Anna Moschovakis
Turtle Point Press ($16.95)

by Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein

The title of Anna Moschovakis's debut collection is cause enough to stop and consider. I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone may stand as one of poetry's best book titles of 2006. It immediately ushers in a poet of sharp irony, humble yet hazardous of limitations. Moschovakis is a poet not to be taken lightly and one not easy to digest. While she seems dispossessing, she gustily describes herself as a poet whose "biographer listens at the window." The thought must be sentimental folly, for Moschovakis's poetry does not demand us merely to listen to her poetry but to take a stand.

I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone is a book with no small agenda. The poems are a series of long sequences that can at times barely maintain a word to a line. In these poems, Moschovakis questions authority— especially the authority that language portends— and performs a sort of grammatology, renovating and questioning the many associations that naturally seem to inhere. The first poem of the collection concludes with these words, mapping her territory:

I don't remember my grammar
rules. I don't think English is very good
for a certain kind of inventioning. I gather
some readers don't like being
confronted with the language in every word.
I want to be a word. I would be abstract
with an inscrutable ending.

As one can see already from this first venture, her method is not psychological or interior but resolutely philosophical—she wants her poetry, and poetry in general, to ask "epistemological questions." She even imagines herself stalking around in the "Platonic cave." As she says, in the sequence of poems entitled "Preparations," where she seems to state an individual ars poetica, "Because Plato felt modern that day / he adopted ironic distance."

Leaving irony aside, the sequence "The Match," is a six-day journey in poetry ostensibly recorded at the rate of "one-poem per day," an exercise that does produce some standout verse. As in "Day 4":

Abstinence can actually alter your desires
or make them disappear.
The person you wanted to consume
becomes something you wear around your neck
or taste gingerly on your knees
leave enough for everyone

Where many of Moschovakis's poems talk at you, this poem conveys a distinct and shocking mood. This is the best of what the poet has to offer. Most of the time, she finds herself narrowly trying to skirt cliché, a challenge that seems troublesome for her to bear: "A view of sunlight filtering through trees can seem corny or kitsch." Still, her odd comparisons and catalogue of coincidences can at times be compelling, and her method produces an interesting first venture in speculative poetry, one that holds real promise for the future.

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Malena Mörling
University of Pittsburgh Press ($14)

by Miguel Murphy

"No ideas but in things" William Carlos Williams famously wrote in 1944; Malena Mörling's work is a contemporary echo of Williams' philosophy of the localized image, one set in relation to theoretical physics and quantum theory. In Mörling's hands, the poetry of the local becomes a way to record, preserve, and witness experience at the quantum level, as it travels wavelike, radioed into space. Theoretical physics, which proposes that any imagined possibility will at some point in time be true, is the underlying framework of this book. Mörling's poems work on one level as artifact, investigating the images of daily sights and moments. As such, Astoria is the manual to this world's experience, traveling at the speed of light, or memory.

In the opening lines of her book, "If there is another world, / I think you can take a cab there," Mörling rejects otherworldliness, heaven, soul, or life-after-death, since these are ideas that cannot be explored by experience. In "131st Street" she writes more directly: "I have never wanted to visit / outer space— // Though I have often thought / about how it never ends." Just as the light we see in the night sky may be that of stars that no longer exist, Mörling's work considers our own light, the experience of this place in time, sent out into the universe to unnameable ends. We are, instead, beings who "continue / in the weightless seesaw of the light / through a few more intersections / where people inside their cars / pass you by in space / and where you pass by them." What is left of us is the evidence of our wearing our place in time. "What will we become?" she asks in "Becoming A Coat," "Besides coats, besides shoes / that will continue to walk / a while longer / upon the earth."

Mörling's language is deceptively accessible. She is a master of imagery and the pacing of her lines is ultimately subversive, lulling by their movement from the familiar paraphernalia of the physical realm into a joyful nihilism. In "Seeing High Above" the poet's belief in "things" is clearly pronounced. Seeing "a scrap of paper" floating in the "blustery library / of the air" the speaker immediately knows "it is a message— // A message / that there is no message." Again in "In the Yellow Head of a Tulip" Mörling offers a catalogue of found objects that feel amazing by their arrangement alone:

an iron next to a nail-clipper next to a can of soup
next to a starling's feather
in the silence inside of stone
in tea in music in desire in butter in torture
in space that flings itself out in the universe
in every direction at once without end
........................................
that could be you
that could be me
that could be nothing.

Place for Mörling is both inheritance and anchor. If there is nothingness— if there is only particle and atomic half-life on the other side of experience, then beauty is both an accident and a byproduct of the marriage of space and the absence of a greater purpose, greater meaning. But the reward of this work is that it insists that the image of this place at this time is itself wondrous. In this book, Mörling recounts one beautiful accident of experience after another:

It's amazing
we're not
more amazed.
The world
is here
but then it's gone
like a wave
traveling toward
other waves.

Mörling's work resists easy versions of belief that provide a safe way to speak about the human spirit, though her work succeeds in being joyful, and never despairs. Spiritualism amounts to playfulness in language, an awe for the connectedness of human experiences— themselves as free as the particles as of light, or breath.

In "No Precise Location" she writes, "Our bodies / are lying here now / on this bed / in the dark / of a house on the earth— / A house as much in space / as the farthest star / in the galaxy of Andromeda." Nihilism is never dark in Mörling's work, but demands that we consider this too-swift miracle of being. This world, and all the characters of experience who inhabit it, is the only thing we know for sure, and Mörling's poetry quietly considers it in the context of theoretical time, in which space is the dilemma of our wonder.

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Landis Everson
Graywolf Press ($15)

by Adam Fieled

Landis Everson is a visionary poet. But that doesn't mean he leaves earthly desires, pleasures, fears and pains untouched—they are, in fact the basis for his visions. For Everson, the daily world allows the poet to receive insights that, mixing innocence and experience, might be called "divine." The paradox of innocence and experience comes to terms with sensuality, love, and loss in Everson's poems. They are directed, much as Blake's poems were, by a recognition that the small matters of our lives can have a numinous quality.

The visionary quality of Everson's poems is complemented and magnified by an easy formal elegance, a sparing approach to language that leaves room for subtle ornamentation. In "Famine," Everson has a dream-vision of deer entering his dark bedroom:

The moon through the window throws cold light
Upon their curved backs, making a forest
Of crossed antler shadows on sheets
That until now have been flawless and starved.

Everson, allowing us entry to a specific moment by writing in the present tense, crafts a song of innocence tempered by hard-won experience. Deer, representing nature in its most unmediated form, inspire Everson's vision of innocence led away from famine. The famine being effaced seems to be a spiritual state of being or consciousness—it could be bitterness born of experience, the "cold light" of the moon, or a sense of seclusion—and with the end of famine, the rebirth of innocence, complexity creeps in and flaws appear. Human salvation is messy and equivocal, whether salvation takes the form of a vision or a poem; Everson takes account of this messiness, in such a way that it would be hard to miss or ignore. The wisdom of experience cannot be forgotten, even when innocent joy returns.

Everson is a poet with a substantial history. A witness of the Berkeley Renaissance, he was romantically linked with Jack Spicer, and had ties to Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser. The connection to Duncan is especially apparent, as they are both poets of transcendence, ethereality and, paradoxically, domesticity. It is at home that we find the greatest intimacy, and Everson is a poet of intimacies completed; as he writes in "Closet," "I see / the stars right through the back / of your head." Closet, in this context, can mean a space for storing articles or a space for denying one's sexuality. Everson lets the ambiguity linger in the air, but his own affect is visible and brimful—the closet is clearly not for him. In Everything Preserved, Everson has crafted a voice that blends the best parts of innocence and experience. His poems feel like acts of generosity, and the mythology built into them by the poet's history add to their already formidable aura. It is a joy to find a Blakean sensibility still alive and kicking.

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Barbara Jane Reyes
Tinfish ($13)

by Craig Perez

do you know what it is to witness an unraveling?

Barbara Jane Reyes's second book, Poeta en San Francisco, explores the translatable and untranslatable collisions of writing self and culture. We immediately become bound to the "lack of apology for what [the poems are] bound to do," which is, as the book's trinity-like structure suggests, to "orient," "disorient," and "re-orient." Throughout this work, we confront the crisis (or the "state of emergency," as Reyes puts it) of "no single, adequate translation" for writing personal and cultural experiences; these poems, however, create a momentary "cove to escape the flux."

Poeta inscribes and re-inscribes the voices of San Francisco and the physical characteristics of the city itself. San Francisco functions figuratively as the book's main trope and as actual landscape:

en esta ciudad, where homeless 'nam vets
wave old glory and pots for spare change;
she grows weary of the daily routine:

fuckinjapgobacktochina!
allthemfuckingooknamessoundthesame!

and especially:
iwasstationedatsubicbay.

Reyes reads the city through its interpersonal and historical violence against Asians in general, and Filipinos particularly. She doesn't suppress difficult histories or the voices that these histories have suppressed; instead, she allows an innocent conception of the city to be haunted by its ghosts:

north of market's upscale shopping mecca's center you can't miss the huge female personification of victory riding an erext 97-foot granite phallus to commemorate commodore dewey's victory over the spanish armada in manila bay on may 1, 1898 this monument dedicated by gun totin' fist shakin' rough rider teddy on may 14, 1903 to end a splendid little war to begin what is known as a small insurrection

Where "El Camino Real" ends, Reyes actively re-invents the city, scripting the Filipino presence in San Francisco's textual memory. Poeta's San Francisco is what Mary Louise Pratt, in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Tranculturation (Routledge, 1992), defines as a "contact zone":

The space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. . . . By using the term 'contact,' I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. A 'contact' perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other . . . in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices.

Reyes's account of culture foregrounds the co-presence of different cultures and the interlocking histories of these cultures. The subject of Poeta, its I, is constituted and re-constituted through its relation to the other. Throughout Poeta, we witness the intersecting trajectories of body, self, culture and city:

we are penned in this narrow strip of land,
sutured by train tracks and high voltage wire,
where these piss and dank stankin alleys
embrace and tear us from our vigilance—
without so much as a sustainable gospel.

in our collisions, we learn to make new:
from our lacerated and fractured selves,
appendages resembling tails, horns.
and, siempre, wings to capture breath.

Reyes proposes that we fashion ourselves and histories within the "contact zone" of our collisions to develop a "sustainable gospel," a communal act of remembrance and invention. In a space where "the pure products of America go crazy" (a line William Carlos Williams wrote in "To Elsie" is quoted inPoeta), Reyes employs a lacerated lyric and de-centralized perspective to wing its fractured narratives.

Poeta also descends from a "poethnographic" tradition that includes Federico Garcia Lorca's Poet in New York, Aime Cesaire's Notebooks of a Return to the Native Land, Jean Toomer's Cane, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, just to name a few. James Clifford's description of postcolonial, postmodern ethnography in The Predicament of Culture: 20th Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988), further echoes Reyes's project:

A modern 'ethnography' of conjunctures, constantly moving between cultures . . . is perpetually displaced, both regionally focused and broadly comparative, a form both of dwelling and of travel in a world where the two experiences are less and less distinct . . . Ethnography, a hybrid activity, thus appears as writing, as collecting, as modernist collage, as imperial power, as subversive critique . . . a way of understanding and getting around in a diverse world that, since the sixteenth century, has become cartographically unified. One of the principal functions of ethnography is 'orientation' . . . But in the twentieth century ethnography reflects new 'spatial practices' (De Certeau, 1984), new forms of dwelling and circulating.

With textual formations continually moving through moments of displacement and disjuncture, Poeta is deeply concerned with "orientation" and the creation of new "spatial practices" in navigating a diverse world. This collection serves as both a poetry volume and ethnographic notebook, recording new multiperspectival cartographies derived from the "contact zone." At one point, Reyes asks: "wanna peek into my notebook? There may be clues hidden in it: instructions for viewing subjective catastrophe. rules of derivation." Learning the rules of derivation will help us understand Reyes's methodology: She leads, draws, and receives from a source. She procures an effect from causes, means, conclusions and opinions from evidence. She traces origin or descent, as in grammar or genealogy. She deduces one function from another according to laws of differentiation and of integration.

Reyes's contact perspective produces a "contact aesthetic," as various languages (English, Tagalog, Spanish, and an ancient script of the Philippines called Baybayin) interact with numerous formal experiments employed towards "the absurdity of navigation." For example, Poeta moves from unpunctuated prose ("do not dip your hands into fish sauce fermented shrimp paste vessels do not grimace tasting salty wetness do not forget to clean up your own mess here no frills leaving gratuity is customary mark of manners") to the epistolary ("dear love, / remember the bamboo tiger cages in those goddamn movies. and napalm, sinister rain, deathly tangerine vapor veiling the islands, for simulation's nothing like the real thing. the real thing. the real thing"); from confessional ("Forgive me father, for here have I faltered. / It has been thirty years and counting, / the process of my acculturation.") to urban-slam ("unsavory districts for kicky dining amongst lush and plush urbanoids, kooky and kitschy, freewheeling trendoids for even the moneyed sport funk-to-grunge artsy attire"); from notes on Asiaphiles ("1. A non-Asian male who prefers Asian women. . . . / 2. A white western male with a pathological, sexual obsession with Asians and their cultures. / 3. A non-Asian person, most often a white male, with yellow fever.") to outright storytelling:

one day she will build a temple from detritus, dust of your crumbling empires' edicts; its walls will hold with blood and spittle, brackish water and sun-dried grasses. within these walls she will inscribe her own terms of worship, upon every pillar and column, glyphs resembling earth and ocean. once she had no sharpened stone, no reason for stone, for once the wind bore her words upon its entire wingspan. Carved into bamboo, banana leaf, her river poems, her birdsong.

Reyes's ruptured fieldwork rubric resists objectivism in favor of "new forms of dwelling and circulating." The methods of seeing and writing culture d(e)rive the narrative through the diverse contact zones of the city and the resulting "subjective catastrophe." In this "state of emergency" where no grand narrative can adequately translate culture, Reyes offers us a shifting narrative that adjusts to variable moments of seeing.

Besides being a "poethnographic" project, Poeta en San Francisco is also a prayer. Writing from within one of the many cultures of U.S. imperialism, Reyes expresses an urgent plea in her native tongues in which "breath is word is spirit":

pray for us sinners         ipanalangin n'yo kamin makasalanan
now and at the hour      ngayon at kung
of our death                      kami ay mamamatay

amen

Although Reyes offers a prayer for her community, she doesn't speak for her community; instead she speaks honestly, intimately, and lyrically within and through her community. In this sense, writing culture becomes "constit(ch)utive" of poetry and prayer.

Turning to the final stanza of Williams's "To Elsie," we read: "No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car." Through Poeta en San Francisco, Reyes re-imagines the single car as variable narrative vehicles; in addition, she re-imagines the "no one" (the "no single, adequate translation") not as an absence, but as an opportunity to navigate these vehicles through a new, sustainable perspective: "The blank space on your map, that's where I was born. . . . Can you appreciate the neither here nor there of it all?" Reyes shows us that the blank space on our maps are not blank at all, but open. It is their openness that we must appreciate and redraw in order to navigate the blinding lightness of the "neither here nor there." Poeta performs this adjustment at every textual moment, and we are present to witness her unraveling prayer:

she whispers desert trees, thorn-ridged, trickling yellow candles; roots
spilling snakes' blood
virgin of ribboned silk; virgin of gold filigree
one day's walk westward, a crucifix of fisherman's dinghy dimensions
washes ashore
virgin adorned in robe of shark embryo and coconut husk
she fingers mollusks, wraps herself in sea vines
virgin of ocean voyage peril
she wills herself born
...............................................................
virgin of naming and renaming places inbetween

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Alicia Yànez Cossìo
Translated by Amalia Gladhart
University of Texas Press ($19.95)

by Kristin Thiel

Alicia Yànez Cossìo's 1985 novel, recently translated into English, is recounted breathlessly, as though time or circumstance might soon prevent it from being told. Some sentences are short or list-like, moving the reader quickly through details, as in the description of a town fair: "There are platters of guinea pig bathed in peanut sauce that look like drowned mice. There are potatoes in their jackets . . . There are baskets of steaming hominy." Other sentences stretch into paragraphs, winding their way through setting, character, and commentary, as with the novel's opening line:

Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, striking showers of sparks against the rocks carved by the water of the rivers whose terrifying currents carry whole settlements to the Oriente, over the round stones like hard rolls, like the bread eaten by the sweat of one's brow, the bread that is burnt at the oven door, stones that have been placed one by one by the calloused hands of the Indians, gallops Magdalena Benavides, and she thinks that the day will come when people from far away, who are the ones who discover foreign lands, will be amazed and come to see with their own eyes the hand-laid cobblestones of the town's streets and its long roads.

This narrative style fits well with the novel, which is all about talk and the urgency to convey one's own version of events.

There are two families in the book's Andean town: the Benavideses and the Pandos. The Benavideses are conservative, religious, and the caretakers of the town's prized icon, the Potbellied Virgin. They are also blonds, being of both indigenous and European descent, and they see this as physical proof of their superiority and right to govern the town. The Pandos are dark-haired mestizos, who used to own the land, but who were dispossessed years before when the Benavideses manipulated legal documents to take control. The plot turns on the Pando family trying to regain power from the Benavides family. Yànez Cossìo also weaves in a couple "misfit" characters, such as a Benavides woman who wants to escape small-town life and a Pando who avoids everyone to publish his subversive newspaper.

Much of the novel pokes fun at the Benavides family. Sometimes the jokes speak to serious issues; for example, in such an isolated and impoverished town, the Benavides' Sisterhood of the Bead on the Gown of the Potbellied Virgin keeps its icon "radiant in her white gown embroidered with gold threads and baroque pearls; with her crown of one hundred and thirty-six diamonds and eighteen emeralds as big as cymbals and her scepter of solid gold that she can't hold up which they have had to tie to a post." Sometimes the humor is lighter. The town has cycled through numerous priests in quick succession because no one can stand working under the neurotic rule of Doña Carmen Benavides, the head of the Sisterhood. She develops an anxious tic in her left eye trying to get one to officiate the Jubilee of the Potbellied Virgin, which makes people nervous that she's flirting with them. Eventually, in a move that is more comedic than threatening, she kidnaps two missionaries who are passing through town and forces them to lead the celebration.

The end, for both the novel and the Sisterhood, brings into full view a third player, the military, another oppressive and absurd force. Whereas the Pandos and the Benavides both speak partially in local proverbs, indicated in italics throughout the novel and demonstrating each group's place in the community, the military men do not. With their entry into the book, they begin to bear some of the ridicule the Benavides once faced mostly alone.

Much about Ecuador's history, attitudes toward race, and play between religion and the military has been addressed in this slim novel—and in the translator's excellent nine-page introduction. But in the end, as in life, everything hinges only on which of history's storytellers was heard.

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B. H. Fingerman
M Press ($12.95)

by Jessica Bennett

We're all familiar with the legions of sexy, forever-young, brooding vampires that have dominated vampire fiction from Bram Stoker to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Well, being immortal loses some of its appeal when you've got to spend eternity working in a cubicle and dining on the dregs of humanity. B. H. Fingerman—better known as Bob Fingerman, the disturbingly, delightfully dead-on comics artist behind the acclaimed chronicles of hipster New York, Minimum Wage and Beg the Question—here explores what happens when the undead are unglamorous, and the results are morbid and droll.

Phil Merman is a reluctant vampire, so guilt-ridden over his need to feast on human blood that he limits his diet to vagrants and criminals in the hope that he'll minimize his impact on society. He lives in a drab Brooklyn apartment, works a tedious job cataloging news photos (the graveyard shift, natch), and rues the day he became a creature of the night. Initially, he tried to hide his vampirism, but his marriage fell apart soon after he was turned in 1974, and his parents grew suspicious of his agelessness before their deaths; his only friend, and his sole remaining connection to his old life, is a swishy, pathetic drunkard named Shelley who makes the occasional inebriated pass at Phil in between sordid stories of his (likely imaginary) girlfriends.

Things change when Phil makes a new friend in Eddie, a fellow vampire he meets while on the hunt. As Eddie begins to introduce him to others of their kind, Phil begins to question his solitary life and embrace his identity as a bloodsucker. He enters a new underworld of vampires from all walks of life—the rich and decadent as well as relative good Samaritans. Realizing that his distaste for the depravity which comes with being undead is a bit of hypocritical reverse-snobbery, not to mention self-loathing, he begins to let loose and, for want of a better word, live.

Fingerman does a fantastic job fleshing out the details of Phil's life through a first-person narrative filled with self-deprecation, endearingly peppered with groan-worthy Catskills-comedian one-liners, and entirely blasé throughout about the gore. And gore there is—the accounts of feedings, coming as they do in such an ordinary voice, often have a stomach-twisting power sometimes muted in more gothic depictions of the macabre.

The story is compelling and Phil is an endearing character. In fact, he's such a sad sack, the reader may find herself wishing he would just go out, enjoy a nice meal, and stop beating himself up about it, already. Unfortunately, the mystery itself falls a bit flat (as does the Catskills schtick at times) when Phil's somewhat unsurprising sire is revealed, but no matter— Fingerman rescues the ending and manages to wrap things up with gruesome panache. Ultimately, Bottomfeeder is a tasty morsel and a welcome antidote to the velvet-draped world of predictable vampire fiction.

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Fumiko Hayashi
Translated by Lane Dunlop
Columbia University Press ($27.50)

by Scott Bryan Wilson

In November 2005, I saw all thirty-one films in a Mikio Naruse retrospective—among them his 1955 film Floating Clouds, one of many adaptations he did of Fumiko Hayashi's novels. Until recently, very much like Naruse's films, Hayashi's work was impossible to find in an English translation. Luckily, Columbia University Press has published this late novel, a bleak romance which examines the lives of lonely Japanese in the wake of the atomic bomb.

Floating Clouds is the story of two on-and-off lovers who meet in French Indochina near the end of World War II. A forestry official named Tomioka, a married man who regularly cheats on his wife, is pursued by Yukiko, a secretary in his office who fled Japan to escape the daily rapes by her landlord. From Vietnam to Tokyo to tiny towns to a small nearly uninhabited island, the novel follows their intermittent meetings through the years, first as refugees, then as repatriates, and finally as Japanese who can't feel at home even in their own country.

This is not, however, a typical romance story, for it is driven by despair. (Even Naruse, who's often accused of a nihilistic outlook, struggles to encompass Floating Clouds' huge range of misery in the film version.) As Tomioka takes on new lovers and eludes Yukiko, Yukiko lives in a shack, always holding out hope that one day she and Tomioka will be together. In many ways, they're perfect for each other: Yukiko is clingy, lonely, needy, poor, and desperate, while Tomioka is selfish, cold, needy, poor, and thoughtless. They never really seem happy when they're together, but when they're apart they're just as unhappy: forced to eke out existence in poverty and squalid conditions, their lives are filled with alcoholism, cruelty, sickness, murder, death, depression, violence, endless talk of suicide, and foul weather.

Tomioka, whose "selfish heart . . . heaped new sins upon the old" looks for happiness in every woman he meets who isn't his wife or Yukiko: a Vietnamese maid whom he impregnates, a juvenile delinquent, a barmaid named Seiko whom he seduces when Yukiko isn't looking. He fantasizes about others. Yukiko, somewhat more faithful to Tomioka, starts working for the religion her rapist ex-landlord co-founds, The Great Sunshine Religion, which exists to fleece believers out of their money.

This is a world in which characters survive by selling possessions, turning to illegal activities, and doing without. Dreams of long-term plans bearing fruit are crushed by the realities of postwar Japan. Throughout all of this Yukiko and Tomioka do their dance, continually breaking up yet always staying together. Tomioka, staring out at the miserable weather with Yukiko crying beside him, wonders "How long would this woman torment him, like a moneylender harassing a debtor, with the memories of the past?" Neither can find their own way in life after returning to Japan, unable to break free of the endless cycle of poverty and alcoholism.

In short chapters, Hayashi masterfully switches point of view between Yukiko and Tomioka, and writes with a restraint which doesn't sensationalize or sentimentalize her novel's brutality. The novel doesn't relish its own gloom. The repetition and plotlessness only underscore the always-uncertain future of its protagonists. It's a remarkable book, and hopefully it will herald more translations of Hayashi's work.

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Jesse Ball and Thordis Björnsdottir
Nýhil ($20)

by Laird Hunt

And out went Vera and Linus with a large knife and a bag, for hunting children's hands.

There is probably no better place to begin a brief comment on this strangely sexy, agreeably scary collaborative compendium than with the above image of its two protagonists gaily heading out to do a little hand collecting, for these two mysterious beings, carved straight out of the space of fairy tale—Hansel and Gretel all grown up with a shed full of axes to grind—never tire of the simple pleasures of killing, collecting, burning, maiming and holding captive. Nor do they limit their murderous attentions to those outside of their heinous, happy twosome:

Linus picked Vera up.

He took her and plunged her head in water.

—Have a little death, he said. For I am to bake a pie tonight and there must be death in the house.

Vera, of course, pops right back up to star in more than her share of subsequent episodes, just as Linus's hand quickly heals from the gouge Vera cuts in it, which makes good sense, because the territory Ball and Björnsdottir chart here is one in which death definitely has no dominion (even the protruding hand of a child they have buried alive during one of their jags remains warm months later); rather, a kind of low-stakes, light-hearted cruelty does. Indeed, over and over again the distant, twisted Neverneverland of quiet childhoods is called to mind as one reads, that space where one might lay siege to an ant colony with a magnifying glass, pretend to kill a couple hundred bad guys with a dream Uzi, lock a favorite doll up in the closet, then cackle about it all with a friend over a glass of chocolate milk. Childhood has never looked better and worse: Proust's lost paradise re-envisioned as a kind of tender hell.

For all its pleasures, Vera & Linus could have stood a bit of pruning, in particular in some of its longer pieces. Still, on the whole this handsome, pocket-sized, illustrated and indexed cross between the Brothers Grimm, Marquis de Sade, Peter Pan and Georges Perec is a great success.

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by Linda Lappin

Two Neapolitan clowns, the king of Naples, a shipwreck, an alchemist, and a trunk full of waterlogged pages—sound familiar? Shakespeare's Tempest, you might think, but in this case the "drowned book" is not Prospero's magic tome, but an original manuscript of Shakespeare's sonnets. In his brilliant, fanciful, and deeply moving play "Shakespeare King of Naples," Ruggero Cappuccio, Neapolitan poet and playwright, imagines the untold story of W.H., the "fair youth" to whom Shakespeare dedicated the world's most celebrated sonnet sequence.

For centuries literary detectives have tried to trace the identity of this mysterious person, defined by Shakespeare as his "good angel." Two possible candidates for "W.H." include the Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Pembroke. Another possibility is that the sonnets are addressed to "Will Himself," i.e. Shakespeare. Oscar Wilde, among others, suggested that W.H. was Willie Hughs, a boy actor at the Globe.

In Cappuccio's fable, W.H. is a Neapolitan actor, "Desiderio," whose name, in Elizabethan English, could have been translated as "Will"; "H" stands for "Heart" as in "Will of my Heart." When Shakespeare comes to Naples, having heard that the people there "have theater in their blood," he discovers Desiderio and is so taken with his performance that he whisks him off to London, where he becomes one of the Globe's greatest interpreters of female roles. Years later, stricken by the plague, Desiderio returns home to Naples, bearing testimony to his privileged status as a famous actor: a letter from Shakespeare, a ring, and a trunk containing a manuscript of poems penned by the bard himself. Desiderio's ship is lost en route to Naples. He is the sole survivor, and nothing is salvaged but the manuscript floating in a trunk full of water.

Cappuccio's play, which first debuted in 1994, returned this winter to the Roman stage at the Teatro Furio Camillo. (The text has recently been published by Einaudi and a film is in the works.) The play interweaves roughhouse clowning, ribald anecdote, gripping suspense, and high lyricism in a unique fusion of Elizabethan drama with the great baroque theater tradition of Naples. These two worlds, as Shakespeare well knew, had many things in common: earthy humor, love of masquerade, a passion for poetry, and a conviction that "all the world's a stage," people "merely players." It's worth learning a little Neapolitan to appreciate the author's ingenious recasting of Shakespeare's sonnets into one of Italy's most musical dialects.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2006-2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2006-2007

THE BOOK OF MARTYRDOM AND ARTIFICE
First Journals and Poems 1937 - 1952
Allen Ginsberg
Edited by Bill Morgan and Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton
Da Capo Press ($27.50)

HOWL ON TRIAL
The Battle for Free Expression
Edited by Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters
City Lights ($14.95)

I CELEBRATE MYSELF
The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg
Bill Morgan
Viking ($29.95)

by Christopher Luna

Recently several books have been published which illuminate the life and work of Allen Ginsberg, the best-known poet of the 20th century. The year 2006 was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ginsberg's "Howl," the work that changed the face of poetry, made the poet famous, and led to the establishment of City Lights as one of the country's most important publishing houses. Ginsberg was out of the country when the censorship trial over "Howl" took place, and according to I Celebrate Myself, Bill Morgan's new biography of the poet, remained slightly detached from the controversy that made the book such a hit. In March 1957 a San Francisco customs agent seized a number of copies of the City Lights paperback Howl and Other Poems "on the grounds that the writing [was] obscene." Both the clerk who sold the book, Shigeyoshi Murao, and the publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, were arrested. Judge Clayton Horn, who would later preside over comedian Lenny Bruce's obscenity trial, eventually decided that the book was not obscene.

Typically, the media attention translated into sales, and Howl and Other Poems went on to sell many thousands of copies. Ginsberg did not think that "Howl" was his best work, but he undoubtedly benefited from the fame that it brought him. Ginsberg was more than just an influential poet; he was also an icon of the Beat Generation and the counterculture who had a hand in nearly all of the social changes that took place in America in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s: the antiwar and anti-nuclear movements; the psychedelic revolution; gay rights; free speech; and the spread of Buddhism as a viable system of belief in the West.

Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression, edited by Ginsberg archivist Bill Morgan and City Lights publisher Nancy J. Peters, gathers many of the primary documents related to the case, including the full text of the poem, correspondence, facsimile news accounts, and excerpts from the trial transcripts. The book also includes several essays on the cultural context of the trial and its impact on the culture from Ferlinghetti, Morgan, Peters, and others.

The newspaper accounts and trial transcripts are particularly useful as a way to understand the differences in the attitudes and "community standards" of post-World War II Americans. For example, there are letters to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle from April 1957 written both by those who support free speech and those who are willing to believe, sight unseen, that Ginsberg's work is obscene.

The correspondence includes a heroic letter to fellow poet John Hollander defending "Howl" and explaining its meaning in great detail. Ginsberg tells Hollander that the key to his method of "keeping a long line still all poetic and not prosy is the concentration and compression of basically imagistic notations into surrealist or cubist phrasing, like hydrogen jukeboxes" and the "elimination of prosy articles and syntactical sawdust." As the letter comes to a close, Ginsberg's frustration with his critics reaches a breaking point: "All this is built like a brick shithouse and anybody can't hear the music . . . [has] got a tin ear, . . . I get sick and tired I read 50 reviews of Howl and not one of them written by anyone with enough technical interests to notice the fucking obvious construction of the poem."

There are also funny letters by Gregory Corso, including a letter to Ferlinghetti in which he warns him against becoming known as a peddler of "dirty books." Corso finally tells Ferlinghetti, "Seriously, I think that you are perhaps the only great publisher in America and will have to suffer for it." Ginsberg remained loyal to Ferlinghetti, steadfastly refusing to "go whoring in NY," despite many offers from larger publishers. He also encouraged Ferlinghetti to publish his friends, convinced that they were the best writers of their generation. In a letter to Ferlinghetti (dated October 10, 1957) written after the decision, Ginsberg states: "If you follow Corso with Kerouac and Burroughs you'll have the most sensational little company in the U.S., I wish you would dig that, anyway; we could all together crash over America in a great wave of beauty. And cash. But do you think you can sell 5,000 more actually? How mad." Today there are nearly 1,000,000 copies of Howl and Other Poems in print.

Reading the trial transcripts, one is astounded by the complete lack of literary knowledge exhibited by many of those involved. Censorship trials are necessarily surreal affairs, as when Deputy District Attorney Ralph McIntosh asks a witness whether the word "snatches" is "relevant to Mr. Ginsberg's literary endeavor." Fortunately, Kenneth Rexroth saves the day, declaring "Howl" to be "the most remarkable single poem, published by a young man since the second war." He correctly labels the poem a "prophetic" piece of literature which is a "denunciation of evil" and "an affirmation of the possibility of being a whole man." Clayton, who had a reputation as a conservative-minded judge, rightfully refused to hear arguments about individual words taken out of context, and found in favor of the defendants.

Lest one think of the trial as a quaint signpost of the past, Morgan concludes the book with an essay about the ongoing battle for free speech. Even today, years after the trial and Ginsberg's acceptance as a literary giant, "the question of 'Howl's' alleged 'indecency' is still unresolved," and the FCC continues to stifle free speech at every turn. "Howl," considered by many to be one of the most important poems of the 20th century, remains a potentially problematic choice for radio broadcasters.

The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, edited by Morgan and Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton, features Ginsberg's early journals and poems, some from as early as 1937, when the poet was only eleven years old. Sixty-five of the 100 poems included in this volume have never been published before. Young writers may want to crib Ginsberg's reading lists. He also includes many descriptions of his dreams and recalls his thoughts about Carl Solomon, the fellow poet he met in a psychiatric institution and to whom he dedicated "Howl."

Those interested in the work of Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs will treasure these early recollections of the time they spent together when Ginsberg was a student at Columbia University. Ginsberg was a self-described "fledgling" at the time and had not yet come to terms with his homosexuality. It is fascinating to read his thoughts as he stumbles toward adulthood and begins to discover his poetic voice.

Many of the sentiments expressed will be familiar to anyone who has ever been a teenager; often the entries resemble the overheated, melodramatic scribble of any college student. On the other hand, there is no question that the young man whose life is recorded here was destined for greatness; indeed, he seemed to be aware of this himself. In an entry from May 1941, when he was still a student in high school, Ginsberg writes:

I am writing to satisfy my egotism. If some future historian or biographer wants to know what the genius thought and did in his tender years, here it is. I'll be a genius of some kind or other, probably in literature. I really believe it. (Not naively, as whoever reads this is thinking.) I have a fair degree of confidence in myself. Either I'm a genius, I'm egocentric, or I'm slightly schizophrenic. Probably the first two.

The journals include notes for an uncompleted novel that fictionalized the murder of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, which provides a taste of what it might have been like if Ginsberg had chronicled their lives in the same way that Kerouac did. There are also interesting transcripts of conversations with Carr, often about the purpose of art. Although Carr considered himself a writer, he seldom wrote anything and did not see the point in sharing his "art" with others. Ginsberg felt that what distinguished an artist from the "self-expressive obscurantist" was the "fact that his creation enriches other artists and spurs them to communicate. Thus, accepting the morality of creation and waste, it is wasteful for the artist to chant his poems to the wandering winds or live his art, and not record it. The uncommunicative artist's value is lost to all but himself."

Morgan's I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg benefits from the author's "unlimited access" to the poet's journals. As Ginsberg's archivist and bibliographer, Morgan is the person most familiar with the notebooks in which the poet recorded his thoughts, dreams, and fantasies. Although Ginsberg always allowed scholars access to his journals, in his foreword Morgan admits to being "sometimes . . . egotistical enough to believe that I'm the only person to ever have read everything Allen ever wrote." Ginsberg eventually learned to mine his journals for material; I Celebrate Myself ably demonstrates the relationship between the journals and the final product. This approach also lends itself to a more personal, psychological portrait of the poet than previous biographies.

In addition, throughout the text Morgan has included the page numbers where individual poems can be found in the recently released update of Ginsberg's collected poems, making it possible for scholars and fans to read the poems after having been told how and why they were written.

In an email interview with Rain Taxi, Morgan recalled how he became Ginsberg's archivist: "In the late 1960s I began working on a bibliography of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's work as a college paper. When the professor suggested that they (the University of Pittsburgh Press) publish it, I wrote to Ferlinghetti and asked him a few questions. He invited me out to San Francisco and I began what was to become a ten-year project of compiling a descriptive bibliography of his writing. During the course of that work Lawrence and I became friends and when I needed to see some very scarce publications, he suggested I ask Allen Ginsberg, since his archive was enormous and better than any library's. That led me to meet Allen, since he was generous enough to allow me access to his collection, and when I moved to New York City in the late 1970s I began working on a two-volume bibliography of his work (Greenwood Press) and became his archivist." Eventually Morgan "saw him every day as I worked in his apartment/office and became one of the many members of Ginsberg's cottage industry."

I Celebrate Myself focuses more on Ginsberg's childhood than previous books, and while this is a welcome approach, the chapters that describe the last thirty years of his life seem very short. As Morgan told Rain Taxi, "The biggest challenge was to cram Allen's very full life into one volume. As usual, the publisher was not interested in a two- or three-volume biography, which is really what is needed to cover a life like Ginsberg's. So much had to be left out that the challenge was to limit the coverage, not expand it." According to Morgan, he was not "trying to say that the later years were less important, but the book would have ended up being 900 pages and no one would have been able to pick it up, let alone read it."

One theme of this biography is the daily grind that the poet endured, rarely catching a moment of rest from the time that "Howl" became a hit until his death four decades later. Ginsberg constantly traveled across the globe to read his poetry and contribute his time and energy to various political struggles. Because many of Ginsberg's final years were "spent traveling from reading to reading to conference to workshop, etc.," Morgan "tried to attend to his private life and that made those more public events less important."

Morgan describes Allen Ginsberg as a "true American hero" and a "citizen of the world" whose ideas about democracy were based on his deep understanding of Walt Whitman's life and poetry:

Recurrent themes [in Ginsberg's life story] are his unfulfilled desire to be loved by others and his search for a love of self, which I think he did come close to achieving in the end. His self-love was not wholly narcissistic. Theoretically Allen was able to trace his ability to love directly back to Walt Whitman. . . . Whitman's lesson to Allen was that it is possible to forgive another and love another only after you forgive and love yourself. That was the underlying reason why he felt that Whitman was so important to the American psyche. Whitman had accepted himself and from that flowed an acceptance of all things. Allen believed that Walt Whitman was the first American poet to take action in recognizing his individuality, forgiving and accepting himself, and automatically extending that recognition and acceptance to all other selves.

Ginsberg wrote that it was ego rather than mere "self-expression" that was the "true cause of permanent art."

I Celebrate Myself is also the story of Ginsberg's unending generosity. Early on he rejected the notion of accepting money for personal gain. Much of the money he made from reading poetry went into the Committee on Poetry, a non-profit organization he founded to help other poets in need. Not only was Ginsberg willing to tirelessly promote the work of himself and his friends, but he also supported them financially. Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, and Harry Smith were among those who accepted Ginsberg's assistance.

The book is also about the damage that drugs and mental illness can do to people's lives. Morgan suggests that Ginsberg looked the other way when it came to his friends' drug abuse; in the case of his life partner Peter Orlovsky's habit, Ginsberg seemed to be in denial. Some of the saddest moments in the book depict Orlovsky's decline into madness, and the difficulty that Ginsberg had letting go, however necessary their split may have been.

Allen Ginsberg withheld very few of the personal details of his life from the public. In fact, he made a practice of being candid, famously stating, "Candor ends paranoia." Asked to recount any surprises to come from his research, Morgan points to his discovery "that when Allen was only 21 years old, the doctors asked him to sign the release papers allowing them to perform a prefrontal lobotomy on his mother, Naomi. (His father and mother were divorced by this time, so Allen was Naomi's closest living relative). He put his faith in the doctors and signed their request form, which I'm certain he regretted for the rest of her life, for in fact the operation did not help her or stop her suffering." Ginsberg's childhood experiences dealing with his mother's illness, and his guilt over her treatment and death, became the subject of what many consider his greatest poem, "Kaddish."

Ginsberg was also very generous with his many admirers. He had a way of focusing in on the person he was conversing with, no matter what chaos may have been going on around him. In the book, Morgan describes an encounter that Ginsberg had with the photographer Edward Weston in 1956 after which he "resolved to be equally generous with his time with young fans in the future." In Morgan's opinion, "More than anything else, I think he was unique because he took the time to be interested in everyone he ever met." I found this to be true of the few encounters I had with the poet, including a brief conversation during the tribute to Ginsberg which was part of the 20th anniversary of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the Buddhist college in Boulder, Colorado, that Ginsberg founded with Anne Waldman and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1974. Ginsberg made me feel as if I was the only person there, despite the throngs of friends and fans standing all around us waiting for their turn. I count myself among the many that were fortunate enough to have shared a moment or two with the poet who changed my life.

Morgan's biography is an important addition to the literature on Ginsberg; here's hoping that someone will write that multi-volume version of his life story someday.

Click here to purchase The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice at your local independent bookstore

Click here to buy The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice from Powells.com

Click here to purchase Howl on Trial at your local independent bookstore

Click here to buy Howl on Trial from Powells.com

Click here to purchase I Celebrate Myself at your local independent bookstore

Click here to buy I Celebrate Myself from Powells.com

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2006-2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2006-2007