Alpay Ulku
BOA Editions ($12.50)

by Camille-Yvette Welsch

Born in Turkey, raised in Canada, educated in both America and England, Alpay Ulku roams the borders of a dozen worlds, all without a home. In this first book, Ulku strives to find causal relationships within his world to provide metaphysical security and comfort. These poems explore a deeply lonely place, a "nowhere" in modern culture where Ulku negotiates without the fixed traditions of any one ethnicity. In "Ars Poetica" he writes "Then this happens, so that happens. And you're older again. / The sky, a cast-iron door, shuts without your consent: / some sickly stars. Déjà vu / is what happens when you know you could stop." In the twentieth volume of the A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of American Series, Ulku's search for agency compels; he cannot "stop," giving the poems both a sense of wonder and a sense of fear, the suspicion that perhaps, the world works without reason.

Ulku's rootlessness provides a gnosis for much of the alienation implicit in his poems. Without a specific home, Ulku explores several different scapes—North America, Turkey, city, desert, but his lack of affiliation propels his work. He writes in his poem, "After Completion," "Time / was, a hundred thousand people could perish in battle over / a hilltop. They died in terror, dreaming of home." Ulku writes in terror, dreaming of a home in faith and history, somewhere between Islam and America, a Western education and Turkish lineage. This volume begins with "July" chronicling a series of actions:

Days that turn like a miller's wheel, nights the air in our lungs. His ashes
are everywhere, in the chambers where gasoline is trapped, compressed,
and then ignited—

These events intertwine based on syntactical proximity alone. The images reveal no higher plan; rather, together, they convince us of Ulku's underlying message: God has left the building. A crisis of faith, equally religious and secular, drives the poet to seek a reason why and how people exist and co-exist, a question without resolution. While the poems display the poet's uncertainty about faith and the meaning of life, they illustrate his understanding about what it means to be living on the earth, to observe his world, and he is not afraid to make comment. For him, it becomes a question of how to articulate beliefs and fears. He writes in "Off-Planet News": "You're a coin sent spinning on its edge. / Dying is a word we use for the thrill of it." The juxtaposition of image and declarative statement characterizes a number of these poems, and Ulku does not fear declaration. He writes in his "Ars Poetica," "Use dignity, and another word for what it takes to survive." After reading this collection, I might guess that the other word is faith.

Thematically, these poems wrestle with spiritual introspection and conflict, but the level of language rarely rises to the point of being startling, beautiful or memorable. The recitation of pedestrian images rarely achieves much. Sometimes we see a tableau, but more often we read a list of actions. In "July," "A car horn blasts. A window goes down. Someone / yells something / about sleep. Shut-up someone replies." Still, at times, Ulku writes longingly about the world that grounds him and seems to give him so much pain, and it is in these moments that the poetry begins to dance, even in its despair as in "Futility":

Believe me.
I would change the meaning of poor.
I wish I were a shard of stained glass
a boy exploring the ruins
picks up and turns over, saying glass.
I wish the bones of a small white bird
would rise up out of the prairie,
rise up and fly off in any direction.

In this poem, Ulku articulates all that the book wants: the desire, the longing, to feel wonder, to be wonderful, to have the power to name things and make them beautiful. Ulku speaks quietly what he would wish for himself in this lost world:

We have lived a hundred thousand lives;
I am tired of it all.
Carry me off on your rolling shoulders.
Show me a new way to live with myself.

Ultimately, though the language lags in places, Ulku still offers some insight into the quest for faith and religion at the end of the twentieth century. Occasionally prosaic, sometimes engaging, Ulku's images are bound by desire, a longing for causality, a universal raison d'etre. Meteorology navigates the eye of a personal storm of loneliness and displacement, a storm that might threaten and enlighten the shores of every modern reader.

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Barry Wallenstein
Ridgeway Press ($12.50)

by Stephanie Rauschenbusch

Sly, wry, ironic, pitch-perfect for off-rhymes, these new poems in Barry Wallenstein's fifth book play with and tease out happy and unhappy endings. In the poem "A Measure of Conduct," a log-borne earwig is, after much thought, not consigned to a fireplace fire, though "in an absent state, I confused / action with inaction, smallness with / next to nothing."

Georgia O'Keeffe's giant painted versions of tiny things tell it no better:

The green spadix is back-dropped
against the lightly striped spathe,
a flower canopy for Jack
the erect her of the piece, on his pulpit,
a kind of throne.

(Jack-in-the-Pulpit: Song and Flower)

This miniature man seems to be the same fellow we meet in "Small" who asks the doctor to make him small "and a little calmer than before." He uses his small size to creep into his love's pocket book and sit on her lipstick "in a desirous trance."

Then we have the ending of the "famed aviator" whose parachute falls and whom we see as though the wrong end of a pair of binoculars:

A dull opening up of everything human
onto water—
so hard he failed his form
on impact
and the churning, schussing heavy
waters—never soft except in cups—
partitioned him further…"

(A Famed Aviator Meets His Death)

The tone of these poems is light, amused, witty, observant, ready to change and turn at a moment's notice, possessed of a dancer's grace. A fine example of this dexterity is "Apostrophe to Dr. Trope, Anesthesiologist." In this fictive letter to the doctor of poetic images—"tropes"—we have an operation, real or virtual, and then a dream:

Dr. Trope, I've dreamed of you
standing here at my bedside—in white,
a gauze mask dangling from white thread.
I ask you about the laws of poetry, probabilities,
the range of tropes.
Do you know how many there are of you?
I'm a devil to ask:
are there little Tropes at home?
Mamma and Poppa Trope still alive?

"I'm a devil to ask" signals the poet's playful teasing and could be the epigraph to the Tony poems—a portrait finely and imaginatively assembled from the many personae of a "street artist," con man, pothead, resident of the Hotel Splendide. A man living in "the backlands of blank" ("Happy Birthday Tony") where "Some oblivions are brightly lit / and dappled with spasmodic action . . ." ("Tony's Brain"), Tony goes invisible ("Anonymous Tony"), dyes his hair red ("Tony the Pothead"), reassures his dead mother that jail time is like floating on an iceberg ("Tony to His Mother") recites his numbers-running past ("Tony Hears the Music") and hides in a tunnel ("Tony the Trader"):

He swishes, spins, stops, sits down
cross-legged on a carpet, 4 by 6
and signed in the weave;
he stacks his goods with soft precision,
fooling himself with false division
for practice, he practices
until
a cloud break in a thunder clap
shakes him to the derelict day; erect,
he jots a note and a name
a column of names.

Two of the Tony poems cut deep. One ("Tony's Blade") starts: "Blade imagines it has memories . . ." This speaking knife ominously feels it needs sharpening. It is, and isn't the butcher's knife in "Tony's Dad" the butcher who carries Tony "across a river of blood." The memories here are exact and terrifying, when we begin to see Tony as the poet's mask, or doppelganger:

The fat in the slaughterhouse,
in the stone room
adjacent to the killing rooms,
would clog in the drain
and the steers' blood puddled
high enough for a young Tony
to need either hip boots
or a lift onto father's difficult shoulders.

At times this Tony sequence seems novelistic in its complexity and subtlety. Wallenstein, a professor at City College, New York, "performs" these poems with a jazz combo, the music putting extra pressure on the words. These poems have the earned seriousness and humor of Yeats' Crazy Jane poems. They and the rest of the poems in A Measure of Conduct are built around the knowledge of "love in its practical conjurings" ("Salvation").

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Tom Devaney
Banshee Press ($10)

by Joanna Furhman

Tom Devaney's first book of poems, The American Pragmatist Fell in Love, serves as an antidote to the rarified aestheticism common in many avant-garde and academic poems. The details he includes have the "ring of authenticity" without the self-consciousness that term implies. These are playful, philosophical, subtle poems. His energetic lyrics demonstrate a care and craft surprising in what might, at first glance, appear to be unmitigated boisterousness.

These are, without a doubt, fun poems. Who wouldn't be charmed by a poem that starts, "You know that movie with Don Knotts and the fish?" Still, it's a mistake to equate their playfulness for flippancy. In "Bee Beard Sonnet," one of series of "sonnets" (in the Bernadette Mayer sense of that word) that make up the central section of the book, a woman sings silently to herself as bees swarm, in what Devaney refers to as a "beard" around her.

Despite a Politics that must be aware of the threatened bee population—
Old Swarm, asexual attraction:
The grace control not to scratch her head, or break out in song.
Nevertheless, she is singing a silent version of what turns out to be:
"The Sunny Side of the Street."

This moment can be seen as a demonstration of Devaney's poetics. The bees, like all situations from which poetry arises, are both a source of danger and of beauty. The sonnet suggests that the happy tone of many of the poems in the book is analogous to the song the woman sings in order to protect herself from fear.

Devaney's smart and goofy poems may also protect a reader from fear. I am going to try to remember his lines the next time I am approached by a predatory swarm.

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Kimberly Lyons
Granary Books ($12)

by Mark Wallace

This enigmatic book of poems, quiet yet intense, draws on an intriguing range of influences to explore the relation between ourselves and others, people and things. The work has an understated precision of detail, as well as meditative subtlety, that consciously echoes the traditions of Asian poetry and mixes them with a set of more recognizably contemporary avant-garde techniques. Despite the historical underpinning, the subject matter is entirely contemporary; the poems focus on small daily struggles, intimate encounters, and startling juxtapositions of common objects, all of them framed by an informed social awareness.

Abracadabra concerns the inevitable interrelation between people--we are not separate from each other but irretrievably bound, in ways alternately comfortable and frightening. Yet it concerns as well the interrelation between people and objects; any notion of ourselves as subjective immediately must reckon with the way our consciousness is also created by the things we live among. Persons become intertwined with each other and with things, sometimes in indecipherable ways. These relations are constantly shifting—connections become traps, and traps become connections, and no situation stays stable more than temporarily. Yet Lyons manages to explore these philosophical implications through a language that never appears overtly theoretical. Rather than commenting from a safe intellectual distance, the narrator of Abracadabra talks intimately about a life she lives in thoroughly, for better and worse.

Lyons frames her poems with an understanding of social dynamics: "is it better to improve and / improve at a defined game / or to fuck up /in continuous instances / in a situation only possibly / a game." Yet political protest stays in the background here; the poems focus more on "Details & Incidents" ("It's cords of appliances that thwart / casual obfuscation of objects") that suggest political implications rather than overtly arguing them. The narrator of these poems lives in a world of complex daily navigation of people and things, one which often takes all her energy. "I want to be / enveloped by you I tell /him. Empathize. / A condition rather than /motion," she writes in "Biscotti," yet it's clear she knows that motion is an unavoidable condition, that she doesn't expect a resolution to the longing she expresses.

Many of these poems are moodily dark; "I suck on my violet duck / I hit my spoon with the floor. Call out to the / shadow of a saint / who has fallen under his horse" are the lines that end "The Concise History of Painting." Objects and people can overwhelm us easily; the danger of connections is that we can lose ourselves in them. This potential is highlighted by the long prose poem "Duration," one of the centerpieces of the collection. Taking place in different locales in America and Europe, "Duration" presents an extended exploration of the way people lose each other and themselves: "She feels herself to be provisional, easily rubbed away by their bodies knocking into hers. She cannot remember what she looks like, even if she has a face. She is duct of words she repeats to herself to become a body. The body sits in a chair." While "Duration" ultimately suggests the necessity of refusing despair, the mood of the poem is one of shadows upon shadows: "In the night there are no pictures, no memory."

Certain later poems in the collection do state Lyons' theoretical perspective more directly: "In detaching buds from the stems, stacks of situations and enigmas. Montage of chaotic, indeterminate surfaces / as the rain diffuses," she writes in "One Hundred Views from Edo." And the book's final section, "Object Relations," makes clear the way she thinks of people themselves as physical, as objects in a world of objects, whatever our various subjectivities. All these objects are interrelated, as she writes in March 6: "and everything seems to be part of it / in the Japanese sense as Patricia says." Yet even such direct statements are not answers so much as they are further situations to encounter, explore and struggle with. Abracadabra doesn't try to tell others how to live but concerns how the narrator herself is going to do it.

There is mystery in Abracadabra, a permanent sense of shadow and fog. Much of the book's power lies in its ability to explore this mystery without dispelling it. Never loud or insistent, these are the kind of poems whose resonance one could easily miss; a reader who doesn't pay close attention might dismiss them as amorphous and mushy. Yet they greatly reward the reader who stays with them, who recognizes that amorphous mush is often the condition out of which we must build lives and identities and connections, tentative but necessary. The great strength of this book is in its honest engagement with the narrator's involvement in this building process, and its refusal to make assertions about the world that, however comforting, would nonetheless be false.

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Tom Sleigh
University of Chicago Press ($12)

by Jeffrey Shotts

The Dreamhouse of the title of Tom Sleigh's fourth and latest collection of poems is a house divided. Between earth and spirit, pleasure and suffering, the dream and its reality, Sleigh's poems are restless assertions of ambivalence, spoken with voices almost assured as witnesses to an other, ethereal world on the shadow side of this one. Whether of sickness, grief, history, or myth, these ethereal worlds that Sleigh glances into brim with both unsettling imagination and the complex rendering of emotions previously unuttered.

But The Dreamhouse is most distinctly divided in its stylistic shifts, sometimes bravely divergent. If it is true, as Helen Vendler has suggested, that the breaking of style constitutes "an act of violence on the self," Sleigh has inflicted himself with an almost self-annihilating torment. Most of the poems in The Dreamhouse are approached through the first person, but through use of multiple personae and frequent stylistic shifts, Sleigh decisively obscures personal identity and artistic propensity. The collection remarkably weaves between subtly crafted formal lines and discursively drawn fragmented turns in the poems' structures and between evocations of Classical myth and images of urban facelessness among the poems' subjects.

The collection opens by invoking Horace in "Prayer," a poem pleading for the gratifications of this world:

Oh god of flesh, god of pleasure,

keep us in the dark
one moment more—

While this first poem suggests earthly pleasure is desired and achieved through keeping knowledge at arm's length, much of the rest of The Dreamhouse seems more concerned with glimpsing into ethereal worlds and uncovering spiritual dimensions beyond the flesh. Appearing just after "Prayer," the title poem describes the first postmortem moments as a surreal dissolve into light:

Even as he takes up residence, the dreamhouse
A void all glass and air: one table, one chair,
And sweeping wall to wall to wall sunlight everywhere.

The spare, sanitized, ethereal world of glass, air, and sunlight will, it seems, sweep away altogether the table and chair—the only objects of the minimalized tangible world.

Through the collection, the inevitable dissolving of earthly comforts continually disappoints the plea of the first poem, but although The Dreamhouse bereaves the loss of flesh, pleasure, and those that have passed on, it is not without a sense of wonder that we confront intersections with the unearthly. In the remarkable "Augusto Jandolo: On Excavating an Etruscan Tomb," the poem speaks with the archaeologist's voice to describe his discovery of a perfectly preserved body of an ancient warrior. But the wonder at this discovery is short-lived and suddenly replaced with the wonder at witnessing something like the warrior's soul at last set free. The ancient body succumbs to its sudden exposure to air and then "dissolved— / dissolved, as we looked on, / Into dust?":

But in the aura
Round our torches, a golden powder
Rose up in the glow and seemed to hover.

The Dreamhouse can seem at times uneven as Sleigh constantly writes in different voices and experiments with divergent forms, but it is finally an innovative and ambitious collection that extends the notable artistry of Sleigh's last two collections, The Chain and Waking. For his prodigious formal and imaginative talents, Sleigh's poetry is indispensable, and The Dreamhouse builds on his signature restless exploration:

Something in the mind can't rest, can it,
the mind is like that, my mind, yours, scavenging

after objects it gnaws, spits out, infantile
explorer day and night?

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Cid Corman
New Directions ($13.95)

by Darrin Daniel

Poetry becomes
that conversation we could
not otherwise have.

Cid Corman's latest book, comprised of poems from the 80s and 90s, is long overdue. For over fifty years Corman, as poet, translator, and editor of Origin press, has delivered his literary mastery to poetry. His work is a direct link to the modernism of Pound and Williams, the Objectivists, and Black Mountain poetics; his influence can be seen in some of the Language poets. As editor and publisher, he has featured some of our very finest writers: Williams, Olson, Zukofsky, Niedecker, Creeley, Whalen, Levertov, and a long line thereafter. Indeed, Corman has earned his keep as editor and literary ambassador, but sadly his own poetry has failed to reach a wider audience. Perhaps that may change, as this latest book is just one of a number of books due out in this new millennium.

Nothing Doing is a sparse and direct book, its small poems varying in length and structure. The book is divided in five sections. The first section contains three poems entitled 'psalms'; these short and beautiful poems, which set the book off as an offering to the reader, are transliterations from the biblical Psalms, each of which considers and transcends the original. The final section of the book is interwoven with haiku; they help us to digest and break down all that has come before. Corman's voice is a fine and eloquent distillation of those poetic movements mentioned earlier, and they set the tone for an individual's own process with language. Though, as Hayden Carruth has written of Corman's poetry, he is fiercely his own man: "The look of delicacy is deceptive. More often it's leanness, poems growing from their own center—no influences, no formal props." This, I think, gets at the heart of what Corman has developed over the years. Corman ranges widely in Nothing Doing—he can be sharp and clear, then switch gears in another poem, providing abstract, rhythmic structures.

By working with a small space, Corman creates his own stage of words and expressions—a tone which is demanding, yet luminously simple. This is a lean, efficient, and lucid voice in action on the page. His is a poetry of pun-like conundrum, as Robert Kelly suggests in his back cover note. Sometimes it almost passes the reader by, and this is why Corman's work often requires deeper reading: it asks that the reader slow down and absorb his minimal structures. Corman's work has always been about joy as well as the immeasurable pain of life to the point of language through language. His poems give something back which is tangible. From the third section of the book, a meditation on words and their relationship to the world, Corman writes:

I want the words
so simple and
true you think they

have come out of
your own mouth and
are breathing you.

This is Corman at his best, pondering and evoking a presence through the language which clearly establishes its groundwork. Corman is able to create an array of emotions and instances through such simplistic designs. It is thought, but thought tied to experience through a language 'breathing' itself out into the world.

Through a sublime orchestration of juxtaposition and circumstance, Corman produces a poetry full of layered meaning while providing a minimal framework. Although Nothing Doing may not rank with other Corman classics such as Sun Rock Man and Livingdying, it is an important book, showing Corman here and now, working the language with delightful economy and poignancy. Nothing Doing is a precise poetry, a window shot of the world in minute pieces of wonder:

Chewing rock

tasting dust
getting down

to gristle

bone. Feeling
what it is

to eat air.

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Dana Levin
American Poetry Review ($14)

by Melanie Figg

Dana Levin's first poetry collection and winner of the 1999 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, In the Surgical Theatre, is a true stunner, alive and pulsing in the reader's hand. The first section, Body moves from a darkly light telling of embalming Lenin's body to the more ghostly "The Nurse" to the brutal "The Baby on the Table" where Levin's own horrific childhood traumas enter the stage. But Levin's narratives enter on the sly, and often through an unnerving, revolving second person. Nothing here is tired or predictable. The angels are parasitic, the body is not a metaphor—it is gangrenous, bloody, a machine fragile to both bacteria and burrowing wings. Like that creepiest of X-Files soundtracked by Nat King Cole, Levin's poems are sonic crooners relaying the hard facts and ugly deformities of our lives. But Levin always steps through to the wonder of the other side. In "Eyeless Baby" she is confident she knows what is beyond those sightless eyes.

I am so sure they're a door,
if I pried into the fused lids I would find
ice, stars, space with its cold fires spreading out
beyond the body

Levin knows the possibility of another vision and the depths of our own blindness.

The structure of Levin's poems recall the best of Larry Levis—poems that turn on themselves, an earlier narration, the dutiful reader or the second self, poems that billow and swarm, and often play tag team with each other. After readers learn the infant Levin was "slit through the belly / without anesthetic / to remove a gangrenous ileum," we come upon the astounding sectioned poem "Personal History," where that baby is oddly watching American boys in Vietnam "with their intestines / sprung out in loops." Levin confesses:

For so long I thought
surgical white
was the color of the soul, I've been floating
for years

in the albanic air round the hospital nursery,
above the orange smoke billowing
from the napalmed river,
huts collapsed
into palm fronds and fire, and the people
staggering away
to lie burned and bleeding in the soft-haired ferns
curling

round the incubator glass—

As the baby's world collapses with the television set, Levin moves on to suggest that those dying boys become angels hovering over "the ghost of me kept burning in the glass." The angel boys find an odd sort of peace in the hospital as "nurses swoop and hover, cold birds in the tropical air." Lost innocence fosters a maturity—or perhaps just detachment—that is all around us later, at the end of "Bathhouse, 1980" amidst desperate anonymous sex and the coming "scourge." Those same "angels gather in the corners of the building. / They do not judge.

Levin's poems build an enormous momentum within themselves, spurred by wind, rage, denial, or fear, and fall off quick and breathless. It's what Louise Glück refers to in the introduction: Levin's "syntax of insistence." Further, Levin persistently challenges the reader to be present, no matter how difficult the subject matter, or lulling the language, as in "The Baby on the Table:"

. . . when will they lower

the kiss, the fist, the sharpened
scalpel, the angels
are waiting, calm, impassive, the emanations
of science
in each white face—
Can you help me sew up
what they're about to open? Can you feel
the chill of the table
on your own small back?

Levin often uses the poem as a place to question the reader's involvement and expectations or issues of metaphor and narrative: "Have you ever been hurt, have you ever been cut, is it only / physical knives? / Is this how I write about / the baby on the table?" She pushes on, this time in the detached voice of the violent father. "His Defense" is a brutal telling of another personal history, full of its own victimization and misguided faith. The rage on the page is gathering its fingers to a fist when he turns to ask: "Did you hope I was a myth, that I wasn't a monster, / that it was all, merely, psychological?" This chilling question indicts the reader as well as the poet, pushing against the ease in which we collapse fact and metaphor, poem and world.

Any single poem in this collection testifies to Levin's imaginative scope and narrative finesse, but to read these poems in sequence—in consequence to each other—is to walk into a new vision of the world. The poems accumulate images and possibilities, sometimes lifting and repeating entire lines in later poems to anticipate fuller meaning. The book is strung seamless, or rather the seam between poems is stitched ragged enough to recall the phantom limb. And, as Levin knows, it is the presence of what is absent that moves us toward reconciliation.

This insight is especially keen in the third section, "World", where earlier poems are recalled not repeated, continued not completed. By now the ghosts are real, not the hovering angels of section one, as if the reckoning of the second section has unnerved those quiet onlookers and turned them into cranky poltergeists. The end of "Banishing the Angels" nails their coffin shut as the narrator stands:

in the real light of the unmystical sun, thinking

the girl who is not an angel is something to believe—

the phone booth in the sunlight, something to believe—

Moving out of the intense interiority of "the exhausting round of wounding and healing," Levin steps into the difficult world of witness: a woman is attacked ("her angels, they won't be returning"); "children are sleeping in a litter of beer cans, and cigarette butts, dreamless—"; only the movie screen lets the narrator "give up the burden awhile. / To be an eye. / Perceiver. / God of the kingdom."

To that "unburdened" place of perceiver, Levin returns again and again. But what she perceives about the human addiction to pattern and self-sabotage is the vision of no disengaged bystander. In "Hive" her imaginative powers are at their peak:

Can you crawl out of asking

the origin of sorrow, now, through the grass,
in the animal moment,
will you nuzzle the roots in search
of the combs,
the resin like jewels in the burnished
light?
Climb up, part
your shattered chest like a veil, and lick
at the honey
welling over your bones—
It has nothing to do with your happiness,
or grief.

Levin has the skilled ear, magnificent tongue and fierce mind of the truly prophetic. I can't remember when I've been this excited about a poet, much less drunk on a first collection. Make room for Levin, and keep an eye out for her next book.

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PURE POETRY
Binnie Kirshenbaum
Simon and Schuster ($22)

MAKING LOVE TO THE MINOR POETS OF CHICAGO
James Conrad
St. Martin's Press ($25.95)

by Peter Ritter

It was no mere oversight that your high-school guidance counselor did not mention "minor poet" as a potential vocation. Here is a career path, after all, that leads even the bright and the disciplined into a wasteland of anonymity. And it hardly needs to be said that announcing one's intention to pursue the lyric muse is equivalent in the eyes of most sensible adults to taking a monastic vow of poverty. There must be something fascinating, then, about those who give their lives over to something that the average citizen of the republic can't be bothered with. How else to explain the frequency with which indigent poets strut and fret through the fiction of their prosy brethren? Even the most wretchedly destitute novelist, it seems, needs someone to pity.

Such schaddenfreude pervades Pure Poetry, Binnie Kirshenbaum's thoroughly acrid rumination on middle-aged distaff despair. Lila Moscowitz, the subject of Kirshenbaum's inquiry, is a formalist poet whose appearance in the august pages of "People" has briefly made her a succes d'estime in New York City's overpriced bohemian ghetto. "I am a famous poet," she announces early on, "which is but a degree of fame. It's not famous like I get stopped on the street for my autograph, but I am as famous as any poet in America can get without being dead and having an intermediate school named after you."

Middling celebrity and college teaching job notwithstanding, Moscowitz is constantly and irreconcilably miserable. The cause would seem to be her failed marriage to a German immigrant, whom she blames for both historical anti-Semitism and every manner of personal indignity, and a failing romance with another man, who is nice enough but far too normal for Moscowitz's aberrant erotic predilections. More likely, she is simply profoundly meshuggena. Late in the novel, Moscowitz outlines her pathology for the benefit of her transgender therapist: "The tantrums, the inconsolable weeping, the rage which could only be characterized as infantile, the insatiable need to be loved, the inability to love for fear I would lose it."

Certainly, lives of unquiet desperation often prove guiltily captivating. Yet the protagonist of Pure Poetry, whose afflictions include angst, weltschmerz, and possibly many other things with guttural German names, is such a morose sod throughout that it remains unclear whether Kirshenbaum intends us to empathize with or grimace at Moscowitz's self-obsession. Ditto for Kishenbaum's novel, which, while suitably sarcastic, takes its protagonist's whining altogether too seriously. By book's end, we're left feeling very much like Moscowitz's therapist, unsure whether to embrace the snide neurotic before us or prescribe some psychotropic balm and tell her to shut the hell up.

Upbeat only by comparison, James Conrad's debut novel, Making Love to the Minor Poets of Chicago, shares the presumption with Pure Poetry than one can be a pathologically unstable schlemiel and still secure a fairly lucrative post in academia. Among Conrad's extensive cast of inconsequential versifiers: Joanna Mueller, a poet-in-residence at a small-town Illinois college who changes lovers like most people change underwear; Sink Lewis, a gifted student who changes underwear like most people change lovers; Vivian Reape, Mueller's rotund and scheming mentor; a mousy militant Marxist librarian named Rose; and a gaggle of gay hipsters who hang around poetry slams and coffee shops to talk about writing verse and couplets. If caffeine and lots of sex were the only ingredients necessary to produce a poet, this motley crew would be formidable indeed.

Alas, as one of Conrad's characters points out, there is less than voracious demand for the sonnets and sestinas of love-sick twentysomethings: "American poetry is truly proof that the more poets a society creates, the less poetry anyone bothers to read."

Even in a culture indifferent to poetry, however, poets have their uses. As illustration, Conrad invents a delightfully ridiculous premise: the U.S. government has decided to gather all the nuclear waste produced over the last half century and bury it beneath a mountain in Nevada. In order to warn inhabitants ten-thousand-years hence away from the radioactive crypt, federal bureaucrats have decided to commission a poet to write the verse equivalent of "Danger. Keep Away." Of course, the legitimacy afforded the project will also presumably silence concerned reporters and environmentalists. The chosen poet, in turn, will ensure that his or her work goes unappreciated in someone else's lifetime as well.

As Conrad's cast of ink-stained wretches jockey for a spot at the government teat, "Minor Poets" turns into a sly satire of state-subsidized art. Poetry may not be a dying art because of talentless young poets, Conrad suggests, but because of talentless canonized poets who care more about grants and tenure than rhyme and reason. Fittingly, by the end of Conrad's smart and satisfying story, not a word of verse has been committed to paper, and Joanne Mueller, best of Chicago's bad poets, has turned to ungainly confessional short stories. She may have sold out, but at least she now has a chance of getting paid for writing lousily. And, really, what more can minor poet hope for?

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2000 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2000