, Packingtown Review, and The Bitter Oleander. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a contributing editor at Inertia. Also a contributing editor of Cerise Press, she teaches writing at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire.
This review was originally published in Cerise Press.
Cerise Press, an international online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works. Co-founded by Sally Molini, Karen Rigby, and Fiona Sze-Lorrain in 2009, Cerise Press hopes to serve as a gathering force where imagination, insight, and conversation express the evolving and shifting forms of human experience.
To contact Cerise Press, please email editors@cerisepress.com.
The Spring 2011, Vol. 2 Issue 6 of Cerise Press features Smoking, Chongqing, a photograph by Steven Benson.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Review-a-Day for Mon, Jul 25: Walking the Dog's Shadow (A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America)
by Deborah Brown A review by Scott F. Parker
In his foreword to Walking the Dog's Shadow, Tony Hoagland writes that the poems of Deborah Brown's debut collection "make thinking look easy." As this assessment and the title itself suggest, these poems are full of ideas; they pursue not so much things as the impressions things have left on the speaker in a lifetime full of memories.
Brown's speaker is mature and wise, fully stocked with experiences to recount and reconsider. These remembrances and reflections lead to abstraction, as in "Proof": "Where 'duck' meant / a domesticated aquatic, not a sniper's bullet about to deafen / your ear. When did the innocent part of the country become one / with the rest of the violent world?" But proof is always secondary to experience, and abstraction must be earned; once earned, it might grant one the privilege to view history from a remove, as when the speaker discusses "racism's latest masquerade / in the flag."
Of course, the mind's impulse to create stories ("Narro, narrare, drifts overhead"; "I read how the brain is structured / to make us believe, or want to") and to compress information for meaning means details are squeezed from memory. Sometimes those details are withheld, as in "Don't Ask," when soldiers "knew what could be said after dinner sixty-five years later, / stories scrubbed clean of blood and pain," leading the speaker to wonder, "How do you know what you've left out of any story you tell?"
Brown's poems are sharply attuned to absence: things missing, words unspoken. Many of the recurring images here focus on what's not present: in the title poem the speaker doesn't walk a dog but a dog's shadow, in another poem the moon "plans to move off course," has been driven "away from home," and has deserted the sky. The attention to absence/presence is summed up neatly in "On Not Knowing Your Father": "I am trying to imagine the pain of a phantom / limb, but the pain I imagine is a phantom, too."
Little in this world is real, and what is might be made unreal at any moment: "how could there / be a whole and happy life...when we have no idea when / antimatter might say enough's enough and take over / and turn us all into -- nots?" The appeal to physics reappears in "The Graviton," where we discover just how fragile our existence is:
It's bad enoughAnd so, we infer, we must stick with what is real. These are big, empirical poems that tell us to pay close attention. The book's section titles are an instruction set for how to read the poems: "Don't Ask"; "Listen"; "Read Between the Lines." Brown's speaker hovers around the familiar, and if you ask you will already be looking in the wrong direction and miss the turn toward the unfamiliar. Instead, listen to everything she says -- and to everything she doesn't say. It's only in learning to pay attention to what's here and what's not that we can go along with the wisdom of the speaker: "In the middle / of the night, the sky lowers towards me. / It has a mind of its own, / but no secrets from anyone listening."
not being able to find good fish and chips,
or true love, or an immigration policy
everyone agrees on. But the graviton
has to exist, since everything else exists,
more or less, so the argument goes.
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