Poetry Reviews

Worn Smooth between Devourings

Lauren Camp
NYQ Books ($18.95)

by Tiffany Troy

Like the animals that follow the order of nature, humans in Lauren Camp’s latest poetry collection, Worn Smooth between Devourings, follow the order of capitalism—thus, the speaker pays the mortgage “on the trees” and bakes muffins “in the middle of a great / battle we’re having with disappointment.” Readers might identify with that disappointment, which Camp portrays as the overgrowth of weeds, an anathema to a pristine and well-trimmed Victorian garden—a conflict that mirrors the poet’s inner turmoil about needing to pay the bills while wishing for more fulfillment than is allowed service workers, whose fate has been predetermined. Drawing from her own experience, Camp conveys how an unfamiliar landscape paradoxically allows her to become familiar with herself and adopt new ways of seeing.

Throughout the collection, Camp teaches readers how to “tell time” via closeups of personified objects (the “clock at the church kept to its ticking, its bells / with their sticky, poised hope”), and asks us to consider them in the context of the institutions (the church, the workforce) to which they belong. In doing so, she compels us to take a step back and reevaluate the way in which the landscape embodies our deepest longings (“Now I gaze at this / quarrelsome desert: barren / with discipline”). These objects, like the doll in Elena Ferrente’s novel The Lost Daughter, take on a life of their own, their limbs and appendages an extension of the reader’s. Like Ferrante’s protagonist, a middle aged Neapolitan woman who travels abroad and spends the majority of the time on the beach, Camp’s speaker enjoys an environment with a backdrop for free introspection.

The “devourings” in the book’s title refers to ecological concerns as well as the speaker’s personal struggles. Camp invites the reader to think about the body in motion, to see the way the reader must “leave the calendar” of our busy lives “to find sun familiar again,” contrasting a man’s ominous cat whistle with the coyotes “whistling about their beautiful lives.” Wildlife and the desert terrain recur as motifs throughout the book: As the speaker gets acclimated to the solitude of hearing “no one but pages,” and as “every inch / of our property dried out” in the “long stretch of knuckled nerves” of the landscape near her home, she considers the “absolutely unknown” of climate change’s effects. Camp chooses poetic forms that mimic our acculturation to the “slow mountains”; in “the river” we find “a yearning, a small seep, a lowest door” that we can step through so as to see eye to eye with “the mountains’ ashen edges / and ambition.” The powerful suggestion is that we might behold nature not as a metaphor, but in its reality of wildness.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Into the Good World Again

Max Garland
Holy Cow! Press ($16.95)

by Catherine Jagoe

Poet Max Garland’s quiet and profound fourth collection uses themes of the pandemic—isolation, distance, time, breath—to approach the existential question of how to live with the knowledge that we and everyone we love will die. Into the Good World Again is haunted not just by the “lethal math of plague,” but by the brevity, fragility, and loneliness of human life. “Soon enough,” Garland writes, “the breath of air that shaped itself / into the syllables of my name will be elsewhere / and otherwise.”

In a way, Garland is a contemporary Metaphysical poet, and indeed he alludes to Andrew Marvell while keeping vigil in “What’s Left For You To Say?”:

this slag of earthly light, this world
enough and time to watch the one
you’ve loved the longest raft away.

Alongside his preoccupation with mortality, love, and religion, Garland’s cosmic vision encompasses both the galactic and the infinitesimal, the “300 million worlds / in the habitable zones of sunlike stars” and the “outer shell of the carbon atom.” Grit as a motif resurfaces throughout Into the Good World Again, a grit connected to both the small life forms that often operate in darkness (worms, zebra mussels, crayfish, morels) and to the “grit of the ongoing” in the human world, where change and suffering “may be the Bible.”

Time in this book is elastic and nonlinear, compressed to a mere blink (an image Garland uses in several poems) and infinitely expansive. It is destructive and consoling at once, since it softens jagged shards into “the rounded shape of the shining world.” Each human life contains ongoing pasts—and Garland’s own memories are conjured with extraordinary cinematic clarity in poems such as “Morels,” which uses mushroom imagery to link the shape of the now-dead elms of mid-century America, the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, and the “small dark churches” with “convoluted steeples” of morels writhing in a pan.

Garland’s vivid evocations of place and time sometimes resemble those of Dylan Thomas; he works with controlled use of alliteration and judiciously chosen line breaks:

But there was no crossing the river without dead-
dragging home behind—caved-in creekbank,
brick thick Bible, the habit
of hunkering in the presence
of whatever glittered godlike and won.

His style is notable for a lucid musicality that feels hard-won, achieved by distillation. Fittingly, he lives in a city named Eau Claire (“clear water”), and his writing is similarly deep and crystalline, returning again and again to light, water, bedrock. The tone is typically controlled but illuminated now and again by glimpses of gorgeous lyricism: “Kingfishers, like exiled gods, / patrol the varieties of glitter”; “the landscape shook loose like a ribbon”; “light / through the windows was briefly honey.” There are also flashes of humor, as when Garland notices his peers’ aging skin “randomly splotched and riddled / as if scrawled by a drunken cartographer” or the mouse in his trailer who every night “climbed his sink pipe, / and sank his teeth into the soap.”

The closing couplet in “Ocracoke” encapsulates Into the Good World Again: “The deeper the listening, / the richer the world.” We are fortunate indeed that Garland is listening.

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Diary of a String

Mark Francis Johnson
Spiral Editions ($18)

by Eric Tyler Benick

“Je est un autre” wrote Rimbaud, famously suggesting the writer’s inherent split as well as the larger aporia of selfhood-as-construct. It’s a split that is reflected in the literary reader: “Many readings are perverse,” Barthes claims in The Pleasure of the Text, “implying a split, a cleavage.” Barthes continues to explain that this cleavage rests in the paradox of literacy to know and unknow simultaneously, to both familiarize and estrange. Yet if reader and writer are doubles, and if both are cleaved not only in their solitary interaction with the material but in their spectral engagement with an other through the material, the bodies of literacy begin to fractal quickly.

In Mark Francis Johnson’s new poetry collection Diary of a String, the lyrical I is obfuscated not only by the relational estrangement housed in the act of writing but also in the quotidian estrangements of labor. In “Woody Excrescences,” Johnson writes, “What all is missing // and I have forgotten my life, / it.” Here, the poet explores a double loss (both missing and forgetting) as well as the inaccessible subsistence of this “it.”

As the Johnson lines quoted above might suggest, the pronouns used in Diary of a String are rhizomatic and irresolute. Just as Rimbaud’s I is an other, the poet’s selves show up in the conglomerate experiences of the outer: “‘They’ is clearly the voice of self-love,” he writes in “Also and Too.” By inverting the impressions of the pronoun, Johnson shows that the “inner life” is actually a breezy dialectic of further estrangements. He closes this section with an attentive apostrophe: “O sensitive parrot aware you / never encountered language.”

It’s a key point: Ecological wonders, subject to destruction by the Anthropocene, are spared its logocentric tragedies. In contrast, we know at this very moment there are microplastics in our oceans, intestines, and genitals, yet the shock of this knowledge is readily absorbed by language rather than by our actions. Johnson’s inverted pronouns and attention to the outer unfold this order of things; the aforementioned parrot is both “aware” and saved by its own illiteracy—not from death, because death is certain, but from suffering the slow termination of value we are daily subjected to, which we render and materialize through language.

Diary of a String is wrought by these questions. In “Date of Last Attack,” Johnson writes that “every hemorrhoid was first an idea,” which brilliantly takes the material effect of stress and strain and dematerializes it. We are no longer talking about the hard facts of the body but about the imperious design of language to impersonate experience. If Stein’s “rose is a rose is a rose” tautology works to unify word and object, Johnson’s ideated hemorrhoid exploits a more painful aspect to the realization that reality inheres in naming: Language is neither empirical nor consistent, and yet our understanding depends on it. The section ends with another shift to the exterior: “Take new little // fishes, destitute upon arrival no / recollection of offense. O fishes! // your use is to teach us / a fish is better off never / encountering its troubles.”

Interestingly, in this context “destitution” would appear to be more of an asset than a lack. The fish’s instructive value is expressed by its freedom from language, which constitutes a paradox: The fish is illiterate yet elocutes a model existence through that illiteracy. Note also how the notion of “encounter” is rooted in logocentric failure. Would many of us even notice the hemorrhoid without its semiotics, or does their very creation offer us access to an interiority that the hemorrhoid itself is entirely estranged from (leaving aside the question of whether the hemorrhoid is separate from “us”)?

Poet Ted Rees says that Johnson’s collection contains “the palpable sickness of the plaintive.” Yes, and worse, this sickness resists clear diagnosis. It would be easy to launch a polemic against the sickness of global capitalism in light of its demands on the body, its egregious contributions to war, genocide, and climate change, its molecular infections of commodity, etc.—but we would also be fabulizing a convenient bogeyman. Still, no part of the “world” is untouched by this illness, which at times feels moribund. If Édouard Glissant is correct to say that “every poetics is a palliative for eternity,” then might we see Johnson’s poems as addressing these miasmic illnesses of modernity, a mode by which to make sense of subjugation, exploitation, and destruction? Aren’t we who reject the frameworks of capitalism forced into some kind of palliative care against the terminal diagnosis of its forces? If the Industrial Revolution marked the decline of the sublime, how might we subvert the mechanized and colonized systems of our era to nurture all that it has taken from us?

Diary of a String offers constructive ways to consider these questions. Take the poem “One Hot Afternoon”:  

Very far from
day and night

due to wind? And the next “morning” I
-a spontaneous production of the earth

;no memory
disputes this-

am requesting a transfer. It’s given,
I speedily perish,

the
spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer.

Even while shattering the spatiotemporal, Johnson still cannot shed the language of labor, a language that continuously haunts his poems. His speaker is fully uprooted as a “spontaneous production of the earth” forced into the nihilism of commerce, where even the permission to die must be sought from some arbitrary superior. This final line—one of the most affecting in the book—is our diagnostic moment, our chance to reckon with the forced obsolescence of the sublime. One might recall William Carlos Williams’s observation “The pure products of America go crazy”; they certainly have, and they are no longer pure but beaten to shit by we who are also daily beaten to shit, who in order to be beaten slightly less must beat others to shit, until absolutely no part of us (and by us, I mean everything) resembles its natural state. There is no option of return, which anyway would present its own ethical problems.

So yes, “the / spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer,” and they will continue to do so until our collective illness is no longer tenable, our palliative efforts futile—until, as Williams’s “To Elsie” portends, there is “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.” Meanwhile, books like Diary of a String make a laudable effort to focus our attention and our will on this dilemma.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

A Year of Last Things

Michael Ondaatje
Knopf ($28)

by Bill Tremblay

T.S. Eliot famously said: “The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” One of the many pleasures in reading Michael Ondaatje’s new collection, A Year of Last Things, is discovering how he fictionalizes his. One senses a real first person in the poems, and not merely because he uses “I” in some poems and in the prose near the end of the book. But the voice here is largely a special third person capable of being intimate and objective at once. These poems are by Ondaatje but not about him in any limited autobiographical sense, except perhaps when he’s writing about writing; thus they evoke a poetics of the transpersonal, leaving a wake reminiscent of Dickinson’s “zero at the bone.”

This poetics takes shape thanks to Ondaatje’s ability to reach for emotional connections through objects cherished for their talismanic power to evoke the beloved. Take the volume’s opening poem, “Lock”:

Reading the lines he loves
he slips them into a pocket,
wishes to die with his clothes
full of torn-free stanzas
and the telephone numbers
of his children in far cities.

The lines carry us forward until we “reach that horizon . . . where you might see your friends.” The poem continues:

How I loved that lock when I saw it
all those summers ago,
                  when we arrived
out of a storm into its evening light,

and gave a stranger some wine
in a tin cup

Even then I wanted
to slip into the wet dark
rectangle and swim on
barefoot to other depths
where nothing could be seen
that was a further story.

“Lock” establishes not only the book’s jump-cut cinematic style but also its romantic sensibility. Ondaatje is all about asking what’s important in life—friendships, encounters, flirtations, intimacies. His feeling for language is set out in “Definition,” which begins “All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundred/pages of a Sanskrit dictionary”; as he wanders down this path, he brings words, vowels, and accents to

                                      light
from that distant village
reflected in a cloud,
or your lover’s face lit
by the moonlight on a stage

Landscapes nudge the dialect.
In far places travellers know
a faint gesture can mean
desire or scorn,
                                   just as

a sliver of a phrase thrown away
hides charms within its grammar

Throughout A Year of Last Things, Ondaatje montages stories from biographies of artists, composers, philosophers, songs, films, and paintings into “that further intimacy that comes with trusting a fiction, a non-personal truth, going towards what you do not yet know.” “A Cricket in Oplontis 79 CE” fuses the idea of “last things” with the patient work of restoring ancient frescos and mosaics buried in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius whose “fragments / wrested away from lava / to remember the end of a world / how it had all been.” “Nothing else lasted,” the poem tells us, “as if these might be the only memory / of ourselves when we are gone.” One might ponder this poem as an archeology of the present, with its endless talk of the end times; again, Ondaatje seems to suggest what matters is not the creation of “art” but of memorials to what one loved in life.

The book’s prose sections seem to have been waiting in the wings for their turn, especially the author’s memoir of school days in Sri Lanka entitled “Winchester House.” In it, Ondaatje writes about his writing process, including taking traits from real people to build fictional characters “during the hunt for your own story. As with photographs, the world is deliriously random, inarticulate.” Against this backdrop, he relates how there were “years when we learned to protect ourselves by becoming liars, being devious, never confessing to a crime—in fact, confessing to nothing, good or bad.” He goes on: “Stories, letters, films, memoirs of our youth, are nothing without some real clue or glance toward the truth.”

There is no question that A Year of Last Things is a book of major significance. In its summative penultimate piece, “Estuaries,” Ondaatje tells us,

There are places where language refuses to meet a reader, like cursive scripts that flow as if unawakened, or those lost voices of waterfalls. It can occur even where you attempt to end your story—some improbable place, as a friend once wrote, that you will walk through only after you are dead, your bare feet on an ancient mosaic in Tunis that could perhaps guide you like a terza rima towards a safe place to complete your story.

He takes us to such an improbable place in the collection’s coda-like, final poem, “Talking In A River.” Here, perhaps, a more fitting way to find completion emerges:

You journey beyond the familiar properties, find yourself
before long in anonymous water, nothing audible from shore,
only the shake of reflection like a breaking word.
Is this a different mood of the Black River?
With daylight there is the disguised location of the stars.

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galáxias

Haroldo de Campos
Translated by Odile Cisneros
with Suzanne Jill Levine, Charles Perrone, Christopher Middleton, and Norman Maurice Potter
Ugly Duckling Presse ($20)

by Elizabeth Zuba

Who can explain how these things happen, but somehow just a few short weeks after both Jerome Rothenberg and Marjorie Perloff’s passing, here comes the first full translation of galáxias, the magnum opus of Brazilian luminary Haroldo de Campos — a book that both writers spent decades sounding the bells for. Hooray for the universe for this unexpected and poignant tribute—and hooray for Odile Cisneros, whose English rendering of arguably one of the most acrobatic and multilectical literary texts since James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is an absolute triumph.  

But to Rothenberg and Perloff’s point, Campos may still be one of the great literary giants of the twentieth century you’ve never heard of, so here’s a quick recap: Together with his equally brilliant brother Agosto and fellow writer Décio Pignatari, Campos led the concrete poetry revolution in the 1950s and ’60s, writing the manifesto Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry and thrusting Brazil onto the international stage. Serially publishing poems and critical pieces in journals and magazines, his influence as a poet, theorist, and translator was wide-reaching and earth-rattling in all three disciplines; Cuban writer Severo Sarduy called him a “Pound-like patriarch.”

A polymath and polyglot, Campos (sometimes in collaboration with his brother) translated scores of writers into the Portuguese, often for the first time, including Goethe, Pound, Joyce, Mayakovsky, Mallarmé, Dante, Paz, and Homer, not to mention Provençal troubadours, Russian futurists, classical Chinese poets, and the books of Genesis and Ecclesiastes. Regarding Campos’s extraordinary reach, Derrida wrote, “on the horizon of literature, and above all in the intimacy of the language of languages, each time so many languages in each language, I know that Haroldo would have access to that like me, before me, better than me.”

Suffice to say, translation was not a side-hustle for Campos; it was his world view. Also, he didn’t call it translation, but transcreation, or sometimes transillumination, translight, and transluciferation, among other monikers. Proceeding from concepts of concrete poetry, Campos saw words not simply as vehicles for meaning but as little morpheme prisms, abundant and complex in their phonemic and graphic characters, along with potential structural, sonic, and connotative relationalities. For Campos, words, like poetry, do not mean but are. And as such, no word or particular relations of words can ever be made over into another language or anything else, but rather must be born totally anew — reciprocal and parallel yes, but autonomous and equally singular.

It’s hard to give an example of Campos’s transcreation, in that he was transcreating into the Portuguese, but fortunately for us, Cisneros has skillfully adopted Campos’s practice in tackling galáxias. Though the English edition does not include the original Portuguese, here are the volume’s opening lines:

e começo aqui e meço aqui este começo e recomeço e remeço e arremesso
e aqui me meço quando se vive sob a espécie da viagem o que importa
não é a viagem mas o começo . . .

Now, here’s Cisneros (in collaboration with Suzanne Jill Levine— three of the cantos are collaborations with or contributions by other translators) impressively following his lead:

and here i begin i spin here the beguine i respin and grin to begin
to release and realize life begins not arrives at the end of a trip which is
why i begin to respin . . .

And here’s a very literal translation (of my own), just to give you an idea of Levine and Cisneros’s transcreation in action:

and I begin here and I measure here this beginning and I begin again and I stir and I throw
and here I measure when you live in the form of a journey what matters
is not the journey but the beginning . . .

You can hear how rhythm and sound are imperative for Campos, and the way Levine and Cisneros sustain that sonic intoning, while also reimagining it from the lyrical, paroxytonic rhythm of Portuguese into the more monosyllabic staccato of English. Semantically, their lines deviate from the specific meanings of each word of the original, but reciprocate the overall intention: the biblical-cyclical invocation of a journey as a continual beginning. Visually, the English “in” word-endings lace together in a netlike pattern over the lines just as “eço” does in the Portuguese, as do the little sequin i’s that shimmer about them, graphically recreating the “e” (and) in the original.

There’s yet another transcreation-esque move here you might miss if you don’t know that Campos is an unabashed glutton for sliding door homonyms and wormhole cultural-lectical allusions. Brilliantly, Levine and Cisneros mutate “begin” to “beguine” to conjure both the West Indian dance and the classic Cole Porter song “Begin the Beguine,” evoking concepts of lingual and cultural hegemony that will resurface throughout the text. Campos would be proud. To be clear, these first few lines are among the simplest in galáxias; a discussion of this epic poem and its transcreation would take a book-length critical work.

this is not a travel book because travel is not a book of travel
because a book is travel at best i aver it’s a baedeker of epiphanies
at worst i can swear it’s an epiphany in a baedeker for golden domes of
an orthodox russo-byzantine church set deep in geneva going downhill
on route de malagnou heading to the city center through a glimpsed
vision of the oldtown and canals you could get married whynot with the chinese
lions that some fatherfriar wayfarer returning from a journey a
pilgrimage to oriental missions learned to sculpt at the entrance of the esplanade
of convento de são francisco northern paraíba at the cobblestoned entrance
overflowing eight mouths of portalgates in contained and then scattered
steps drying racks of stone and joão pessoa in the summer rain was not
an island by gauguin bronzing away in the distance paradisiacal peace in an iamb of silks
and hair blowing in the wind plumed quill in the sultry summer and seated in a café

Widely considered his magnum opus, Campos wrote galáxias over the course of two decades, starting in 1963 and publishing the poem in its entirety for the first time in 1984; the 1992 edition was additionally accompanied by an audio recording of sixteen of the cantos, reinforcing the importance of the voco in his total verbivocovisual work. In that later edition, Campos says:

The galáxias situate themselves on the border between poetry and prose. In this kaleidoscopic book, there’s an epic, narrative gesture—mini-stories that come together and dissolve . . . but it is the image that prevails, the vision or calling of the epiphanic. . . . This permutational book has, as its semantic backbone, an always recurrent yet varied theme all along: travel as a book and the book as travel (despite the fact that—and for that very reason—it is not exactly a “travel book”. . .).

A series of fifty “galactic cantos” that center loosely around different places Campos has traveled, the work charts not only the poet’s literal journeys around the world, but also the atemporal, multiverse ones he takes by way of spiraling slipstreams of language. Densely covering the right-hand side of the page—absent punctuation, capitalization, stanzas or sections—but balanced with a blank verso not unlike the empty expanse around any galaxy, each canto is in and of itself a lexical and literary cosmic ride that plummets through wormholes of languages, sounds, graphemes, time, and cultural and literary allusions, making it an extraordinary experiment in a Babel-transcendent poetry.

Campos describes the forty-eight cantos that sit between the two beginning-end/end-beginning poems of galáxias as “movable,” each introducing “its ‘difference’ but contain(ing), in itself, like a watermark, the image of the entire book, which can be seen from an Alephic vantagepoint.” Aleph as in A, I asked myself? I looked it up. Probably not. More likely, Alephic as in the mathematical sets that number the infinite. No, I cannot explain that mathematically. But “Alephic” makes a lot of sense as a description for this universe-expanding and yet ultimately contained book—like a subparticle is a thing you can count, but also a way to see forever.

du scheinst ein rotes wort zu faerben through the voice of sophocles through the voice
of hölderlin schiller laughing away goethe smiling illustrious company he must have been
crazy herr hölderlin or he pretended to be because sophocles only meant
you seem worried about something ismene to antigone through the voice of sophocles
one of the most laughable products of pedantry that red-tinted word . . .

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a sketch of Buckminster Fuller’s imagined Geoscope, but I’d describe it as a human-size earth model you can stick your head into and experience the whole world happening at once from the inside out; Fuller’s hope was to expand one’s sense of an individual relationship to the world as in fact a series of connections and interrelationships. When the architect Jesse Reiser recently recreated a Geoscope of sorts for a show at Princeton University, it was a totally immersive multimedia experience complete with multiple voices, screens, sounds, cultural references, and views from and of earth. Reading galáxias is a little like that, only instead of a Geoscope, it’s a multiverse scope, and instead of a physical structure, the spaceship is language itself. To say it is an otherworldly experience doesn’t begin to cover the sheer magnitude of the joyful abundance that carries you along.

saffron yellow egg vermillion verging on pompeian lava red you could
say after seeing pompeii the amorini friezes against a ground of
giallorosso but this is rome the roman colors like flags the blue
most fine most frigid of that rarefied january morning the mild winter
that year almost springing in the first greens and reds and tawnygold
and redyellow yolkbisque and carmine and oldancient imperial walls
oldancient baroque palazzi mansionhovels alternating with
villas lei può dirmi dov’è la via del consolato i’m not italian i’m an
amurr’kan from inside a sports car and could you tell me sir where
the swiss airline office is tente de me entender professor por favor . . .

Ultimately, writing and translating were metaphysical enterprises for Campos. In his author’s note to the 1984 publication of galáxias, he writes, “today, retrospectively, I would tend to see it as an epic insinuation that resolved itself as an epiphanic one.” Spinning and colliding all that immense knowledge around in his head—particle-accelerator style—Campos saw endless and perpetual connections between words and sounds, images and ideas, that spoke to some greater truth or meaning. As Cisneros and Sergio de Bessa have written in their introduction to Novas (Northwestern University Press, 2005), a selection of Campos’s writings from poetry to theory, Campos saw, in that wild Geoscope brain of his, that “true meaning could only be glimpsed through prismatic refraction.” Lucky are we who get to strap on our space helmets and touch the multiverse through his transilluminated lens.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Selected Poems: 1959-2022

Neeli Cherkovski
Lithic Press ($28)

by Zack Kopp

A writer of poems that fill one up like nourishing and enjoyable word-meals, Neeli Cherkovski (born in 1945) continued creating his artfully imaginative verse right until the end of his life on March 19, 2024. The posthumous publication of Cherkovski’s Selected Poems: 1959-2022 represents his long overdue recognition as one of the most essential poets of the Beat Generation. In addition to the searching, haunted poems in this beautifully printed 400-page book, an introduction by Charles Bernstein situates how their author consistently “bows head in respect to disrespect”; while photographs track a life of literary engagement, starting with a picture taken with Lawrence Ferlinghetti around the time Cherkovski’s Ferlinghetti: A Biography (Doubleday, 1979) was published, and one of an even younger version of Cherkovski sitting on a tricycle next to his friend and mentor Charles Bukowski (also on a tricycle).

Perhaps due to having caroused with Bukowski in Los Angeles during the 1960s—adventures recounted not only by Bukowski in poems, stories, and articles (where he commented more than once that Cherkovski would “make a great rabbi someday,” popularizing and belittling him in one swipe) but also in Cherkovski’s landmark biography Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski (Random House, 1991)—Cherkovski’s work has often been perceived in the shadow of Bukowski’s, so proper estimation of his own poetic voice has been delayed. The pair shared a winsome dynamic, as can be seen in an early poem in Selected Poems, “THIS ONE BUKOWSKI THREW INTO THE FIREPLACE (WITHOUT READING)”:

Bukowski looks out of his window
he looks out of his Hollywood window
his forty-year window
his Hollywood Park window
Bukowski looks down from his three story window
he can see little children playing below
and he cries because someday they will die
when the fallout crosses the street they will die
and if not the bomb then age or sickness
or some holy accident
he opens the window to let in the air

But beyond Cherkovski’s teen years, the differences between the writers became more pronounced than their similarities. In contrast to Bukowski’s habitually spare voice, Cherkovski writes poetry as if to give the very letters on the page back their lives by turning them into trees again—albeit in a whole other spirit. Take “Leaves,” from 1979:

ONCE THE UNBREAKABLE LEAVES SPOKE A LANGUAGE
THAT FLOWED LIKE PURE CLEAR WATER FROM THE
BREATHLESS LAND ONTO PROSPEROUS FIELDS & SEA-
LINES STRETCHED TO ISLANDS WHERE TALL SWAYING
PALMS BECAME THATCH-ROOFED HOUSES FOR PEOPLE
WHO BELIEVED IN MANY GODS AND IN TONGUES OF
FIRE THAT CALLED FROM DEEP IN THE RESTLESS
OCEAN & THEY KNEW THE NAMES, LONG OBSCURED,
OF PALM GOD AND GRASS GOD AND GOD IN SAND
AND WATER & THE LEAVES FALL LIKE IRON PLATING
ONTO THE AWAKENING PLAIN & DAWN, INDEFINABLE
BEAST, CRAWLS UP THE COASTAL HILLS AND DOWN
TO THE SHORE & ONCE THE CANYON LEAVES DID
NOT REST LIKE TABLETS, ONE RED, ONE YELLOW,
HOLDING WORDS OF A WISDOM MORE SENTIENT, LESS
BELLICOSE, FILLED WITH GREATER UNDERSTANDING
& THOSE WHO PRESSED THEM INTO BOUND VOLUMES
RESTORED OLD ENERGIES TO THE SUN AND PASSED ON

Always seeing more books in the trees, the ocean full of individual drops of liquid, and mercy going in and out of print as time proceeds, Cherkovski offers readers the flash of living language; there is a primordial omniscience in his work, as if the sudden brightness of dinosaur-brained birds is lighting up the pitch-black darkness.

Let’s therefore remember this wizened Bohemian bard who so passionately wrote from his neighborhood of living letters “near San Francisco but not San Francisco but part of San Francisco, frozen in time somewhere in the sixties or maybe the sixty-eight-seventies,” as he once described it in a Facebook post. Besides being a gifted inimitable West Coast poet and a pioneering proselytizer for the writers he dubbed “Whitman’s Wild Children,” he was a lovely person who invited all who met him into the warm embrace of lyric poetry. Let’s remember him, in fact, by heeding the instructions offered in one of the last poems in this volume, “Don’t Forget Me”:

when I am gone
think of me
as you tinker in
the technological forest
find time to draw
my words on your cloud
think of me as
a strip of bark
on an ash tree
as you lead the bees
on a country path

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

learn my odes by heart
remember the timbre
of my voice,
don’t forget me,
I was a poet

come listen
when my spirit rises
on branches
of the last redwood tree
wipe my tears
tell me I’m remembered
lie if you must

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Women on the Moon

Debora Kuan
The Word Works ($19)

by Julia Klahr

In Women on the Moon, Debora Kuan’s vulnerable new poetry collection, the author draws on her Asian-American heritage to explore the gravity rooting a woman’s life in an “imaginary firmament” by invoking the ethereal figure of Chang-e, the Chinese moon goddess. Divided into five “lunar phases” examining the place of women (particularly women of color) in contemporary American society, the book is a refreshing take on modern femininity that finds magic in the banal domesticity of the everyday.

Kuan’s free verse seems to signal the liberty of expansive contemplation, especially in the book’s “Gibbous” section. In recalling the myth of Chang-e’s path to immortality, the author casts a mystical light on her heritage:

Say a woman leaves you for the moon.
Say you discover after turning over the quilted

page, she’s drunken the elixir,
she’s gone—ghost of indented slippers, pulse

thumping beneath your birdless ribcage.

However, Kuan has no less praise for the corporeal, as in the pithy “Magic Lesson”:

. . . every woman
has been sawed in half
at least a dozen times
before sunset.

The book’s opening phase, “Last Quarter Moon: Mothering,” features “Having a Baby at 43,” a poem that portrays the speaker as apprehensive and vulnerable as she grapples with older motherhood. Following recent egregious displays of anti-Asian sentiment, “One Day in America” subtly evokes an Asian American mother’s fears while watching her child:

         when you catch sight of me,
you practice your wave, opening and shutting

your fist in the weighted air. Your nose and chin
and eyes are splattered with dark red

berry purée, as you kick your feet
in your highchair.

Here, Kuan tries to make sense of a horror-filled day in which the Asian-American spa workers to whom her book is dedicated were brutally killed. Kuan reinforces the devastating impact through enjambment, using meaningful line breaks to help carry the movement of thought. Her language, however, remains informal, with a natural cadence that makes it readable despite the difficult content.

The book’s next phase, “Full Moon: Coupling,” includes a foray into end-stopped and end-rhymed verse, where the interlaced quatrains of “Man & Wife” emphasize a sense of burdensome mundanity and exhaustion:

By dinner, we tear our bread with both hands,
forget candles, eat straight from the pan.
We ready our sorrys on hooks by the nightstands,
so we can reach them as quick as we can.

Images of married life’s predictability and dull routine, where “the complaints go on dripping, / stalactites in a dolomite cave,” continue in wry poems like “How to Live with Your Husband,” but in the book’s final section, Kuan’s speaker seems to embrace the joy of the ordinary in a series of still lifes. The brief tercets of “Still Life With Mushroom” feature deft use of alliteration (“cloud of cartilage”), internal rhymes (“the unsteady / shed”), and other poetic devices that suggest a sense of order and acceptance, one summarized in the poem’s poignant final lines:

I have married my life
to lowliness, and I want
to cry aloud with happiness.

Kuan deploys cultural icons as varied as Anna May Wong and Freddie Mercury as she contemplates subjects ranging from female invisibility to racial stereotyping, and  throughout, her singular lens highlights the inequities of American life. In “The Night After You Lose Your Job,” for instance, Kuan’s characterization of a newly unemployed mother embodies an implicit call for greater recognition of society’s overlooked caregivers.

Lyrical, vulnerable and astute, Women on the Moon is a wide-ranging contemporary ode to womanhood. Shedding light on romance and realism while celebrating the contributions of marginalized women, Kuan’s voice advocates for their honest representation with an acuity that speaks volumes.

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The Cheapest France in Town

Seo Jung Hak
Translated by Megan Sungyoon
World Poetry ($20)

by John Bradley

“The value of this book is, at present, the same as the lowest online-exclusive price for a half box of thirty Shin instant noodles,” deadpans Seo Jung Hak in his introduction to The Cheapest France in Town, a collection of prose poems. Even before reading a single poem, the reader has entered Seo’s world of the absurd. The author gleefully takes apart logic in the thirty-four poems (and a foldout poem) in this subversive bilingual edition.

For those who believe that the prose poem has been thoroughly explored, many surprises await. One innovation of Seo’s is to offer two versions of the same prose poem: “There’s Nothing Between Us” and “There’s Nothing Between Barns” appear on the same page, the texts almost identical—but wherever the first uses the word “barn,” the second uses “us.” For example, “The scent of lilac seeping into our faces sent the barn up in flames” in the first becomes “The scent of lilac seeped into our face sent us up in flames” in the second. Such a small change, with a tense shift, produces surreal results.

Even more innovative is the foldout poem at the back of the book that makes a small box (or rather two boxes—one in Korean and one in English). Seo’s obsession with boxes, those reliable tools of consumerism, becomes literal here as the reader is given the opportunity to construct their very own paper box adorned with poetry. One box fold reads: “If you order online, / two copies of the / book / with / his awkward smile / will be delivered / in a paper box.” As Seo enjoys satirizing familiar enticements, he is not above subverting even the title of a poem, that sacrosanct entity so vital to the reader; the title “You’re Necessities” plays with “your” and “you’re,” a distinction that bedevils many English speakers.

Not content with subverting prose poem expectations and language conventions, Hak also problematizes punctuation, mainly by violating the proper use of the comma. While the reader may at first believe these odd commas are typos, Megan Sungyoon points out deeper resonances in her translator’s note: “even an element as small as a comma can completely undermine the sentence structure, catapulting us into unfamiliar syntax.” Here are a few examples of those “catapulting” commas: “You become, a tree,” “The highlight, of the conference was mispronouncing a word,” and “Where is, everyone.” One of the poem titles even includes a comma, “Quite,”—aptly demonstrating how nothing is off limits to Seo.

While there are many references to France in this book, Seo appears to be influenced less by the French Surrealists than by a writer from Prague—Franz Kafka. It would not seem out of place if we were told that Joseph K in The Trial had this experience: “When he opened his lunch he saw the word ‘freedom’ written in black beans.” Unlike Kafka, though, Seo focuses not only on the absurdity of the situation, but on language itself. Noticing the dangerous lunch of their fellow office worker, his colleagues come to his rescue: “By the fast and precise chopsticks of the colleagues, the beans disappeared one bean at a time so ‘freedom’ was turned ‘freed’ and then ‘feed’ and then ‘fed’ and then ‘fd’ and then was completely gone.” Once again, Seo uses humor to resolve the conflict: “one of the colleagues farted once as the price of digesting ‘freedom.’”

Given the challenges of translating such a non-conventional poet, Megan Sungyoon deserves much acclaim. Not only does she maintain clarity despite Seo’s odd diction and non-standard punctuation, she also captures his strange and utterly unique playfulness. Who else but Seo would compare writing a poem to “spitting a seed out of your mouth—phut”?

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Public Abstract

Jane Huffman
The American Poetry Review ($16)

by Erick Verran

Like a Purcell aria, Jane Huffman’s poetry is plaintive, formally numb, and indefatigably self-pitying. Early in Public Abstract, Huffman introduces “my brother death,” the Thanatos to her Hypnos: “Held the broom / Of sleep // Between / My teeth // Until I slept,” she mutters (and readers might note the cover art, Albrecht Dürer’s Pillow Studies).  Recalling the ill lungs with which it begins, this debut collection is by turns caught up short in shallow brushstrokes and morbidly expansive:

I am under-interpreting my symptoms, the doctor says. My interpretation can no longer be trusted. I’m seated in a glass spirometry machine. On one monitor, green lines tick against a dark backdrop. On another, a cursor draws roulettes. It will feel like you’re breathing with your mouth against a brick wall, the doctor says. Air buckles behind my lips. So in love with interpretation, I’m blue in the face from kissing it.

Though koans abound—a goldfish pond, for instance, “Is mostly water / Little gold in it at all / Despite its name”—haibun, which combines narrative prose with haiku, is the main attraction. Haibun was invented in the late 1700s by Bashō during a months-long journey through the Japanese hinterland, as recounted in his travelogue The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Huffman, trapped somewhere between agoraphobia (“with the curl / of my ear to the door”) and invalidism (“Mortified to move / My body through // The world // In the way / That it demands”), keeps to the country of her emotional interior, sketching poems that would fit onto envelope paper.

Like Emily Dickinson, who is echoed here, Huffman is neither straightforward nor deliberately cryptic, but rather mysteriously honest. Dickinson, though, for all her proto-modernity, was never this recursive (“I was / small and dizzying. I was dizzy. I rode / in small and dizzying circles”—here she sounds more like Robert Creeley or John Taggart). Huffman’s wish to thank literally everyone in the book’s end pages—university administrators, a twelfth-century troubadour, the family dogs—is perhaps unconsciously snobbish, while in her more maximalist mode she can slip into scholastic preoccupation, as prose experimenters are wont to do:

In the first translation is a hammering. “Should”—a moral judgment. An oiled object laid bare on a linen bed. “Shouldn’t” tied around the “should” with butcher’s string.

In the second, a yip, a certainty, desperate in its forwardness. “Where could?” as if the possible eluded him. To boot, denied its final mark. The thought falling from “Where could?” like rain from a cloud, a vanishing source.

This has all the verve of a dissertation. The more finished poems, labeled revisions or fragments, are the more successful; and when a “failed” sestina abruptly breaks off, like the fugue Bach died writing, the reader lurches after its absence.

Evincing stylistic kinship with Language poets such as Rae Armantrout, Huffman’s instruction, though cold as doctrine, consistently fascinates for its willingness to teeter at the edge of sense; we find her weeping “into the zenith of a rose,” a kiln is said to be “thinking itself warm.” This is impressive, given that the book ultimately concerns the rippling effects of her sibling’s addiction (much like Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec). In the penultimate section, Huffman’s topical absorption reveals itself to be deceptively extempore. One paragraph hides a sad vocabulary drawn from pregnancy, including tied fallopian tubes, the question of viability, and a metal pail. Another rhymes with drowsy lethargy:

I wrote a play, out cold in urgent care. Heated blankets toweling my sweated hair. When staged, the actress playing Mother held a wicker broom for acts two and three, with which she beat and beat the rug—a heavy tapestry rolled across the deck. It jumped with fleas—a cast of tiny specks that leapt with urgent hunger as she swept. Lucidly, I slept. I always do, when in duress (no escape from the world of the page). So I wondered how I would create the effect on stage — what props and practical effects—and who would clean up the mess?

With their diminutive, hardened fragility, there is something a bit Glass Menagerie about Huffman’s poems; and though Public Abstract also feels cobbled together, it coheres with greater sureness than many first collections of poetry. To avoid the pitfalls of the merely cerebral—intelligence for the hell of it—there’s no denying that the live wire of a poem must be grounded in the truth. But truth, with apologies to Keats (and to Huffman, who quotes from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), isn’t beauty ipso facto. Without invention, the unadorned horror of what happened, like one might overhear in a waiting room, will be “private as a runny nose” and as interesting. What so often disappoints about artistic suffering is its obviousness, the way it leans on grief at half the craft. Huffman, however, allows hurt to knock everywhere, to come out with things plainly, in this enviably wise debut. The language countermands—“The lie is that today I want to die”—and this gives life its shape.

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All Tomorrow's Train Rides

Matthew M. Monte
Sixteen Rivers Press ($18)

by Lee Rossi

Yes, you hear an echo—the Velvet Underground playing “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” their great anthem to indulgence and dissolution. But though it offers less indulgence and more longing, less dissolution and more selflessness, All Tomorrow’s Train Rides—the second book by San Francisco writer Matthew M. Monte—is also great in its own unpredictable way.

A thoughtful, educated writer with associate’s degrees in insomnia, shoplifting, and alcoholism, Monte evidences a fascination with the work of other writers, figures as varied as Gary Snyder, Pierre Reverdy, and Miguel de Cervantes. In “Then I Read Wisława Szymborska” he reports on purchasing one of her books in Paris—at Shakespeare and Co. of course—and retreating to “the silent piano room”:

Where with you, I
Must say I
Feel only
Free

A love poem, isn’t it? Conversely, we find him hating on Jacques Derrida: “Form and Function Letter” mimics William Carlos Williams’s famous “This Is Just To Say,” except that Monte’s apology, which is more j’accuse than je t’aime, is directed at the fabulously indecipherable French philosopher. “This is just to say,” the poet begins, that he doesn’t “mind these synonyms / and metaphors and analogies,” but that he “very much mind[s] the meanings of these tightropes / between conventions, this / high-wire act we call language.” Language is perilous, the poet seems to admit, but “these lines save us / from drowning in your / soup of same.”

Clarity, precision—these are language’s gifts, and we abandon them at our peril. Consider Section V of the title poem, a sequence whose sections are spread throughout the book, in which Monte engages in dialogue with that consummate realist from the pages of Cervantes, Sancho Panza—transformed for the occasion into a Caltrain conductor. Who are these people on the train, Sancho wants to know, who “earn their keep from neither arms nor letters”? And the poet tells him: “the ore is silicon, a fool’s gold for sure. They create other minds from it. So that we don’t need to remember.” “No memory?” exclaims Sancho incredulously, issuing the poet “a private smile” for all the 400-thread-count cotton dress shirts: “Sancho knows / Clothes don’t make the man / Sees the suits for what they are / Variations on the fig leaf.”  

Culture, he insists, is a charade, a theatre of the absurd.

Reality is what Monte wants, in all its clarity and precision—even when what it reveals is harsh or cruel:

Where the utility men
Cut back pine and manzanita
          near the old quarry
They left behind a ragged cross-section of knotted wood
          in the boot-print trail dust
That resisted the motoring blade and its bite

Monte’s passion for the real takes him into unexpected places. Many of these poems come with notes and annotations, some which are straightforward, and others which read like prose poems. Commenting on Don Quixote’s famous discourse on arms and letters, the poet references the GPS coordinates where Quixote spoke, and adds that “the windmills . . . / are spread along a / hill overlooking the Manchegan / plains, offering an excellent view of / things as they are, which are even / easier to see through the pages of / Don Quixote than the bullet train’s / blurring windowscape.” Once again, language and literature lead us closer to reality than our technological culture.

Latitude-longitude designations appear throughout the book, adding a dash of typographic esprít, but there are also other typographical flourishes—long strings of periods enclosed in brackets, for example. As a reader, I’m not sure how to receive these extra-literary excrescences; are they a sendup of erasure, a musical interpolation signaling rests, or a just a new-fangled jokiness? I suspect one can read them all three ways. But without a doubt, All Tomorrow’s Train Rides is a variorum of image and epithet where time and again we encounter this poet’s extraordinary verbal facility. Another poem in sequence, “[Latitude],” “[Longitude],” “[Degrees],” etc., is a list poem offering scores of subjects which contemporary poems do (and in some cases shouldn’t) embrace. Or consider these lines from “Three Sketches from Insomnia”:

              That used-car salesman, memory,
never tells the true mileage or how
pumping the brakes never stops the night
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

            With histories like these, who needs enemies

For a writer who seems consumed with knowing exactly where he is, these lines signal a refreshing skepsis vis-à-vis the possibility of knowledge. It’s there, Monte suggests, but only if your search is dedicated and uncontaminated by self-will. I hear that sort of injunction in these lines from “Reconsider a Meadow”:

But it is states of not-mind
that reconsider a meadow
day after subtle day

above the snowy track and
shallow thaws in sheltered valleys.

Similarly, in “Write Livelihood,” he issues a slight re-formulation of the Buddhist imperative:

You read and say
how many things crystallized in your mind
and we know life found in found words is without parallel.
And though the world is not without its darkness
there is not
so much regret.

What do we find “in found words”? In All Tomorrow’s Train Rides, we find compassion, forgiveness, attention, and insight. We should be so fortunate in everything we read.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024