Brief Reviews |
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Dave Brinks, The Caveat Onus: Book Two, Lavender Ink, 2007 by Jan Edwards This is the second installment in the Caveat Onus trilogy, is first a structural work of art; without its form, it would be too disconnected from its audience and would mean little for both the reader and the poet, for this collection of poems is as much a journey for Brinks as for his readers. The poems embody a mental journey for the author during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and carefully, though somewhat confusingly, bring the reader along on the exploration. Each poem, or meditation, in The Caveat Onus: Book Two consists of thirteen lines constructed as two hexagrams, with one middle line serving, as Brinks says, as “the center of a sphere, with a line moving through that point in space, in opposite directions.” Moreover, the meditations are sonnegrams, in which the first and last lines, second and second to last lines, third and third to last lines, and so on, correspond and move inward, until reaching the middle line, which is the seventh, the axis of the poem. The seventh line can also begin the poem, from which the lines would move outward in the same corresponding pattern. This pattern works through the four sections of the book, and these axes in the poetry create a movement in and among the poems and bring a surrealistic quality to the work as readers move with Brinks through memory and discovery. There is finally an axis for the whole book; Brinks refers to this most important axis as a vanishing point, or the point on a physical plane where everything disappears. This vanishing point is in the fourth section of the book and is the convergence of the poet’s world and the reader’s ability to understand it, in that a need for the concrete gives way to the arena of the mind. One does not have to read the notes on the text in order to realize that there is something often unnerving and different happening in the book, and one may neither grasp nor enjoy the book upon an initial sitting with it; these sentiments of the reader most likely stem from a misunderstanding of the structure and point of Brinks’ work. Thus, reading The Caveat Onus: Book Two is continually frustrating. The language alienates the reader, in that the images seem to be part of the poet’s memory and are not yet fleshed out enough for the reader to understand or explore. A reader senses the poetry more than connects with it; a reader knows that the poems must be more than disconnected remembrances and observances or random images gathered from clips of the poet’s experience, but it is difficult to provide an explanation for this feeling that something bigger is happening on the pages of the book. This, of course, is a result of the structural intricacies, which cause a general frustration with the reading; because of the movement of the work, there seems to be no point at which the reader can grip onto the words, to become a part of the author’s pictures and seeming abstractions. Yet page after page the reader’s feeling that the poems are supposed to both convey to and create in the reader the author’s deep feelings grows stronger; at the same time, the reader realizes that the problem with the images is not that they are not full enough, but that they seem to be too much a part of the poet’s world, which does not quite feel real. The poems, both individually and as a collection, seem to be the essence of a memory, which one can explain but in which one can never totally include another person. Yet the poet moves so fluidly through the work that it must be real enough to be understood; this further leaves the reader with the feeling that there is no place for an outsider in this work. Just when the frustration reaches its peak, and when the reader feels the past hour has been wasted trying to understand something which has no meaning to anyone but the poet, it happens: in the last of the four sections of the book, Brinks begins taking lines and images from earlier poems and creating new poems with them. In these restructured pieces, the images have not changed; they retain the same essence of a memory that characterizes the book. Yet they come together full circle; in just a handful of poems, the feelings of frustration disappear as the reader somehow comes to share in the memories and the poems with the poet. It is as if writing these clips of experience and having someone read them is the only way Brinks could ever convey what the poems mean to him. In this way The Caveat Onus: Book Two becomes a shared experience; reading Brinks’ thoughts and memories makes them part of the reader as well, and when the images come back together in the last section, an understanding comes with them. Possibly after the reading of the notes on the text, a reader not only feels but finally sees how the symmetry and patterns in the work have converged both on the page and in the mind. A look at meditation ninety-eight, the poem Brinks describes as the vanishing point, exemplifies the fluid yet symmetrical style that is both the beauty and the challenge in this work; this poem also embodies the journey on which Brinks has gone and taken his readers: the caveat on us 1 is a great tear in the dreamwork forced upon the mind like a terrible sound that only compares with silence where everything belongs to water and whose sadnesses have no equal or worse 7 O Memory let these creatures stir snap the teeth of your dragon’s snout send forgetfulness to repair their suffering the song of the hawk knows no boundaries between heaven and earth 13
Sarduy and Eggers by Beatriz Hausner Cobra and Maitreya, by Severo Sarduy, Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. Dalkey Archive Press What is the What, by Dave Eggers, McSweeney's Publishing In Cobra, by Severo Sarduy, the main character is called, well, Cobra. He may be a transvestite, or maybe transgender[ed], or neither, but one thing seems almost certain: he/she/it lives in Amsterdam. Cobra seems to have a foot that is mechanical, though nothing is certain. Herzog's Green Cobra, only now being released in North America, features Klaus Kinski, obviously, playing a terribly insane, oversexed, white master among South Americans and Africans. And, just now, into my study has walked a human-size raccoon. He greets me and seems kind, despite the threatening teeth. I welcome him, mostly because he will provide warmth for the next few hours. It remains to be seen how long he can stay seated in the uncomfortable wicker chair I have set in the corner, the one covered in the elegant Oaxaca weaving, meant to be worn as a skirt by women in the Mixtec region. His breathing is distracting, perhaps because, as he has just informed me, he is suffering from an uneven heartbeat, wrought, as it is, by the insertion of an extraneous valve into one of the chambers of his heart. I tell him that these procedures are quite common nowadays. He seems tired, worn out. Perhaps the raccoon is simply echoing my own state of mind. Perhaps not. It's hard to say. * David Egger’s What is the What, could be considered one, if not the greatest contemporary expression of our condition as nomads. Perhaps, it is the journey itself which sums up our existence, condemned as we are to wander, sometimes in an apocalyptic world, other times, in a world ruled by magic and chance. Regardless, the journey is the what, and it defines us. Raccoon has risen from the chair and is enveloping me in his furry presence. The mechanical fingers which finish his right arm are touching my centre now, the place where my legs meet the chair I am sitting on. I feel a quiver and with it, the certainty that I may not be dying inside. He is cruel in the manner of his distance, obsessively building walls between us, so that the journey to his more southern location often feels daunting, almost impossible; so many are the hurdles I will have to leap over to reach him. I may never get there, what with the eye that watches from the window constantly delaying the train that crosses these nights. I know that I am the crystallized flower between the sharp teeth of this animal. Such are my thoughts as I sign off on this day’s events. Jake Berry, Dave Brinks, Durriel Harris, Tom Mandel & more by Hank Lazer Jake Berry, Brambu Drezi, Station Hill Press, 2006 Jake Berry, reclusive poet, songwriter, musician, and visual artist of Florence, Alabama, has worked for two decades on Brambu Drezi. The new Station Hill edition presents the first three volumes of Brambu Drezi. (Berry has begun work on a video-based fourth volume.) Brambu Drezi is an overwhelming reading experience – a generative site for colliding mythologies, perspectives, culture, visions, decompositions, and recyclings, complete with superb drawings by Berry – not illustrations, but drawings that are inextricably part of the journey, part of the ciphering and deciphering. The work moves from a kind of talking in tongues to the most lyrical of moments, from mythic encounters to mundane cinematic scenes. With Berry as medium – the poet as the site or gathering point for the text – we are given a work that rewards reading and re-reading. To learn more about Berry’s varied work, go to http://9thstlab.blogspot.com Dave Brinks, Caveat Onus: Book One: Meditations One Thru Fifty-Two, Lavender Ink, 2006 Bar owner, activist, poet, and community leader, Dave Brinks has written a remarkable four-book cycle, The Caveat Onus, in a surreal, visionary mode in the peculiar world that is post-Katrina New Orleans. Written figured re-configured – hallucination dream nightmare meditation – balm petition judgment & redemption, Dave Brinks’ Caveat Onus arrives in the post-Katrina post-apocalyptic New Orleans tragedy called by the government a “recovery.” Brinks, though, locates a source: “a voice speaks to you/ from oblivion/ whose mouths are zero-shaped/ and all in the key of blue.” From this ancient tune, Brinks makes use, as poetry must, of all available wisdom and engages in the difficult discipline of considered attention so that “out of this dead city/ you carved yourself free and awoke.” In a city where shortly after Katrina “grey line passengers/ are paying $35 to see the destruction,” Brinks believes “this slender hour comes forward/ to see what can be salvaged.” Caveat Onus comes forward to help show us a way onward for a city and a nation in peril. Duriel Harris, Drag, Elixir Press, 2003 Musician, scholar, singer, sound-artist, Duriel Harris has written an amazing first book. As Sterling Plumpp tells it (correctly!), “Drag is a twenty-first century literary text emerging out of the prism of race, gender, and social class. It is eloquently postmodern funk and intimately original.” Recently, I had the pleasure of hearing Duriel read/perform, and I immediately thought, hallelujah, what bold adventurous funky informed rich poetry. In this her first collection of poetry, Duriel Harris lays claim to the forward movement (an informed forward movement) of works such as Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge. Duriel Harris’s work is as adventurous on the page as it is musically and in performance: “Backwater, yeah, but I ain’t wet, so misters, I ain’t studin’ you:/ Don’t need your blessed doctrine to tell me what to write and when./ Behold, God made me funky. There ain’t nothin’ I can’t do.” Indeed. She and Tracie Morris are cutting us a new rug. Tom Mandel, To the Cognoscenti, Atelos, 2007 A remarkable book in three parts: a long poem sequence “To the Cognoscenti,” a selection of “First Poems,” and “Cheshbon ha-nefesh,” a series of poems that are part of an assigned inventory of the poet’s soul. Mandel is an oddity – perhaps an acquired taste, like a complex red wine. A key figure in the early days of Language poetry (when Mandel lived in the Bay Area), he has since charted a thoroughly independent course as a successful businessman (as a consultant, marketing executive, and entrepreneur). Mandel has considerable intellectual resources (having studied many years ago at the University of Chicago with Hannah Arendt and Saul Bellow), and as a poet he is not trying to please anyone (but himself and what he perceives to be the just demands of poetry), and he is not hustling the Po Biz circuits. Instead, he is producing a measured, serious, deeply thoughtful poetry – perhaps not something that will appeal to younger readers. I find his thinking and his questioning, his candor and his forthright consideration of what is essential to be inspiring and deeply engaging: “You know I wonder sometimes can I/ love this life that turns my soul/ around and around, screwing it/ straight down into the earth/ if this not poetry – then what?/ if it becomes poetry again – then what?” Glenn Mott, Analects, Chax Press, 2007 Analects is a remarkable first book by a wonderfully independent, smart poet, Glenn Mott. The book emerges from Mott’s time in China during the boom of the early and mid-1990s: “In the years I was there the economy of Shanghai grew 19%.” It is, quite clearly, not a typically American book of poetry, i.e., it is not predominantly about me and my feelings. It is a book deeply involved with asking how one does find a place in the world – that respects and observes and analyzes the workings of that world. As a book of poems, Analects puts the form of the poem itself into question, seeking to learn from sources as diverse as Thoreau, Pound, and Confucius. Mott’s ambition is to know, see, and appreciate the world around him with clarity: “There must be a word for/ whelmed –/ to appreciate something the exact amount.” As such, this is a book that George Oppen, perhaps the greatest poet of clarity, would have admired. Stephen Vincent, Walking Theory, Junction Press, 2007 What better measure for poetry, what better metric, what better rhythm and attention to time and place, what more reliable foot possible than poems built upon walks. Routes of the familiar re-viewed and re-incarnated. Place become word. A life lived walking in San Francisco, a poetry compassionate and independent, the scene as seen: “STEAL BACK YOUR LIFE / stenciled in big black letters on the sidewalk.” At times elegiac – for the dead in Iraq, for the poet’s father, for friends – at times celebratory through a kind of slowly emerging ecstasy even in the face of a painfully demanding city: “the heart/ let loose among buildings without trees,/ the lobbies of the dead, people who lean/ variously to struggle with reason against/ an architecture born deadly.” So “what can the poem do, walking, step-by-step: witness, suffer, hope.” Hunter S., Ed Sanders, Bukowski & Missy Suicide by Christian Prozak Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century by Hunter S. Thompson Simon & Schuster though vainglorious and nascent of old gonzód hat Kingdom is most smoking nug of nitrobiased journalcy cured w/ crystal fiction to aggravate the Hogs of War in sad shadow of yr Michael Moore ——but impotent in fury? ie: "Let's face it — the yo-yo president of the U.S.A. knows nothing. He is a dunce. He does what he is told to do — says what he is told to say — poses the way he is told to pose. He is a Fool.... This is not the time to have a bogus rich kid in charge of the White House.... he wantonly and stupidly endorses mass murder of a logical plan to make sure we are still Number One — he is a Jackass by definition — a loud and meaningless animal with no functional intelligence and no balls.... Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us — they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them." Lo, our friendly neighborhood dopefiend has spun another narco-coil twined in clever curlitales of sundry plots converged in theme that as of yet no critics know what to make of bombast but more of ye olde same Cockmuffins! This is a different specimen sophisticated in suspense paced with cops and guns and Depp gelling to the namedrop end avec a secret stitch of aggressions in transgression in face of dick and bush and all their slimy scandaleezas nevermind the mad doc's bullshit self vindication re: fatporn stargone wild what's pisspants hilarious is booze-fueled roadkill pig-limo visions of Clarence Thomas humping whores in Elko lustrush of most quintessential knee-slap Amlit overkill this pseudonym has ever seen blast ratbastards in the ass Ho ho! Bravo! Encore Maestro! War makes art worth a shit. America: A History in Verse Vol. 3, 1962-1970 by Edward Sanders Black Sparrow Books Aye the I in the eye of once Fugly troubabard who après l'evidence of JFK chiggerism poses "Is it not proper to think that military leaders who would propose domestic terror could also kill a president or fashion a patsy?" then all that ML Kingful marching lynching bugging baiting beating in red white & blue blood of sacrificial Camelot lambs (whom most luminous is Ted!) blazing amazing scathing faces thugslugging RatherDan in Panthered past of Mansonland where "The Spirit of Napalm... & his bone-pal Scythe Man the Lurker" spankingly contrasts "the fluffy... condemnation of a writer... famous for his breathy, envious book on... Kesey" adding "You could see Mr. Wolfe in 1827 snickering at the paint-stained clothing of William Blake (and his egalitarian politics) after... snickery visit" till Four Dead in Ohio and flowervisions in the gun as Sanders goes and goes and goes toward volume 4 of Nixon Ford Carter Disco Iran-Contra Reaganation Oblivion making a new Maximus what doesn't condescend. Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems by Charles Bukowski HarperCollins Finally! A dead-Bukowski afterbook that doesn't suck posthumous butt poetry inspired by "my cats, my wife,/the shape of my coat thrown over a chair, the weeping of the planet... the flight of the hummingbird and" the fact that it's so easy to die long before the fact of it so the bird has now busted out the heavy stuff: "how close we all are to being nothing most of the time and for some of us nothing all of the time" since "we are hardly ever as strong/as that which we create" and "most poets are just big tit-suckers: accepting readings taking university chairs praying for tenure writing books on poetic technique and giving lectures" aka "those chattering bitching ninnies who are so quick to insist... that I am not one of them" plus plenty of advice for those who can't: "read this to your class in contemporary literature and tell them how easy it is. then send those children out to walk the asphalt like the rest of us" meanwhile "some are good at cleaning the shit stains out of the toilet; others at polishing the mirror of their own vanity; many are expert at composing inoffensive verse or sucking dick. but while the drippings from their thin minds spill from their tongue I'll continue to type" the unBukowski: "mental charutos pimentel charutos pimentel charuto entel charutos pimentel charutos pimen..." Say What? No wonder this voice was wisely left for surreal existential end of "flowers floating on the lake. New Jersey dogs in thrall... do abandoned factories ever scream at mid- night? I am warming up now as bottle caps explode in my brain. I am giving off smoke. I am really smoking now. I am an Easter egg. I am a paper clip.... as the world reaches its final foolish conclusion I realize that nothing has been learned" and as the "powers-that-be persist/in tolerating shit" Bukowski plays the "shuck and jive" like horses at the track a "pure folly to get slick about" cuz ultimately (he he he) poetry's "a lie." Suicide Girls by Missy Suicide Feral House, L.A. http://suicidegirls.com This is a glossy sexy photobook of saucy naked nudie Goths and Gen Y hotties but also a statement of a shaven piercéd generation tattooed Betty Booply not nipple porn for wanking wetly (though you could) but the stuff of coffee table yakage ahhhhh sweet sassy lasses how we love your boobs and asses your bad grrrrl grins and vixen visions but next time leave yr poetry at home. |
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