Phillip Lopate
Basic Books ($25)

By Ricky Opaterny

It is no small irony that Philip Lopate is considered a master of the personal essay and yet his work is almost entirely out of print. Getting Personal, a selection of essays that range from the confessional to first-person journalism and criticism, draws work from six of his books, four of which are out of print and one that has not been published yet. Thus this substantial volume serves as a sort of greatest hits collection, giving readers access to his work in the form he is best known for, yet it is also smartly designed to trace the arcs of Lopate's personal and professional lives, making it "the informal version of the autobiography he never got around to writing."

Following Lopate's "Notes Toward an Introduction" and an amusing follow-up by a fictitious doctor mourning the author's death (quoted above), the collection is divided into six sections stretching from childhood to middle age. Lopate lays out his vision of the personal essay in the introduction: "I am endlessly interested in the wormy thoughts and regrets and excuses and explanations that people have for their behavior." And later, "I believe in the aesthetically impure as an accurate reflection of reality." This approach makes for an often exciting stream-of-consciousness reading experience, but also permits the perils of self-indulgence and excessive self-reflexivity. Lopate is at his best, ironically, when writing about other people: the Korean woman whose father's poetry he translates, the fellow teacher who commits suicide, the elementary school students with whom he stages Chekov's Uncle Vanya. His writing on film that appears throughout the volume, though it displays an obvious love of the medium, is less engaging.

While recounting the Chekov play—which must be one of the greatest achievements in elementary school theater history—Lopate quotes one of his actors describing the audience of students as "just childish little babies. It's not our fault if this is too mature for them," and then analyzes, "He had already acquired the artist's advance defense mechanism for rejection by the public." Lopate's tactic is not so exonerative, but rather self-questioning and defeating, though only to the point at which it reveals his ambivalence about the topic at hand, taking the questions his work poses and examining them from two, three, four different sides in succession. However, what is illustrative in this passage is the balance with which Lopate can juxtapose observations and self-revelations.

When the pace of his writing moves quickly, Lopate can get away with long passages of thinking on the page that are redeemed by his humor. In an essay against the supposed staples of leisurely activities—dinner parties, idle time, living in the present—Lopate, in the space of a page, makes references to "Laschian political analysis," William Hazlitt, Schlitz, and a study on depression conducted by a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. On the same page, he makes the reader laugh out loud: "The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun.'"

In another piece of ostensible opposition titled "Resistance to the Holocaust," Lopate uses a similar hyperbolic technique to impress his point on the reader—in this case that the Holocaust has been abused as a cultural phenomenon: "Sometimes it almost seems that 'the Holocaust' is a corporation headed by Elie Wiesel, who defends his patents with articles in the 'Arts and Leisure' section of the Sunday New York Times." This is the best piece of Lopate's criticism in the collection. His arguments against treating the Holocaust as an event outside of history without comparison or as an event that must influence all art that follows it are lucid and seem eerily contemporary, since they are equally applicable to the post-9/11 American zeitgeist in which historical contexts and precedents have been abandoned. 9/11 has become like the Holocaust, as Lopate sees it, both a silencer of public discourse and an absolute justification to be applied seemingly at will.

Though he claims not to spend these essays looking for himself in others, Lopate's long hard looks are directed both inward and outward. The last two substantial essays in the collection focus on a pair of paternal figures: the author's father and his colleague at the University of Houston, Donald Barthelme. Both are distanced from Lopate in life—that unexpected distance is part of their attraction—and brought closer through his writing about them; in discussing the latter, he writes: "The difficulty is distinguishing between what was really Donald and what he evoked in me." Barthelme remains rather aloof throughout his relationship with Lopate, who, after the great writer's death, uncertainly labels them "close colleagues, friends, almost-friends." The most memorable image of Barthelme is of him helping Lopate move boxes to an apartment in the West Village on a ninety-four-degree day—being used by the author like a "drayhorse." Barthelme's generosity here is obvious despite his taciturnity, and Lopate, in all his gregariousness on the page, manages to return that sentiment with sympathy and humor, trying not to write to the end of understanding, but simply to hold up, in art, the contradictions that he sees in life.

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Edited by John Morthland
Anchor Books ($15)

by Adam Hall

To write rock criticism having never read the work of the late Lester Bangs is a bit like attempting to ignite an audience never having heard of Iggy Pop: you can do it, but you'll have no idea how much better your predecessor was. Bangs's pyrotechnic, adrenaline-fueled diatribes are rife with jarring cultural references, unpopular and unexpected opinions (from anointing Anne Murray a sex goddess in his review of Danny's Song to labeling Bob Dylan as craven opportunist in "Bob Dylan's Dalliance with Mafia Chic"), and infectious passion for the music which consumed him. These elements fulminate into such a heady brew that the reader is invariably taken aback by Bangs's relentless, electrifying ode to rock.

Admittedly, this unceasing soliloquy occasionally degenerates into muddled stream-of consciousness rambling; segues derail into train wrecks and references fly at your face like so much shrapnel. But even as John Morthland, a longtime friend of Bangs and editor of Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, cops to Bangs's inconsistencies, he points out that "his ability to move his most electric thoughts from the brain to the page without interruption" endowed Bangs with the power to create truly extraordinary work. None of the writing contained in this new collection of reviews, fiction, and essays drifts into the copacetic euphemism which is part-and-parcel of rock criticism today. No "jangly guitars," "lush soundscapes," or "melodic croons"—vague terms which populate as many record reviews as press releases these days—inhabit any space in Bangs's oeuvre. Instead, Bangs paints descriptions so vivid that even albums never heard take on a tangible formation in the reader's mind. Witness his description of John Cale's instrumentation for Nico's The Marble Index: "Through a pale morning's arctic sunlight glinting dimly off the snow, a bank of violas emits one endless shrill note which eventually becomes electronically distorted by points of ice panning back and forth through the space between your ears."

One of Bangs's most endearing traits as a critic is the pleasure he took in defacing the pedestals of his own favorite idols, the aforementioned Dylan piece being but one example. Bangs's most cherished sacred piñata takes the shape of the Rolling Stones, who the author reveres as saving his soul in one paragraph and decries as peddlers of mediocrity in the next. Four articles charting the progress of Bangs's growing disillusionment with the band are included in the "Pantheon" section of Mainlines, from his glowing summation of Exile on Main Street, in "I Only Get My Rocks Off When I'm Dreaming" ("When so many are working so hard at solipsism, the Stones define the unhealthy state, cop to how far they are mired in it, and rail at the breakdown with the weapons at their disposal: noise, anger, utter frankness") to his merciless dismissal of Mick Jagger in "State of the Art: Bland on Bland," a review of Black on Blue ("So thank you for not aspiring: you are an inspiration to the blank generation whole."

Bangs, in short, was more than a rock critic; he was a writer, in the truest sense of the word. Instead of taking the pose of the faceless tastemaker dispensing snide "truths," he effortlessly weaves his own pathos, his own joy, and his own personal disappointments into the fabric of his prose. Furthermore, under Bangs's speed-driven fingertips, the typewriter becomes an erratic instrument of social reparation: rock criticism transcends itself and becomes a revolutionary act, a living commentary not just on this record or that band, but on the society and culture from which they spawned. Nowhere is this more evident than in his rant on the death of Sid Vicious, where Bangs decries the Punk Generation for failing to find "valid, non-copout alternatives" to nihilistic, self-destructive punk excesses. "And this isn't like If You Can't Say Anything Nice Don't Say Anything At All," he writes, "it's more like . . . . why restate what's been said and refuted already?"

So much talk about the state of rock music today has led this generation to question whether anyone can save rock and roll. From my admittedly biased vantage, a more cogent question to ask might be "Can anyone save the state of rock criticism?" After reading Bangs, it is tempting to wonder what he would have had to say about the depressing state of modern radio, the proliferation of irony and apathy trumping the actual expression of emotion in music, or the appalling decay and desiccation that has turned his beloved Rolling Stones into even more of a parody of themselves than when he last wrote about them. It is tempting to wonder, because if Bangs were still around, rock critics might actually inflame passions and fuel debate rather than support a status-quo party line for fear of their own cool index. To save rock criticism, we need another hero. We need another Lester Bangs.

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Blake Bailey
Picador ($35)

by Kathleen Andersen

Richard Yates could once be held up as the exemplar of the "writer's writer"—hailed by his peers as one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, but largely unread by the people he was so committed to writing about: ordinary Americans. This was a shame both for the many people who might have been moved by his work, and for Yates, who didn't choose obscurity. His style was direct, his subject matter fearless yet commonplace, and he longed for greater recognition and financial success, even daydreamed about sending his daughters to Harvard on book royalties. But despite a National Book Award nomination, an agent who never stopped working on his behalf, and the love of countless contemporary authors, Yates remained unknown.

A decade after his death, this seems finally to be changing, as Yates's readers old and new have been treated to a resurgence in his work. His fabulous first novel, Revolutionary Road, often hailed as his masterpiece, returned to print in 2000 and The Collected Short Stories of Richard Yates followed a year later, bringing us all of his vast, wild short fiction together for the first time. Now Blake Bailey (The Sixties) has given us a comprehensive biography, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, tracking down school friends, lovers, ex-wives and drinking buddies to tell the very sad and sometimes bewildering story of Richard Yates's life.

While Yates's commitment to his writing never wavered, he suffered from occasional psychotic episodes that, along with alcoholism, general poor health and plain bad luck, left his personal life a shambles. Still, he was eternally hopeful and often seemed to be on the rise. Handsome and always tricked out in the Brooks Brothers suits he learned to wear during his days at an elite boys' high school, he was once hired as Robert Kennedy's speechwriter, and went several times to Hollywood, adapting William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness for the screen (everyone involved, especially Styron, was excited by the screenplay, but the project failed in spite of periodic efforts to revive it over the years).

Although Yates never went to college—and throughout his life was both scornful and envious of those who had—he was hired to teach at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where his students adored his gentle style (as well as his habit of ending classes early so that they could all go out for cocktails). Upon the publication of each of his novels and short story collections, the reviews suggested that he might finally break through as a popular and critical success—this never happened, but he never stopped believing that it could. Despite his optimism, Yates was often very much alone. His instability drove away many friends and lovers, he spent long periods of time far from the daughters whom he loved desperately, and he parted ways with his mother and sister after an unhappy childhood.

Bailey recognizes the part Yates played in creating some of his miseries, and captures the absurdities of his life in a way that his subject, who never lost his dark sense of humor, might have enjoyed:

In later life Yates would become almost a parody of the self-destructive personality: He smoked constantly despite tuberculosis, emphysema, and repeated bouts of pneumonia; he was an alcoholic who, when unable to write, would sometimes start the day with martinis at breakfast; he rarely exercised (indeed could hardly walk without gasping), and ate red meat at every meal if he could help it. Such behavior seems to indicate a death wish, but it wasn't that simple in Yates's case. It was true he had a gloomy temperament and was sometimes all but immobilized by depression, though often enough he was capable of high delight, and as for smoking and drinking—well, he liked smoking and drinking.

Turning to Yates's fiction in order to work through some of these rich contradictions, Bailey begins with the (unwritten) contention that his life and work are inseparable, that much of his fiction can be read as autobiography. This is not implausible, as Yates did use himself as a model for many of his characters, sometimes even naming characters after himself and people he knew in early drafts. He also subjected his characters to experiences he had himself, writing about isolated children, soldiers who questioned their courage, men killing time in tuberculosis wards, frustrated copywriters, people who married young and then found themselves trapped in the suburbs.

Bailey takes the connections he finds between the life and fiction far, often quoting from Yates's work, from his characters' internal monologues, as if they represent Yates's own thoughts and impressions. While he usually acknowledges doing so (phrases like "Yates speculated in a later story..." abound), at some moments the reader must turn to the end notes to determine whether Bailey's source is an interview, one of Yates's own letters, or a section from Yates's fiction, his imagination. This treatment of the work is provocative, a choice that might be supported (or at least explained) in the book, but it is never discussed. It is also a bit odd in a biography so impeccably researched, and otherwise written with great delicacy.

Thus, the book raises questions about the links between an artist's experiences and his writing life. Even when an author draws from personal experience, is it fair to read the fiction in this way? What is lost and what is gained, for the biographer, the reader, and the artist? After all, Yates's genius as a writer stems from his vision of everyday life, and his willingness to grapple with all of its painful and petty aspects, from small humiliations on the job to the ambivalence found in the closest of relationships. While Bailey does his readers a great service in providing this biography at a time when his work is happily coming back, Yates's work is in some ways reduced by the suggestion that so much of it can be traced directly back to his own life.

Despite this, A Tragic Honesty will hold pleasures and surprises for those who love Yates's fiction. It conveys a sense of his complexity as a person, and more importantly, as an author. Richard Yates worked almost every day for half a century, writing stories beautiful enough to break your heart, fully realized and empathetic visions of people living out their own complex and difficult lives. His life's final irony lies in missing his own renaissance, but those who have a chance to read his work should revel in it.

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Smedley Butler
Feral House ($9.95)
by Joel Turnipseed

It's easy enough to imagine the long history of Marine Corps war heroes: Dan Daly cutting the pistol from a dead horse to continue fighting in Haiti, where he earned his second Medal of Honor; barrel-chested Lewis "Chesty" Puller, serving in campaigns stretching from World War I to Korea, storming over a frozen Korean ridge for his fifth Bronze Star. These are the guys who are, as they say in the Corps, "Brass balls and bulletproof." Puller even petitioned, at age 68, to go to Vietnam in 1966, but was denied. His son, Lewis Puller, Jr., went instead and lost his legs.

What's harder to imagine is the long list of the Marine Corps' anti-war heroes, such as Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, or David Shoup, also a Medal of Honor winner, who resigned as Commander of the Marine Corps in 1963 over his disagreements with the President about our action in Vietnam. Shoup said in a famous '60s anti-war speech:

I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody dollar-crooked fingers out of the businesses of nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they (would) arrive at a solution of their own that they design(ed) and want(ed). Not one crammed down their throat by Americans.

The leading Marine Corps General in the First Gulf War, Anthony Zinni, started campaigning against a subsequent invasion of Iraq during the Clinton Administration and continues to give speeches critical of our ongoing disaster in that country. Colonel David Hackworth once asked, "What is it with most Marine generals? Do they get inoculated with double shots of truth serum in boot camp?" Who knows, but both camps, the Marine Corps war heroes and the anti-war heroes, could claim the same man as their standard-bearer: Smedley Darlington Butler.

Butler was born to a long line of Quakers but grew up reveling in his grandfathers' tales of the Civil War, on whose behalf they both fought despite their pacifism. So it was only natural that when the Hearst papers ran with the headlines announcing the demise of the U.S.S. Maine, and he overheard his Congressman father talking of the need for new Marine Corps officers, that he bullied his mother into vouching for his adulthood and headed off to war. In his first action, fighting the Filipino soldiers who had taken their country back from Spain and would not surrender it to the US, Butler found his platoon pinned down in a rice paddy. His men were afraid for their life, and so was Butler, but he stood up and started firing anyway, which in turn encouraged his men to do so and the rout was on. In honor of his first victory, he tattooed the Marine Corps emblem on his chest. From there to China, where Butler earned the first decoration of the many that would eventually make him the most decorated Marine ever to leave the battlefield. After a fight in which three of his men were killed, and from which his Marines were in retreat from a village heavily armed with Boxer soldiers, Butler learned that one of his men was unaccounted for. He marched all through the night back to the village, found his man lying in a ditch with a destroyed leg, patched him up, and carried the man seven miles back to their unit. The enlisted men who went with him earned the Medal of Honor. Butler missed out on his because at the time officers were not granted the Medal of Honor, and so he was brevetted from lieutenant to captain. After Congress passed a law allowing officers to win the Medal of Honor, Butler won the two he did earn (and no one has ever earned three, making Butler arguably the greatest warrior in U.S. history) in Mexico and Haiti. When he retired from the Marine Corps at age 50, he was the highest-ranking Marine Corps officer at Brigadier General and one of the most famous Americans in the world—Lowell Thomas, so responsible for making T. E. Lawrence famous, even wrote a dashing hagiography called Old Gimlet Eye.

Imagine the surprise when, in 1935, Butler published a longish pamphlet called War is a Racket, which opens:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

He wrote it in response to the growing fears that America would be dragged into yet another war, and it should be noted that his views were not so much pacifist as anti-war. A good, honest war in defense of his country's Constitution and Bill of Rights would have roused a great cheer from Butler, who loved his Marines and was as tough as anyone. But after he was asked to help assassinate Roosevelt so that the U.S. could join with the Fascists in Italy (about whom publications like Fortune had written glowingly for their business acumen), Butler said enough was enough. He spent the rest of his life exposing the lie that so often hid behind the noble rhetoric, and the money fueling the engines of war. When reading War is a Racket, you can't help but feel the anger in his words—and yet, too, the tremendous will and steel of a man who had seen hell and was bound not to expose even one more young man to it if he could help it.

Butler's anger was not aimed at war, but the war-makers, or rather, the war-profiteers. Indeed, reading his little book, you think that Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" speech (which would have been a great addition to this volume) is just a gloss on War is a Racket. Of course, even Eisenhower's speech is now lost to the dustbin of cliché and War is once again an honor and a glory (and, for the few, still tremendously profitable). Luckily, after decades out of print, alternative press Feral House has reissued Butler's famous pamphlet. Publisher Adam Parfrey could have added a bit more balance to his introduction (which focuses with harrowing detail on Butler's foiling of a Wall Street plot to assassinate Roosevelt and align the U.S. with the Fascists), but has otherwise done a great job—especially in adding two smaller Butler speeches and Frederick Barber's photographic exhibit of World War I photographs "The Horror of It." At a time when books like Max Boot's Savage Wars of Peace make bestselling sport of fighting small wars all over the globe, there is no more necessary book than Butler's War is a Racket.

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Edited by Harvey Shapiro
The Library of America ($20)

by Jeffrey Alfier

This anthology is one in a new series called the American Poets Project, an effort intended to produce a "compact national library of American poetry." Editor Harvey Shapiro—himself a veteran of 35 combat missions as a B-17 tail gunner—sets a solemn tone for the volume in his introduction, stating at the outset "We were victorious, but the sight of dead bodies is scattered among these poems about World War II the way bodies were washed up on the shores of invasion beaches." The 62 poets he has selected form a credible collection: "There are Objectivists here, Imagists, followers of the Southern school of formal verse and dense rhetoric," etc. About two-thirds of the contributors are veterans, the others non-veterans; thus the volume includes works by conscientious objectors and other war-resisters such as Robinson Jeffers and William Stafford. All his selections serve his stated purpose: "to demonstrate that the American poets of this war produced a body of work that has not yet been recognized for its clean and powerful eloquence."

Shapiro undoubtedly gathers some of the best poetry of the war. Included are majestically poignant air war poems by John Ciardi, James Dickey, Richard Eberhart, Richard Hugo (though his magnum opus, "Mission to Linz," does not appear here), Randall Jarrell, and Howard Nemerov. Some of the best poems of ground combat are by Louis Simpson, George Oppen, and Anthony Hecht. Several poems are quite moving, such as James Tate's "The Lost Pilot," written for his father who was killed in action when Tate was five months old, and Peter Viereck's "Vale from Carthage," which Viereck wrote on the occasion of his brother's death in the European theater. There are sublime elegies like Vladimir Nabokov's "When he was small, when he would fall" and Richard Eberhart's "A Ceremony by the Sea." Many poets achieve a powerful austerity through just a few lines, as Samuel Menashe does in his 18-syllable, 5-line poem, "Beachhead":

The tide ebbs
From a helmet
Wet sand embeds
From a skull
Sea gulls peck

Yet the poems here are not solely about combat and its effects, for they also inform the wider ontology of war, emerging into the foreground of military victory to ask the unanswered questions of race and class. Compelling examples are Witter Bynner's "Defeat" and Gwendolyn Brook's "Negro Hero."

Ever since Plato's Cratylus (ca. 360 BC) critics have debated whether poetry can close the aesthetic space between the reader's expectations and the poet's ability to meet them. The work in this exemplary and diverse collection accomplishes that closure quite effectively, despite the decades that have passed since the end of the Second World War.

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Jack Kerouac
Edited by Regina Weinreich
Penguin Poets ($13)

by Keith Abbott

If we talk about nothing, doesn't the talk become something? And don't we see, or think we see, the nothing through our something? What this process can achieve is a sense of space. There's this much room between the nothing we wish to address in something, this sentence, words, art, prayer. The space remains.

So, as in meditation, the eyes focus on the middle distance.

But, what if the perceiver, the artist let's say, has an acute consciousness of already existing in that middle space? Of being neither that nothing nor that something?

Jack Kerouac was such an artist, and this is why he wrote the largest body of the best haiku in the English language.

Basho put it this way: "the basis of art is change in the universe." The English is slightly misleading: there are no articles in the Japanese, no restriction on whose universe or what universe. Yours, mine, theirs. No matter.

All day long wearing
a hat that wasn't
on my head

This haiku is funny. Absentmindedness is shunyata, or empty space. A cosmic spy, it exists within our imaginary daily selves. And that's Basho's one change in this poem, so it meets his classical criteria.

Kerouac had an acute, at times almost vertiginous sense of this internal void as self. But because he was in-between, not really invested in either that nothing or that something, it was often funny to him.

Kerouac's friend, the Zen priest and poet Philip Whalen, disliked haikus, saying "Reading them is like being pecked to death." That's the genre's major failing in English. Yet Kerouac was seldom precious, despite his occasional and sometimes entertaining sentimentality, because he saw some very big pictures:

The windmills of
Oklahoma look
In every direction.

This is a superb Buddhist haiku, because the nature of a particular place is captured in it. Oklahoma has very capricious winds. The need to capture that energy, to live, to survive, depends upon recognition of that randomness. This is not a pathetic fallacy, as Kerouac's "look" doesn't really posit a person as windmill; rather, it implies the human placement of the windmill, the need to use this element of wind, and get energy any way possible. A secret desperation lurks in this haiku.

The nature of emptiness is also here: all directions are empty, and all directions are equally capable of filling with wind. As the Sutra says, "Emptiness is form, form emptiness." But humans need to use that emptiness, capture its energy for a moment, and bring up water to drink in a dry windy land.

Allen Ginsberg understood this aspect of Kerouac's art, saying "emptiness, with all its transcendental wisdom including panoramic awareness, oceanic city vastness, a humorous appreciation of minute details of the big dream, especially 'character in the bleak inhuman aloneness' is most clearly consistently set forth in the body of Kerouac's prose, poetry, and essays and so forth."

Zen consciousness is as hard and clear as a diamond, and Kerouac's spirit reflects yet embodies, as Ginsberg points out, the small with the cosmic, the human with the void. Kerouac's remarkable achievement is best found in his own selection at the start of this book, especially those written during the time when he was a serious worker in Buddhist canonical texts, in some cases translating from French sutra transcriptions. But these are quintessentially American haiku, and for that our national literature is much the better.

In my medicine cabinet
the winter fly
Has died of old age

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Spencer Selby
Sink ($15)

by W. B. Keckler

Verbo-visual poetry, or whatever designation you choose to use for those works which integrate or conflate text and images, is often given short shrift in American literary criticism. Critics such as Bob Grumman, Johanna Drucker and Richard Kostelanetz have tried their best to rectify this situation, but there is still a sense of stonewalling, if not an outright ghettoization of the art form. Spencer Selby—one of the most accomplished and visible practitioners of verbo-visual art, who has also published many celebrated books of textual poetry—once authored a book on film noir, and I'd wager this fact occurs in most reviews of his verbo-visual works, since the noir aesthetic seems to appear passim in these books of black-and-white palimpsests of text and image. Noir is by no means the predominant atmosphere in Problem Pictures, however, which consists of more than 100 pages of alarming configurations of ink (not all of which are truly verbo-visual productions, as some pages consist of images sans text). The predominant atmosphere is one of politically-adrenalized wariness; the collages of Rodchenko come to mind, or some of the verbo-visual works of other Russian Futurists, like Mayakovsky.

Attempts to rationalize the meaning of these productions is probably defeatist, since Selby's art wants to destabilize the complacency of meaning, our poorly bartered peace with meaning. He wants to show us the ground of meaning, which isn't really pretty. These poems, and I do consider them poems, sucker-punch the reader, especially when they directly engage the violent American zeitgeist by re-presenting past acts of inhumanity and vile repression. Stark images of car crashes, people drowning, protesters being herded by police, are placed under jingoistic and exhortatory phrases (often handwritten) such as a few bars of a joyous hymn, and the contrast often achieves a grim, literally black humor. Science and scientific hubris are often targets; many images look like they come from Cold War-period science textbooks that were actually thinly veiled propaganda. There seems no doubt that we are now living Under Empire, and Selby backtracks to show us where this all began.

Texts are rarely given in complete form, since fragmentation is the prerogative of power and the motif of our age. We see on Selby's page what a condemned man might have time to read in the moments when a sentence is handed him on paper just as he's being led out to stand against the wall. Reading down his pages, we find phrases like "watched / doorway / of writing" and "is alive / implies / universe" and "gaping / cover / motive." These are words of different sizes floating in space over images so the use of virgules is a modified convention here. There are a few images excerpted from Un Chien Andalou, usually different stages in the razorblade slicing the eye. (One senses Selby is summing up the 20th century by selecting one image to represent it; if this is indeed the case, I could hardly think of one more apt.) This book really has to be held in your hands to be fully appreciated. You have to be able to read it almost as a flip book, to get that sense of testimony that the works build through conscientious, disquieting accretion. One is fairly certain Oppen and Reznikoff would recognize their legacy in the works of this unflinching artist. This is an age of problem pictures. Selby is one of the few who refuses to look away.

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K. Silem Mohammad
Tougher Disguises Press ($12)

by Aaron Kunin

How to create a community through poetry: (1) A poem can describe an existing social organization such as "adolescent girls in America." (2) It can describe a society from an earlier historical period: "I spent 20 years in the army / of the most powerful nation on earth / the army of the Pharaoh / biting kids in your street." (3) It can invent one--for example, Martian teenagers, magical kittens, "the army of the negaverse," etc. (4) It can even invent the symbolic rituals through which societies define themselves: "many pledge allegiance to the 'blood god' / I pledge allegiance to the freaky horse / who watches over me as I sleep."

These examples of community awareness are quoted from K. Silem Mohammad's poetry collection Deer Head Nation. The title suggests a commitment to nation-building: this book wants to be America, although it may not particularly like America and may occasionally demand "DEATH TO AMERICA!" In any case, the "head nation" designated in the title is not exactly singular. For one thing, it's a pun: it both describes a nation of people who collect and display deer heads as hunting trophies (or, more simply, a nation in the shape of a deer head), and, in the respectful but impersonal language of form letters, it addresses that nation as a world superpower: "Dear Head Nation." This addressee is also not singular; since nations are in conflict, both the militant "deer head nation" and the "raghead nation" have some pretensions to being recognized as the "head nation." And Mohammad's America is not singular either; behind the oppressive "voice of America ad nauseam"—a monoculture where everyone is apparently saying the same thing, "the same deer's head for instance / appears over and over"—many distinctly articulated voices, including "the voice of Yogi Bear," project their own self-images as collective identities.

Thus, (5) a poem creates a community by incorporating multiple voices through quotation, allusion, and influence—intertextual rather than international relations. The poems in Deer Head Nation are a little coy about their use of source-materials—in "Spooked," the first poem in the collection, "the voices have no source"—and the front matter and jacket copy are disappointingly unforthcoming about Mohammad's methodology, but it's apparent that most of the language is derived from internet searches for keywords or phrases. In his word searches, Mohammad tends to prefer language that's inarticulate, vulgar, anti-literary; some of the words in this collection have probably never appeared before in poems. (Also, for a book of computer-assisted writing, the ethos is surprisingly low-tech: the basic model for artistic technique is a preserved and mounted deer head—"warning: skinning a deer head really and truly sucks"—although some poems imagine a post-apocalyptic "public transit system of hovercrafts.") This language is then presumably reduced, arranged, divided, and otherwise doctored. The collaged results are sometimes relatively seamless ("NAFTA, 6 pesos to the dollar / that is downright spooky"); less frequently, the presentation emphasizes the prior situatedness of the materials in a computer-generated word list ("Misfits Attitude.mp3 Misfits Braineaters.mp3," etc.).

One might also argue that (6) a poem is an expression of a community of poets. Deer Head Nation is a state-of-the-art collection of a kind of writing that's sometimes called "flarf." (The term was originally supposed to designate uses of language that would be inappropriate in poetry, but now it seems to be primarily associated with poems based on internet searches.) Some of Mohammad's colleagues in flarf writing (Drew Gardner, Gary Sullivan, Katie Degentesh, Jordan Davis) make cameo appearances in the charming, witty, and only mildly offensive poem "Puritan": "there's a bunch of people in Drew's pants / and not forgetting Gary's pants / police also noticed a bulge in Katie's pants / . . . we are in 'Jordan's Pants' / oh great—/ let's go find Michael Jordan's pants." (I'm using the term "offensive" in, if possible, an objective sense, although anyone who claims to be offended by this book is probably being disingenuous. What did you expect from a poem called "Puritan" in a book called Deer Head Nation? Which is just to say that (7) a poem is also part of a community—a collection of poems, or a sequence such as "Deer Head Suite"—and should be judged mainly for its behavior within its peer group.)

Finally, (8) a poem establishes an artificial community among its readers. Everyone who reads a poem is connected to it and to its other readers—an occult fact that Mohammad cheerfully exploits in "Full Summary and Analysis of Paradise Lost" and in "Wallace Stevens," poems that recount misinformation about the lives and works of major authors—e.g., "Satan turns into a cute little cherub / . . . 'spent $17,000 on a new car,' he laments." Because the context of reading is a social one, poetry acquires its real significance in use.

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Pentti Saarikoski
Translated by Anselm Hollo
La Alameda Press ($18)

by Gregory Farnum

Look for information on Pentti Saarikoski at your local library or (in English) on the net, and you'll find precious little. Yet he is a major Finnish poet, and Trilogy, completed shortly before his death in 1983, is his crowning work. Fortunately the cycle has been masterfully translated by the Finnish-born Anselm Hollo (who grew up to be a German poet, then a British poet, and is now indisputably an American poet), the man who, along with the Englishman Herbert Lomas, has made Saarikoski's work accessible to the Anglophone world. Hollo eloquently describes Saarikoski's legacy in the forward to Trilogy:

He left us twenty-two books of poems, six volumes of essayistic and autobiographical prose, three plays written for radio, a posthumous volume of diaries, and seventy book-length translations into Finnish from classical Greek, Latin, Italian, German, English, and Swedish, including Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses, the fragments of Herakleitos, Sappho's poems, Aristotle's Poetics...

And on and on. On top of all this, Hollo goes on to say,

He was, for a time, a youth idol—the popular press referred to him as 'The Blond Beatle of the North'—whose often scandalous behavior and pronouncements, combined with his introduction of uninhibited Finnish vernacular into the language of literature . . . shocked his elders in much the same way that William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg jolted the establishment in the United States.

Saarikoski twice ran for parliament as a Communist, and was famed for his extrovert tendencies during the '60s. In the '70s, however, he moved with his new wife, the writer Mia Berner, to an island off the coast of Sweden to live a quieter, more private, rustic life. At this point one can hear the noise of half-witted comedians, bow-tied conservatives, newspaper jabberers and other fast thinkers who dominate so much of our mental ecology speaking disparagingly of hippies and their laughable back-to-nature efforts. Here are Saarikoski's words:

Snakes with their small tongues
licked my ears clean
once again I can hear
the sounds of the world
Festive
the rowan-berries

I want to keep this peace
in which I have creatures sit on my shoulders
and dance floor on the mountain

That's the fifth poem constituting The Dance Floor on the Mountain; published in 1977, it was the first volume in the trilogy, followed in 1980 by Invitation to the Dance. In both, the poems are numbered rather than titled, and cling to the left of the page as they ramble, jaggedly and serendipitously, between the personal and the universal, the present and the ever-present past. The classical motifs (serpents' tongues and the dance) recur throughout in a manner that is consistently discovered rather than merely cited.

The dance motif might be seen by American readers as a charming metaphor striving to overcome its encrusted overlay of triteness, but Saarikoski means something more profound; think instead of martial arts or healing disciplines, or contemporary physics, such as string theory—i.e., the magical power of movement and rhythm to open doors. That rhythm includes the less bucolic aspects of the poet's environment, such as the factories on the island. Saarikoski, a streetwise leftist, was very familiar with factories. The yuppie getaway villas on the prime beach-front real estate were a newer phenomenon:

in the café I sit
look at tall villas on the opposite shore
inhabited by people with their own brand of contentment
other people
they've turned the wind around so the spirit of the city
won't breathe on them
sunny mornings busy with sailboats
on the bay
cool highballs early summer evenings
they have those coming to them
new thoughts won't be needed for a long time

The final volume in the trilogy, The Dark One's Dances, hearkens back to Saarikoski's groundbreaking 1962 work What Is Really Going On (as discussed by Hollo in the introduction)—the lines are jagged, dancing around the page and creating their own form, and the Dark One (Herakleitos) is ever more present. Pound, an acknowledged precursor, is there, but so perhaps is Ron Padgett—an example (which Herakleitos would no doubt approve of) of remembering the future:

I make the kind of observations a depressed person makes
the boat's been left there
to rot in the water
now that he who used to row it
is dead

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2003/2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003/2004

Lorenzo Thomas
Blue Wind Press ($19.95)

by Christopher Luna

In his introduction to this expanded second edition of his first major poetry collection (originally published in 1979), Lorenzo Thomas provides an extremely pragmatic statement of his poetics:

Always it has seemed sensible to me to accept the proposition that the poet is the man who suffers; that to speak of that suffering helps us to understand how such experiences shape people and the world. Understanding such things might teach us how to make life less painful, our relationships less brutal. As our nightly entertainments and the watchman's alarums both reveal, ours is a society full of brutalities decked out in excuses. True civility would show us how to install intelligence and wisdom in the place now haughtily occupied by destructive sophistication.

Chances Are Few is a thoughtful collection of plainly spoken and unpretentious observations, some which underscore the brutality of society, and others that are more subtle. There is a specific "I" present in many of these poems, but "he" is never intrusive or self-aggrandizing. The immediacy of his social commentary is compelling, as in the final two stanzas of "Security," which describes the increasingly "crazy" behavior of Thomas's fellow Americans:

All Americans are going going
"Those honkies" hissed
The protestants at the pier

And "I, too, am an American"
Dreamed a lovely desirable gone white girl
Marvelously sedated in a chair

Similarly, "Broadway-Lafayette Espadrille" captures the particular rhythm of the inner monologue that often accompanies travel in the city, as well as the anxiety created by both the close quarters and lingering tension between persons of different ethnic backgrounds.

Another standout piece is "The Rule of Thumb," a poem dedicated to Ron Padgett which follows the mind's meanderings in a Tulsa motel room, as the narrator watches TV and drinks Coors. In "Sketches of Susan," Thomas admits the difficulty of capturing the essence of a person in words, and contrasts the work of other artists, such as Mary Cassatt and Frank O'Hara, to his own perceived inability. "Hiccups" is a vibrant and sometimes humorous poem that consists of sketches of a "typical West Indian childhood."

"Class Action" makes effective use of movie-going customs to illuminate racial and socio-economic disparity. The futility of both defiance and indifference in response to segregated theaters is debated. As Thomas states, the former solution, "hurling Jujubes" from the balcony onto the heads of the white folks below,

Does as little good as the pleasure of being ignored
Being stolen away from yourself
One casual phrase at a time, or suddenly
A traumatic abduction from your own protection
Anxious yes and easeful as your "own"
Or after slackening of care by days
Being looked at as if you were wallpaper;
As strategy, it isn't logical a bit
But if it works, it's a breakthrough to logic.

Unlettered negroes called this logic Jazz
Relating thought to life, love to projection
Spirit entertained by spirit
as in life
And when the movies chose to speak
The voice was Jazz

Thomas is as skilled at evoking the power of speech ("Discovering America Again") as he is at providing unflinching scenes of race relations ("Art for Nothing," "Souvenir of The Manassah Ball") that are both shocking and poignant.

The ambience of many of the poems is provided by geographical setting, and the book closes in Houston, Texas, the "Liquid City" that provides the final section with its title. Thomas leaves us with an image of hope, discovered in the reflection of the sun upon the glass windows of the tall buildings that may help to correct the "gulf between us and ourselves":

We need a song that all of us can sing
A true reflecting. A moody, bright, expansive song.
In all this glass, when every face is seen,
These mirrors will hold conversations with the sun.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2003/2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003/2004