Nikola Vaptsarov
edited by Georgi Gospodinov
translated by Kalina Filipova, Bilyana Kourtasheva,
and Evgenia Pancheva
Smokestack Books (7.95 British Sterling)

by George Kalamaras

“I consider Vaptsarov my brother in poetry
and struggle.”—Yannis Ritsos

Anticipating the arrival of the latest translation of a poet little known to American readers, I recalled a series of sometimes-coincidental events, only some of which I will relate. I discovered Nikola Vaptsarov’s slender book Nineteen Poems (The Journeyman Press, UK, 1984) nearly 25 years ago while poking around a bookstore, struck by a note on the cover promising an “Introductory poem by Yannis Ritsos,” the monumental Greek Marxist poet. No one I knew had heard of Vaptsarov, a Bulgarian poet executed by his country’s fascist government at age 32 for his involvement in Communist revolutionary activities. The following year, I stumbled upon another rare book of his, this one from a small press in Bulgaria. His modernist and deeply emotive poems revealed a lost treasure connected to a constellation of other poets of social justice: Ritsos, César Vallejo, Miguel Hernández, and Nazim Hikmet among them.

Fifteen years later, I asked a graduate student from Bulgaria, whose thesis I was supervising, whether she’d ever heard of Vaptsarov. Nikola Vaptsarov?! she exclaimed. He’s from my small hometown, Bansko, where there’s even a Vaptsarov museum! I’ll bring you another book when I return from there this summer. What I found in that book (a critical study of Vaptsarov that included a healthy dose of Soviet propaganda) was a rich cultural context for why the Bulgarian people revere him; what I still did not understand was why he remained invisible in the U.S.

I feared that beginning this review with autobiographical details might inadvertently sound self-serving, devouring what little space I had to discuss one of the most tender and personal political poets of the 20th century. Still, I reasoned, Vaptsarov’s work inhabits the balance of the personal and the public as its core motivation—he’d want me to include such anecdotes.

When Kino: The Poetry of Nikola Vaptsarov arrived, I put this rhetorical dilemma temporarily aside, struck immediately by the cover: Vaptsarov’s police photo when he was arrested in March 1942. An evocative fraction focuses the wall, scribbled just left of the poet’s head: 7424 / 942. Did this relate, perhaps, to the number of arrests and deaths of political dissidents? That photo, for me, made his life as a revolutionary, stoker, and factory machinist (the title of his only book published during his life is Motor Songs) and his subsequent arrest and torture (he was hung upside down for long periods and beaten beyond recognition) all the more poignant. As I headed to bed, a further “coincidence” regarding my earlier dilemma occurred. I opened by chance to the introduction’s third paragraph (which followed, I soon learned, the editor’s personal stories of his own discovery of Vaptsarov’s verse):

I began with these stories because it seems to me that poets like Vaptsarov are weaved into our own biographies, they are part of our own bildungsroman. And because, for years, it has been impossible to write in this way about Vaptsarov’s personality and poetry. There were ready, predetermined clichés, ideological symbols, hollow abstractions, worn out similes. The textbooks in literature and the critics’ analyses insisted on presenting Vaptsarov most of all as a monument—enormous, made of concrete, with a raised worker’s hand, devoted only to the Communist Party and the revolution. Vaptsarov’s poetry, thank God, proved to be stronger than its interpretations. Everyone of us could read his or her own, different Vaptsarov—intimate, gentle, lyrical, sometimes desperate, sometimes ironic, “unexpected.”

The biographical stories of others around Vaptsarov, editor Georgi Gospodinov suggests, widen the arc of the struggle for social justice beyond distributing bread to the hungry. What are the dominant modes of discourse, for instance, embedded within our practice of criticism that we might do well to interrogate? Our stories help shape a more approachable Vaptsarov—not just contribute to his legend—enabling a richer understanding of the nature of political poetry and the role of “the personal” in rendering collective action (even interpretive reading) possible.

Kino, though unfortunately slim, includes several of Vaptsarov’s poems that are often neglected, including two I’ve never seen, as well as some of Vaptsarov’s more well-known work, as might be expected in representing a poet with such a brief, yet infamous, career (Bulgarian schoolchildren now recite his poems without fear of reprisal). Vaptsarov’s untitled final poem, completed just hours before his execution and smuggled out of prison, is representative of the poet’s direct style and primary concerns:

The struggle is mercilessly cruel.
The struggle, as they like to say, is epic.
I fell. Someone else will take my place.
That’s all. What does one person matter?

The firing squad. And then the worms.
The facts can’t be denied.
But when the storm comes, my people,
We will be there at your side!

Posthumously, Vaptsarov has become widely revered. He helped usher into Bulgaria a concrete, colloquial poetry that included reference to cinema, radio, technology, and modern culture. His final poems (written during his four-and-a-half-month incarceration), especially, illuminate a marked transparency between the personal and the public, exposing an often-unnecessary dichotomy in which “political” poetry is considered anything but “personal.” Rather than the glorious “workers unite” tone of the final poem, another late poem, “Valediction”—also smuggled from prison and dedicated to his wife—is more intimate, even ghostly, complicating the struggle for social justice in terms of personal loss and regret. It recalls the extreme tenderness of some of the final poems of Miguel Hernández, written to his wife and newborn son (whom Hernández never met) as he was dying in a Franco jail during the Spanish Civil War:

Sometimes I’ll come home in your dreams,
And sit and watch you as you sleep.
Just leave the door upon the latch,
Then in the darkness I will keep

My soft and silent bedside watch,
An unexpected guest, and when
My eyes have drunk their fill of you,
I’ll kiss you, then I’ll go again.

Admittedly, several of Vaptsarov’s poems do not sustain this eerie resonance. Some are doctrinaire, as with the close of “Country Chronicle” (“So I am saying / since cooking oil / is scarce / and our bread is / harder / than our pains are, / our slogan should be: / Stop the terror! / Alliance with the U.S.S.R!”). Such moments stumble toward what must be said by the poet (reminiscent of early Mayakovsky, to whom Vaptsarov is often compared) rather than yielding to the demands of what the poem itself wants to say (an arguably more transformed political vision, as is frequently seen in the likes of Hernandez, Vallejo, Hikmet, and Ritsos). Furthermore, the frequency of end rhyme makes it easy to see why Bulgarian schoolchildren grow up reciting Vapotsarov’s verse, but at times it detracts from the power of his poems.

These awkward moments aside, there is enough fierce tenderness in Vaptsarov to resonate beyond ideology (“No matter how hard you try / It is not a good time for poetry,” and “I pick up the swing of the saxophones / The heat of a woman’s black thighs—”). Even after the fall of Communism, Vaptsarov’s verse survives, its complexity allowing even deeper layers of understanding beyond a state-sanctioned heroic interpretation.

Vaptsarov’s poetry—beyond its literary merit, and its social and historical import—encourages us to consider the nature of dissident writing. How best does a poet address issues of social justice, and what is the role of the personal in political poetry? Does the personal enhance or detract from a rendering of larger social concerns? Can there even be a “collective” without “individual” voice? Moreover, what is ever “individual” about a voice that takes shape within a cultural context? The boundary between such binaries, fortunately, is blurry, and the poems of Nikola Vaptsarov—with their daringly ragged quality—spark us to examine parameters between not only the personal and political, but of other dichotomies as well.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

Davis McCombs
Tupelo Press ($16.95)

by Kyle Churney

Who wouldn’t be the slightest bit apprehensive to read a poetry collection with a coal-black cover featuring a waft of mysterious smoke floating upwards? And the title of Davis McCombs’ second book, Dismal Rock, seems as morose as the jacket art. I am happy, however, to report that “dismal” is not a melodramatic adjective that the poet has chosen; Dismal Rock, rather, is the name of a sandstone formation in Edmonson County, Kentucky that serves as the geographical and poetic locus of this impressive, regionally-inspired collection.

McCombs has distant genealogical roots in the region, which adds a command and organic feel to his work, and he has thorough research that he incorporates into his poems lucidly and gracefully. (Who knew that Keats had relatives in Kentucky, to whom he wrote a letter in September 1819?) The first third of Dismal Rock—the strongest portion—is a sixteen-poem series called “Tobacco Mosaic,” part historical documentation, part tribute to burley tobacco culture. The title, as McCombs explains in the notes, refers to a tobacco disease, and the sequence is ultimately elegiac. McCombs approaches burley tobacco through many oblique angles. “Lexicon,” for example, explores narrative through local speech: “they are saying white burley, lugs and cutters. / Old men are whittling sticks with their pocketknives / and they are saying Paris Green.”

The “Tobacco Mosaic” poems also explore local characters, including Bat Gaddie, McCombs’s great-great-great grandfather, and span all the way to the present to the character of “the young man,” presumably the poet. The weight of this history and tradition resonates throughout. McCombs does have a taste for the grand, often lamenting, poetic statement, and though it might be off-putting for some, it typically succeeds. The final poem, “The Sharecroppers,” remembers “that day of the developers and the divvying up,” and finishes

he thought how nothing he could ever say would match
the sound of the undergrowth’s inquietude that last night
when barred owls talked in the timbered sink, and he heard
in the call of the towhee the sound of the end of the world.

The larger portion of Dismal Rock, “The Mist Netters,” offers an assortment of poems in which the region also plays a prominent part. “Self-Admonition at Summer Seat” is an ars poetica in which the speaker commands himself through the poem’s beautiful language: “Consider the shelf of cracked bedrock where the roots / of cedars knuckle down. Knuckle down.” “The Last Wolf in Edmonson County” is a self-explanatory elegy in which the speaker waits at “the pedestal of Dismal Rock” “where the blood-spoor / of local narrative intersects a trail gone cold”—a line that speaks in a larger sense to the territory McCombs explores in his work. These poems are first-rate. “Rosetti in 1869” and “The Elgin Marbles,” which are also included in “The Mist Netters,” are also fine poems, but because of the depth that McCombs achieves in depicting the region, they simply feel out of place, as an antiquated European would have felt in this area of Kentucky. “Bob Marley,” an entertaining, well-wrought poem of tourism-gone-wrong in half-rhymed couplets, suffers in a similar way; ultimately these poems pale because what surrounds them is so cohesive. Nevertheless, McCombs is an intelligent, focused poet who always aims to match a poem’s intellectualism with emotional depth, and Dismal Rock is a proud testament to his ability.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

Matthea Harvey
Graywolf Press ($14)

by Wendy Vardaman

Given the imaginative titles of Matthea Harvey’s two previous collections of poetry, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form and Sad Little Breathing Machine, her new book’s title, Modern Life, seems to signal a dry urgency. Both earlier titles delight through their use of antithesis, overt and covert; both ask us to sympathize with objects, to consider their point of view; both seek to disrupt the division between human and nonhuman, and between the humorous and the pathetic. Yet perhaps all of that tense conflict between the mechanical and human, as well as the blurred distinction between them, is still present in the phrase “Modern Life.” The book’s cover art, created by Harvey herself, seems to support this reading; it features digitally-altered photographs of dominoes lined up and ready to fall, their dots oddly made to look like blackberries or clusters of eggs—something life-like, at any rate, but also mathematical: division and fractions suggested by the heavy black line that separates the dominoes’ two halves. It’s an image that simultaneously evokes duality, the numerical, and life’s fragility; so much depends on the dominoes remaining upright.

Like the cover photo, Harvey’s surprising, intelligent, and mysterious poetry spurns the personal and turns often to the pun, to the non sequitur, and to mathematical double-meanings. Aside from its title, which appears to break from its whimsical predecessors, Modern Life differs from these earlier works in several other significant ways, most noticeably the nature of their humor: although Harvey still can’t resist a pun, the poems’ jokes are more self-conscious, as befits a book whose subject is ultimately the current political landscape and its violence—or, perhaps more accurately, the cultural violence that engenders the political. Another notable shift is in the balance between prose and poetry; whereas the majority of pieces in Sad Little Breathing Machine are lineated (and sometimes in two columns), prose poems predominate in Modern Life. Also different is the amount of “speculative” poetry—poetry that is not merely surreal, but incorporates the conventions and subject matter of fantasy and science fiction. Her sequences “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” create a dystopian world whose main characters describe, somewhat-matter-of-factly, the brutality of an apocalyptic, post-disaster future which ends in the isolation of each sequence’s narrator.

Unchanged is the way Harvey explores the blurry borders of the human versus nonhuman throughout Modern Life, mobilizing a range of fascinating and far-fetched characters to do so: the sentient parrots of “The Empty Pet Factory,” the word-creatures of “Word Park,” the gentle Frankenstein hero of the fascinating Robo-Boy series, the centaur of the prose poem “You Know This Too,” which explores in a half-humorous, half-serious way the plight of the half-man, half-horse. Half poetry, half fiction, the piece begins inside the centaur’s thoughts, which naturally turn toward division: “The bird on the gate and the goat nosing the grass below make a funny little fraction, thinks the centaur. He wonders if this thought is more human than horse, more poetry than prose.” The remainder of the poem includes an explication of the centaur’s plight, a river so filled with merfolk that “there’s no room for fish,” griffins celebrating the Berlin Wall, and the centaur’s doodle of “a girl in sequins getting sawed in half.” Besides being crammed with images of the divided and the fused, the poem asks us to consider how things crowd each other out, a process that leads to destruction and violence, so that what begins comically with the “funny little fraction,” ends disturbingly.

The title poem, “Implications for Modern Life,” is another fascinating prose poem with implications both for the book Modern Life as well as for modern life itself, interrogating the relation between art and life, creator and creativity. The subject of the piece might be a painting—it reads like an ekphrastic poem about a failed art work—or it might be another world. In either case, the poet/narrator/creator tries to distance herself from her repulsive creature/creations, using images again located between alive and not-alive:

The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset. I deny all connection with the ham flowers, the barge floating by loaded with lard, the white flagstones like platelets in the blood-red road. I’ll put the calves in coats so the ravens can’t gore them, bandage up the cut gate and when the wind rustles its muscles, I’ll gather the seeds and burn them.

The narrator of this piece ultimately rejects her distance from her creation and the resulting violence in a conversion experience that involves a dead horse in the road: “But if I didn’t make the ham flowers, how can I make him get up? I made the ham flowers. Get up, dear animal. Here is your pasture flecked with pink, your oily river, your bleeding barn. Decide what to look at and how.” The mental territory of this poem includes creativity, aesthetics, surrealism, ethics, politics, social justice, free will, and the relation of man and God. It’s a good map for reading the rest of the collection.

Other prose poems explore similar avenues with interesting variations. Harvey, in fact, most vividly displays her strengths in this medium, combining imaginative and artistic visual imagery with a flair for story-telling in poem after poem: “The Golden Age of Figureheads,” “Inside the Good Idea,” “Word Park,” “The Lost Marching Band,” “Strawberry on the Drawbridge,” “Your Own Personal Sunshine,” and “Free Electricity,” in which a woman develops a rash of electrical sockets all over her body, becoming a free source of light and power first to friends and family, then to strangers. The poem ends in a comic/cruel/cannibalistic/Eucharistic ritual: “Someone kind left a gap at my eyes, so at night I can see the red switches of the piles of powerstrips blinking and imagine the city running on whatever strange surge (not quite sugar, not quite caffeine) flows through my veins. That’s me in the hum of your fan, me in the crackle of your TV, me lighting up every last lightbulb.”

The line between surreal and speculative is another border of interest to Harvey. “Free Electricity,” for example, has a slightly different character if we think of the electrical sockets as a metaphor for, say, the demands made on contemporary women, versus a reality in some alternate universe. This is a new area in Harvey’s poems, which have always had an affinity for the surreal but not for science fiction, especially prominent in the three series that dominate Modern Life: “The Future of Terror,” “Terror of the Future,” and the Robo-Boy poems, about a mild-mannered, mixed-up robot on a quest to acquire human feelings despite his insensitive creator—a kind of revisionist Frankenstein’s monster who could be a metaphor for the disabled (particularly the neurologically impaired) or for the otherwise different.

It’s difficult to say whether “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” are more notable for their variation on the increasingly popular abecedarium and zabecedarium poetic forms, or for their speculative and frightening subject matter and imagery. Whereas these forms usually have 26 lines, each beginning with a different letter A-Z or Z-A (and sometimes, in the case of the “double abecedarium,” lines that end with the letters A-Z as well), Harvey’s variation takes the letters between F (for future) and T (for terror), and then uses those letters one after another alliteratively in the poem, creating a very different form than the regular abecedarium, whose stricter constraints sometimes create odd swervings in the subject matter. Harvey’s abecedarium is almost a prose-poem adaptation, and I wonder why she maintained the lineation at all, except that the pieces have a nice columnar shape on the page this way, rather like tall buildings.

The narrators of the two series, one a soldier, the other a lover, have an oddly matter-of-fact relation to the terrifying world they inhabit. Given this tone, Harvey displays her penchant for puns in “The Future of Terror/6,” despite the disaster:

There were girls waiting at the gate
but we were homonyms away from
understanding each other, like halve
and have, like “let me hold you” and “I hold you
responsible.” Hospital bed or house arrest
were the idylls we lived for. I promised to name
my firstborn Influenza for a better shot at the flu.
A knot of spectators got killed and unraveled
into the lake.

Destruction and violence are everywhere, unredeemed by art or love. “The Future of Terror/10” describes soldiers making a sculpture with useless scraps of people’s ruined lives—scissors, nails, nylons, a pram—and just as the reader is sucked into feeling hopeful, they destroy what they have spent so much effort building: “When it crumbled we stamped on the ruins. / It felt great to tear something down again.”

“Terror of the Future” ends with the word “or” and suggests that

It’s not a matter of life and death, it’s life or
death. Here in the grove, after jar after jar
of grain alcohol, the sun looks like a halo,
then a noose. Give me a helping hand,
historian. Help me with “or.”

Life or death, Terror or Future. Ultimately Modern Life is at least as much concerned with ethics as art, with life as poetry, though they do not, for Harvey, exist in opposition to each other the way that war and peace, or terror and future do. In one of the collection’s last poems, a celebration of tolerance and imagination called “Ode to the Double-Natured Sides of Things,” Harvey envisions a God who resists dualism, too, who “invents a more flexible forgiveness.” A slight imbalance changes the world just enough so that:

The usual botany class—two rows of long tables, students on either side with wildflowers in vases between them—keeps its format, but now, if a boy puts down his reference book and stares instead at a dot of green on the cheek of the girl across from him, his essay “How a Leaf So Tiny Got on Her Cheek” is relevant, may even warrant an “A.”

We live in a society filled with Fear, Anxiety and Violence, and leaders who tell stories about these things in order to consolidate their power and manipulate their constituencies. Modern Life also tells stories about Fear, Anxiety, and Violence, but with a vastly different purpose: to reveal their dead ends. In the title poem from Sad Little Breathing Machine, Harvey wrote, perhaps answering Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us”: “The world is slow / to dissolve & leave us. Is it your // hermeneut’s helmet not letting me/filter through?” Modern Life exhorts, pleads, begs, screams, and wheedles at its reader to remove those helmets and get out of the “boxes inside boxes” that so many of our modern lives have become.

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INSEPARABLE
Poems 1995-2005
Lewis Warsh
Granary Books ($17.95)

THE RIOT ACT
Geoffrey Young
Bootstrap Press ($15)

GLAD STONE CHILDREN
Edmund Berrigan
Farfalla Press ($16)

by Mark Terrill

Despite their differences in age, lineage, and poetic temperament, these three poets, and especially these three new collections of their poetry, have much in common, and provide an exemplary overview of what’s happening at the cutting edge of avant-garde contemporary American poetry. All three poets have been greatly influenced by the New York School and Language poetry, as well as by the Black Mountain and San Francisco Renaissance poets. A common denominator that runs through all three poets’ work is their use of montage and pastiche, extending and refining the techniques originally employed by the Dadaists and the later cut-ups of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, as well as Ted Berrigan’s great cut-up masterpiece, The Sonnets. (Indeed, the presence of the late Ted Berrigan seems to hover over the work of all three poets.) Another shared legacy is that of the Language poets’ foregrounding of the material aspects of language while moving the concept of an authorial “I” to the background, sometimes eschewing the idea of a central narrator or even a linear point of view in its entirety. On the other hand, all three of these poets are also comfortable with first-person narrative monologues, proving that they are not locked into any particular poetic dogma or regime. In this era of post-postmodernism, the perception of language, both as material and vehicle, has gone through many changes, and these three poets are acutely aware of those changes, as evidenced by these three new collections.

Lewis Warsh’s Inseparable collects ten year’s worth of work into a single volume, bringing together thirty-five mostly longer, multi-part poems, some of which were previously only available as small press chapbooks. Warsh primarily works with longer sentences, written in a straightforward, deadpan style that often approaches the non sequitur, combining these into longer stanzas in which shifting pronouns, characters and points of view—oscillating between the deeply personal and the impersonal—force the reader into becoming a co-creator of the text. Despite Warsh’s use of line breaks and enjambment, these are prose poems in the truest sense, as the long lines build up to a linguistic entity much greater than its parts. The wending way of the lines, always turning away at the first sign of possible closure, often remind the reader of the forward-jumping anti-logic and fascination of a dream, yet are firmly grounded in the author’s own “dailiness,” as we see in “Reversible Destiny”:

The guy pointing a gun against the side
of my neck was sucking on a lollipop. To
talk out loud about what you’re feeling
precludes the idea that someone will understand.
Talking to yourself defeats the purpose of
being alive. Only the ego thrives in solitude.

While there may be an emphasis on the textural nature of the language, Warsh’s poems are by no means superficial. In “Ten Years,” one of the more memorable pieces in Inseparable, the author reflects on a ten-year block of time in which he delivered and picked up his kids at the same school each day. He sees himself, almost as a ghost, sitting on a bench reading the paper, smoking, writing poems, standing around in the street talking to friends, or going to get ice cream with the kids, each memory triggering yet another. This catalog of past experiences becomes a meditation on the passing of time and the exigencies of transience, a heartfelt contemplation of Proustian nature. Other poems are more abstract and opaque by nature, but never fail to provide apertures that give way to the deeper concerns of self, sexuality, desire, and mortality. Reading these poems sequentially in this generous collection is sometimes like reading a long, eloquent novel, with its various characters, points of view, and planes of action—which is in part what gives Inseparable its substantiality and strength. But beneath the surface of Warsh’s circuitous, self-reflexive lines lay the unmistakable rhythms and cadences of true poetry.

Geoffrey Young’s The Riot Act, with its elegant cover painting by Eric Fischl, is divided into three sections: “Why I Don’t Write Novels,” a selection of thirty-four sonnets; “Conversion,” a selection of twenty-one short prose pieces; and “Up the Wazoo,” a final selection of “occasional” poetry in various forms, formats, and lengths. Young’s sonnets are dense, fast-paced, and bristling with energy; they sample and collage various tropes and sound bites from Young’s internal and external worlds, mixing up his own interiority with fragments of contemporary culture. The pacing, tempo and improvisational nature of the sonnets is often that of a jazz saxophonist leaping up to blast out an inspired solo, as in these lines from “The Drop-Dead”:

I hit “Star Sauce” & catch
The drop-dead to Valhalla
Fizzing like champagne in a hailstorm
I must ascertain what humans are for

The short prose pieces in the second section are compact vignettes often of autobiographical nature and delivered as straightforward narratives, but cleave to the poetic. “Flashback” is about Young’s accidental witnessing of a brutal wino-bashing in lower Manhattan, and how he then helps the battered, bloody wino into a cab and off to the hospital, where Young then anonymously disappears into the night like The Lone Ranger. In “Cleanest,” the author tells of attending a concert by The Band at Williams College and a chance meeting in a men’s room with Richard Manuel, the keyboardist, just a year before Manuel hung himself in a Florida motel bathroom. Both of these moving pieces reside in the memory with indelible clarity, despite their briefness. In the final section, “Up the Wazoo,” Young travels all over the place in style, format, and approach, his poetic sensibilities bouncing off a wide range of material, from the free-association of “On the Liz Willis Bridge” to the more straightforward yet comic eroticism of “The 97th Kentucky Derby” to the grand finale of “Can’t Get No Whole One Blues,” a reworking of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans with line breaks and enjambment provided by Young, emphasizing the lyrical nature of Stein’s quirky prose.

Edmund Berrigan’s glad stone children continues in much the same vein, collaging, cutting up and juxtaposing, while at the same time pushing syntax and grammar to the extreme farthest corners of the envelope. Whereas Warsh’s main unit is the longer sentence, and Young prefers the shorter sound bite or colloquial tropes, Berrigan collages single words within the sentence or line, altering their context, changing tenses, declensions, and endings, and making up words as he goes along, coming up with combinations that are both baffling and humorous (“Disturningly” is the title of one poem). Berrigan is apparently fearless when it comes to twisting and distorting the language in order to achieve his various effects, his penchant for indeterminacy sometimes reminiscent of John Cage. Here in its entirety is “Somewhat Slug”:

I found my jaw on my face today.
Walking into the llama portion
of bicentennial alarmism
somewhat disgruntled frumping
into a deeper sense of generous torchside
ashtrays built out of opium and shoeshine
that took out a mortgage on the future of
petrol and centralized amnesty from fact.
How can you stand to keep the mirror in the shades
of sordid bucolic pieces carved into a
polaroid Pyrrhic victory?

It’s difficult to surmise just how much the younger Berrigan has been influenced by his father, and it may be a moot point in the end. But one can’t help see some direct parallels in the way both Berrigans approach the language, with their enthusiasm for taking the willful distortion of language as far as it will go while still remaining true to the “poetic,” and never losing touch with their unique brand of humor.

Together these three collections show that the postmodern aesthetic is much more than the reputed “death of the author” or Fredric Jameson’s “death of expression.” On the contrary, what we see here is a serious determination to question poetic and narrative forms, along with a playfulness and sense of experimentation that opens up the possibilities of language, in ways diametrically opposed to the mainstream models of contemporary American poetry. Whether in the self-reflexive discourse of Warsh, the vibrant juxtapositions of Young, or the mutable modalities of the young Berrigan, we see here three decisively different poets all deeply engaged in the material and procedural aspects of rhetoric, bringing home the true meaning of Jack Spicer’s adage: “Where we live is in a sentence.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

Ian Monk
Make Now Press ($16.50)

by Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle

Ian Monk was elected to the Oulipo in 1998, the year that Atlas Press originally published his Writings for the Oulipo in London. Founded in Paris in 1960, the Oulipo hovered first between Surrealism and Bourbaki mathematics as their ‘Pataphysical corrective. Wearied by Surrealist schisms and expulsions, Oulipo members instead are appointed for life, and their dead remain ever in good standing. One may secede by suicide alone.

Oulipo abreviates Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature. “Potential” here may be its operative word. By devising generative principles—active axioms—and combinative procedures characterized by inversely prolific constraints, its patriarch Raymond Queneau maintained, “Rats construct the labyrinth from which they propose to escape.” Called, in a strategic paraphrase of Clausewitz, “The continuation of literature by other means,” self-imposed Oulipian restriction at last affords, as Jacques Roubaud put it, a way out of the “intellectually pathetic belief in total freedom.”

Recently re-released in the U.S., Ian Monk’s Writings for the Oulipo dazzles with its display of samples. Take “A Threnodialist’s Dozen.” Threnodials contain 11 sets of anagrams of the 11 most common letters in the English alphabet, in each of which each letter is used one time. The set “Threnodials” (literally, a dirge) is an eponymous example. Note: an anagram is not a bananagram! Invented by Harry Mathews, the bananagram is an anagram vigorously and rigorously void of meaning. Perversing the baker’s dozen of 13, Monk’s dozen, based on 11’s, comes to 10.

A magisterial translator—he rendered into English our sole complete version of Raymond Roussel’s matchless Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique—Monk next critiques Gilbert Adair’s translation of Georges Perecs’s La Disparition, entitled A Void. While Perec’s book-length murder mystery charts the disappearance of the letter e without once employing that most common vowel, in what’s strictly known as a 12-paragraph lipogram Monk disparages Adair without using it also—as in my last 21 words.

Finally, for those who suppose such language games are too thinky or dinky, I excerpt from Monk’s “Homage to Georges Perec: An Entertainment in Six Univocalisms.” Both its constraint and lack thereof should prove glaring:

In his digs, I kiss his lips. Lifting his shirt, impish, I sink. First, I pinch his midriff. Blinking in his hindsight, I kiss his thighs, lick his dick till it’s stiff. I grip his fist, sliding it till his mid-digit’s clitiris*-twiddling.

*Sic!

Above I list just three of Monk’s Sphinx-like steganographics. And in a caveat I add I may somewhere have misread a form, as one Oulipian constraint, “Canada Dry,” requires work to look like it is constraint-determined while utilizing no constraints at all.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

Chapbook design, community, and collaboration

by Noah Eli Gordon

I had the opportunity to hear Robert Creeley only once, at Wesleyan University, where he gave one of his last readings. After driving over an hour to attend, arriving five minutes late, being refused admittance, and puttering around until the first wave of students exited the auditorium, I was finally able to listen to him talk during the question and answer session. And talk he did, leading the audience on a sort of rollercoaster ride of language—just as his generosity and connection to poets and poetry yoked together generational and aesthetic divisions, so too was he able to use syntax as an improvisatory shaper and chiseler of thought as it began to find location and form within his sentences.

Although there is an abundance of available prose, interviews, and even recordings of Creeley, nothing really captures the drama of performance and conversation, with their attendant hand gestures, stammering and hesitations in speech, and other paratextual moments imbued with meaning. Luckily, some things can come close. Such is the case with the latest chapbook from Hooke Press: Interview with Robert Creeley features a transcription of an interview conducted by Brent Cunningham in May of 1998. In his introduction, Cunningham explains that as a student at SUNY Buffalo in the late ’90s he’d done an independent study with Creeley, where, “Bob would mostly talk and I would mostly listen.” At the semester’s end, Cunningham recorded on “a cheap cassette player” an interview that remained mostly forgotten, until Creeley’s passing sent him back to the original tape, and, eventually to the creation of this chapbook.

Their conversation is fascinating, in that it demonstrates what Cunningham calls “Creeley’s tremendous power of recall and his ability to quote people vividly and possibly even accurately.” There is talk of Pound, Olson, Robert Graves, and Duncan, of numerous professors and scholars, friends, acquaintances, and the conundrums of both domestic and departmental responsibilities. Creeley discusses his admiration for the visionary work of his peers, while admitting his own interest in the particulars, in “reading time and space as an information rather than as a vision.” The interview also contains several pithy takes on a wide range of subjects. Here’s Creeley on myth:

I think myth is mouth. . . that’s what speech is: myth, what’s said. It’s a mouth. There’s not a symbolic mouth. It’s physical.

On poetry and political agency:

I think it’s an activity, not a content.

On the poetry workshop:

Those poems will just be a compromise of every instinct you have.

As an object, this chapbook, which measures 6 ½ x 8 ¼, is a joy to hold. Its wider page layout gives a physical sense of the breadth of its contents. Cunningham, who along with fellow Small Press Distribution employee Neil Alger, founded Hooke Press in late 2005, notes Alger’s design acumen: “I really feel he has a sense of page size and layout that’s unerring and truly impressive. Things like sizing are often neglected when people think about chapbook design, but it’s one of those things that I think powerfully affects how we think of a book-object, just how it fits in the hand and how the size relates to the interior text.”

Among the more stunning moments in the conversation is Creeley’s explanation of what constitutes a “prototypical American writer.” Here, when he says, “What’s interesting about them, variously as a company, is that they all have the necessity of inventing not only themselves but the literature they purport to be fact of,” he’s speaking specifically of Pound, Edward Dahlberg, Dickinson, Moore, H.D., and Williams—and yet, in a sense, this is also a statement about one’s ability to build upon such an invented company, about the necessity of tending the ground one has somehow stumbled upon. Of course, Creeley himself was such a fertile presence and influence for so many writers, with his tenure at Buffalo touching multiple generations of some of the most interesting and active poets now enlarging the field.

As review copies for Rain Taxi’s Chapbook Corner continue to pour in, I’ve noticed a distinct level of quality in the work produced by an expanding matrix of publishers associated with SUNY Buffalo’s Poetics Program. Cunningham notes that, “Hooke was founded almost a decade after I’d left Buffalo. But that year was tremendously significant for me in the sense of challenging and developing my received ideas about poetry, and helping me map out the kinds of work and writers I care about, so in another way just about everything I do with Hooke could be tied back to Buffalo.” And this is evident in the production of the Interview with Robert Creeley chapbook, as it was fellow ex-Buffalo publisher Patrick Durgin, the force behind the now-defunct journal Kenning and the thriving Kenning Editions, who taught Cunningham how to use the Gocco, a Japanese silk-screening device that allows for the cheap production of handmade covers. “It has a somewhat crude aesthetic that we’ve decided to embrace,” notes Cunningham. “For instance, with the Creeley cover we made it look like a passport stamp, so that if the Gocco didn’t print evenly it would just look like we had intended to make it have the unevenness of any passport stamp.” Because economics are always a factor in publishing work that rarely recoups its costs, one has to think creatively. “Like with poetry itself,” says Cunningham, “we feel the limitations and faults of the methods we’re using to design these books can be turned, with some creative re-thinking, into what makes them distinct.”

Speaking of distinction, Cuneiform Press and Atticus/Finch, two of the most impressive publishing ventures to emerge from Buffalo in the last few years, have recently released new and absolutely stunning chapbooks. Kyle Schlesinger, who founded Cuneiform Press in 2000, was encouraged early on by Creeley, whom he’d met while serving as director of the Goddard College Press, to attend Buffalo’s Poetics Program. “Everyone had a press, magazine, or reading series that they were involved with,” Schlesinger notes, discussing the overall atmosphere of production at Buffalo, “and most of us wore a couple of hats. There was Jonathan Skinner’s EcoPoetics, Chris Alexander’s Rubber Ducky, Michael Cross’s Atticus/Finch, Patrik Durgin’s terrific magazine Kenning, Kristen Gallagher’s Handwritten Press, Sarah Campbell’s P-Queue and many others. I had the honor of lending a hand in all of these fine publishers.”

Some of this honor is no doubt due to Schlesinger’s discovery of a dormant letterpress in the college’s Art Department. “When I arrived as a graduate student I was looking around for a letterpress,” he explains. “I didn’t move my press from Vermont because I wasn’t sure how long I would stay in Buffalo… moving a press isn’t a picnic.” After making some inquiries, Schlesinger was told by folks in the Art Department that there was “a machine that hadn’t been used for years and there were ‘lots of letters’ in the room.” This set off some very loud bells and whistles for the already proficient printer. “I had a hunch as to what they were referring to,” he says, “and sure enough, there was an all but abandoned Vandercook 4, a stapler, an AB Dick, folding machine, and even a Nuark Fliptop.” To the layperson, such a discovery is about as interesting as finding a few pebbles stuck to the bottom of one’s shoe; for a printer, it’s like realizing those large grass-covered mounds in a recently purchased plot of land are actually made of solid gold. “It took months to redistribute the misplaced type, sort furniture, clean, and dispose of the junk in the cabinets,” Schlesinger notes. The work paid off, and the press was up and running, providing Cuneiform Press with a workshop for Schlesinger’s half-dozen years at Buffalo.

In that time, Cuneiform amassed an impressive catalogue of dozens of broadsides, chapbooks, trade editions, and fine press works, including material from Creeley, Bill Berkson, Joe Brainard, Johanna Drucker, Thom Donovan, Ted Greenwald, Luisa Giugliano, and many more. Having relocated recently to Brooklyn, Schlesinger is still hard at work, though he does admit his waning interest in the chapbook, and his turn toward full-length manuscripts and artists books, because “chapbooks require great labor, they’re difficult to distribute, rarely written about, and they rarely recover their initial investment.” And yet, he’s quick to explain that the chapbook is still of much value. “I can’t think of a more efficient, or seemingly simple means,” he says, “to produce and distribute printed poetry than the chapbook. Anyone can learn how to put one together in a couple of hours while the fine points of design can take a lifetime.”

These fine points are everywhere on display in Cuneiform’s recent release of Lingos VI by German poet Ulf Stolterfoht. This chapbook is nothing less than gorgeous. Its thick, letter-pressed maroon cover acts as a dustjacket whose design is echoed in the interior of the chapbook, demonstrating Schlesinger’s masterful subtlety and care. “Ulf and I met while I was living in Berlin,” notes Schlesinger, “a city with a lush typographic history that you can see in everyday design practices.” For a printer, and especially one so steeped in his art, something as simple as a stroll around town can be dangerously time-consuming. “Maps, postcards, posters, magazines, and even the ticket stubs often stopped me in my tracks, full of awe and delight. Sometimes the waiters would come to the table and only then would I realize that I had been admiring the menu’s kerning [the spacing between letters] rather than thinking about what to eat!”

How could one hope to compete with, or at least complement, work produced in a city so amicably tied to design? “From Gutenberg to the Bauhaus to FontFont to the controversial history of Fraktur, Germany has been a center for printing and innovative design since the very beginning,” Schlesinger explains, “but oddly enough, I didn’t feel at all compelled to set Lingos VIin a German font.” Just as Rosmarie Waldrop brought into English Stolterfoht’s German verse, Schlesinger too opted to cross the Atlantic for a translation of sorts in the sense of design, settling on a font called Jojo, created by the Canadian company Canada Type. In a further sequence of translation, this font, which features ’60s-style psychedelic swoops and curls, takes its name from the lyrics of the Beatles’ song “Get Back.” “For the dust-jacket,” Schlesinger says, “I blew up the Roman Numerals VI to 500pt. to create an abstract background that would bleed off the page, then I positioned the title and author’s name so that some of the letters would drop out of the I’s stem (this motif was repeated in red on the title-page).” To the average reader, much of this information might seem unimportant, or otherwise remote, but it is exactly this sort of detail and attention that can, often unknowingly, ease one into the experience of a book.

And once one begins to actually read Lingos VI, the subtlety of the chapbook’s balanced design is immediately detonated, as Stolterfoht’s verse is exuberant and explosive; it allows phrases, lines, and sentences, by turns prosaic and condensed, to ignite in the mind an unsettled, combustible sense of language’s grip on the world, until it is as though these poems ask who, exactly, is holding whom? Stolterfoht has been working in the serial mode throughout his three books published in Germany. Each is given the title Fachsprachen—German for technical languages or jargon, and translated by Waldrop as Lingos. This chapbook presents the sixth sequence, itself comprised of nine poems, each of which features five four-line stanzas. The strictly regimented form gives way to loose rhyme, ghostly meter, and an always self-reflexive questioning. Each individual poem carries a title that includes the termmuttersprache (mothertongue), followed by a date, and phrase like “friend-foe-recognition” or “YO HERMENEUTICS! susan sontag declares war.” In the Author’s Note, Stolterfoht explains that these poems owe their titles to the linguistic journal muttersprache, and that “there are subtle relations between the poems and articles in the named issues.”

When I originally received a review copy of this chapbook, it included a note from Schlesinger calling the book “something of a teaser for the Burning Deck Lingos I-IX due out soon.” Although I’d eventually read that full-length version as well, I found myself compelled to return more often to the excerpt contained in this chapbook. Schlesinger, too, understands such compulsions, as he states, “as a reader I’m still very much in love with duration, that I can read a chapbook in a single sitting (usually) and I love the materiality.” Duration and materiality go a long way to explain the appeal of this chapbook. One feels welcomed, even as the work itself tends to unsettle, jar, and shock. After all, who hasn’t experienced an odd pain in one’s joints, followed by the inability to stop twisting toward the exact position that had originally brought on the sensation?

It’s hard to imagine a more impressive chapbook publishing venture than that of Atticus/Finch. Since its inception by publisher Michael Cross in 2003, the press has brought out a dozen chapbooks of extreme quality, featuring thick letter-pressed covers and dramatically different shapes and sizes. “I wanted to make books that did justice to the amount of effort that went into the poetry I was printing,” Cross explains. His keen eye and diligent craftsmanship does just that, as any title on his press offers one the multiple pleasures of intelligent poetry expressed via an exquisite design. The look, shape, and feel of an Atticus/Finch book offers nearly as much to ponder as the material one finds within it. Beginning by documenting the work of the New Brutalism, the now-defunct moniker for a specific moment of confluence in Bay Area poetry, Cross brought into the world books by Cynthia Sailers, Elizabeth Willis, Julian T. Brolaski, and Eli Drabman. Once Cross moved from the Bay Area to attend the Poetics Program at Buffalo, the output of his press began to reflect its vibrant community of past and present denizens, including books by Gregg Biglieri, Myung Mi Kim, Patrick Durgin, and a stellar collaboration between Thom Donovan and Kyle Schlesinger.

Although his creations might call for it, Cross is quick to dismiss the appellation of book artist: “I’ve never thought of myself as a book artist,” he notes, “instead, I wanted to make books that enforce the poems, so that the book’s form is simply an extension of its content (as Creeley would have it).” And here, one finds with each book what Cross calls “the spirit of collaboration at Buffalo.” After arriving in the blustery post-industrial town, he began an apprenticeship of sorts with Kyle Schlesinger, and subsequently helped to train other incoming students on the particulars of printing. “When the press is running,” he says, “the doors are open, and there are always a number of folks helping run or pull. This, of course, leads to any number of collaborations, from presses working together to produce a book to folks offering their services to sew.” Because of the labor-intensive process, these services are often indispensable. “Sometimes folks don’t get how much time and money goes into these books. In fact,” notes Cross, “I realized long ago that I would be saving money if I just made print-on-demand trade editions. But I wanted to make an object, something that worked on the senses at all levels.”

For Cross, this sense of an object is tied to the chapbook’s ability to arrest attention, to sculpt and freeze the present: “Atticus/Finch is a vehicle to print poems with some immediacy (cultural, political, etc.) in medias res. I wanted from the beginning to print books that were in conversation, in the air, while they were in conversation, in the air.” Doing such work has given Cross a window into one of the more intriguing aspects of the chapbook—its ability to alter the trajectory of an author’s future concerns. “It’s super instructive to study what happens when a chapbook finds a home in a full-length book,” he says. “One can learn a lot about a writer’s practice by tracking the difference.” These differences can be subtle or substantial; oftentimes, their subtlety is precisely what makes them substantial. When Wesleyan University Press published Elizabeth Willis’s Meteoric Flowers in 2006, for example, the poems from her Atticus/Finch chapbook of the same title reappeared in a dramatically different order, fundamentally altering a reader’s experience.

The mere act of printing itself can also affect one’s experience of a text. The more time Cross spent printing, the more he found himself enchanted with the act: “It’s pretty magical (or, I suppose, alchemical) to make the poem into an object, to actually sink the letters into the page. Your relationship to the poem changes. So much of our labor as poets is abstract—at the end of the day, when printing, you get to take something home with you.” That this something can encompass object and idea—the abstract mental sphere of the poem and the concrete earthiness of an object, an absolutely touchable, tangible book—gets to one of the core pleasures of chapbook culture: economies with little capitalistic commerce. “I guess it all comes down to a gift economy for me,” says Cross. “I have a personal relationship with each and every book I print, and I think of the labor of publishing as a gift to the author (and reader) that such a work exists!”

Cross’s latest chapbook to enter this gift economy is that of C. J. Martin’s Lo, Bittern, which carries the characteristic striking production of Atticus/Finch. Its cover is printed with black ink on sturdy pink cardstock with French flaps, and features a grid design with several repeating geometric shapes. The interior signature is hand sewn with black thread, which helps to echo the overall symmetry of the book’s design. The pink and black combined with its smaller size create a sort of physical tension; there is something uneasy about this chapbook’s elegance, which makes it ultimately all the more compelling. When settling on a look for each of his chapbooks, Cross often finds that “the poems themselves are responsible for so many of the design decisions.” Thus, one need look no further than the poems themselves to discover the officiator of such an off-kilter marriage of elegance and uncertainty.

Martin’s verse is difficult and arresting. Its difficulty is that of any encounter with difference—that which calls for a recalibration of whatever machinery one has erected in order to engage with a text. It is poetry that gives one pause, which I mean as the highest possible praise. Yes, there are familiar elements here: the spare yet constricting brevity of later Celan; the visual materiality of some of Susan Howe’s work; Leslie Scalapino’s use of duration as landscape; various techniques of collage, abbreviation, assemblage, sound-driven writing and referential uncertainty. However, it is Martin’s orchestration of these elements that makes them once again odd and strange. Like the occasional reflection of one’s own eyes in a pair of glasses, these poems negotiate the inevitable transaction of language by looking back at themselves while staring at the world. Which is to say that the poems are not at all lacking in subjectivity and content; rather, their subject seems to be a containment of the transitory aspects of language. We don’t get what happens; we get happening: “For when—and then as much as— / was at least something, / slowly. —Rigs it, blown.” Lo, Bittern is a chapbook worth hunting down and approaching with caution, as it might take off the top of your head.

What strikes me as wonderful and exciting about this particular group of chapbooks is that it is a company, it is a constellation—but one forever open to revision, to new formations. Several years ago, the forums at the website Foetry.com were a hotbed of anonymously scribed accusations, conspiracy theories, and generally vindictive, venomous quips regarding the state of publishing in contemporary American poetry. Within such a miasma of petty muckraking, the one moment of crystalline, articulate passion that stood out was Robert Creeley’s contribution. Over the course of several days, Creeley posted to these forums, his legendary sense of company brightening the otherwise murky atmosphere. Although these posts are no longer online, I have a vivid memory not of what, exactly, Creeley had written, but ofhow his writing seemed to nullify, gently, so many of the enraged and anonymous arguments circling around the topic of conflicts of interest. I remember reading these forums with the same sort of voyeuristic attraction and repulsion one feels after having stopped to watch the aftermath of an accident. But Creeley approached the debacle with care; anyone reading his posts could feel his deep conviction, and the sense that as poets, and publishers, one should honor one’s interests, and keep one’s company.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

CLEAN CARTOONISTS’ DIRTY  DRAWINGS
edited by Craig Yoe
Last Gasp ($19.95)

BEST EROTIC COMICS 2008
edited by Greta Christina
Last Gasp ($19.95)

EROTIC COMICS
A Graphic History from Tijuana Bibles to  Underground Comix
Tim Pilcher & Gene Kannenberg, Jr.
Abrams ($29.95)

by Paul Buhle

In his monumentally hefty collection and commentary No Laughing Matter: Rationale of the Dirty Joke, Gershon Legman noted that sex humor is hardly ever about sex, so much as dishing out degradation. But a large handful of the jokes he collected strike me as quite good, usually because they dole out wholly justified revenge by women against men (impotence jokes, small penis jokes, etc.), or because they treat satisfying and unharmful behavior as perfectly fine (so long as no one is hurt or really humiliated, anything goes). The humor is found in the foolishness of sexual embarrassment about ourselves.

This is the spirit in which the ill-famed Tijuana Bibles produced 50-75 years ago continue to look a lot better than almost all other comics pornography. The dames of these booklets are, generally speaking, quite chipper, and the men are depicted as foolish for all the usual reasons. Also, the satires of movie stars, politicians, and other comics are often sharp and topical, amounting to a sort of Doonesbury with sexual acts. The underground comix artists of the ’60s and ’70s, determined to overthrow existing censorship, went back to this source in more ways than one, adding more cartooniness and shunning the pseudo-realism of professional porn. Undergrounds such as Snatch, Jizz, Wet Satin and Tits 'n Clits were all pretty funny, and Gay Comix actually reframed what comics are and what they do.

In the ’80s and ’90s came the era of alternative comics and the rise of soap-opera porn typified byOmaha, The Cat Dancer and the diverse offerings of Fantagraphics’ “Eros” line. For all we know, many independent comics publishers might not have survived without this line of goods. The belated critical acceptance of comics as an art form no doubt inspired Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's recent pornographic epic Lost Girls, which achieved prestige for displaying sex in ways that the Tijuana Bible artists would have considered impossible. Escaping legal retribution used to be the game; now publishers of erotic comics vie for window displays.

Best Erotic Comics 2008 brings us up to date. Actually, the work herein was originally published from 2000 onward, but the mood is distinctly modern. Organs and process predominate, and humor or social critique of any kind are less present than sexual transgression (not all of it compliant). This is not a happy book, although a majority of characters obviously enjoy themselves. The art is impressive, in a mostly depressive way: we see a world of near-hopelessness and sex as costly consolation, perhaps a mirror of the prevalence of STDs and the specter of impossibility that haunts that erotic leitmotif, the pleasurable but chance encounter. A fair share of the happier congresses seem to be about the displacement of power in favor of women, and in that sense, except for the emerging and often central role of lesbians, it may not be entirely far from the Tijuana Bibles after all.

Still, the seriousness of the work in Best Erotic Comicslies in vivid contrast to Clean Cartoonists' Dirty Drawings. Anthologist and editor Craig Yoe, a former manager of the Muppets, is a sort of modern Legman, a collector of visual impressions and a compulsive filer-away of odd art. Here he has gathered dozens of naughty pieces by well-known comics artists and cartoonists, mostly from the 1920s-60s, many hitherto unpublished. As Yoe notes, mainstream cartoonists from Rube Goldberg to Charles Schultz—including Carl Barks, Will Eisner, Mort Walker, Hal Foster, Hank Ketcham, Chuck Jones, Al Capp, Jack Cole, Jim Steranko and Roy Crane—repressed their quiet urges to draw hot stuff in their funny papers and comic books. Only a few, like Don DeCarlo, did it for a living, and even then the ladies kept some of their clothes on.

When seen as a group, unfortunately, a lot of the women depicted here look too much alike—tall, busty and brazen—although it’s nice to see Brenda Starr naked, something her artist (Dale Messick) wanted to do for a long time. Worse, too few of these artists are women and even fewer nonwhite, but in the mainstream, these categories were small until very recent times. The important thing is that their art is, in most cases, exemplified their individual styles—none of these artists are imitating someone else's idea of nakedness. Clean Cartoonists' Dirty Drawings thereby helps make sense of what has been missing from the mainstream all along.

Robert Crumb writes in his Forward to Yoe’s book that its contents might have been better left secret, the wild id of the artist that never got beyond his drawing board. Aline Kominsky Crumb has a somewhat similar comment in her Foreword to Erotic Comics: she looks back to the Men's Magazine era of the 1920s–’50s and its extension into the underground comix that followed as the Golden Age of porno-humor, exuberantly sexual, by obvious (if unstated) contrast to the last few decades. In short, and once again: perhaps less is more.

But this would be a conclusion that the authors of Erotic Comics are not at all likely to share. In one sense, the book is an updated version of Maurice Horn's Sex in the Comics, published in the more innocent (or censored) year of 1985. Both versions are global, with heavy influences of the French (naturally); apart from graphic updates, the new volume includes S&M material that Horn and his publishers were probably too fearful to handle. Thus, the often unclothed ’60s heroine Phoebe Zeit-geist, who originally appeared in the Beat-oriented pages of the Evergreen Review, seems tame when compared to an entire section of “Bondage Babes.” It's all out in the open, and though the authors add helpful commentary, mainly biographies of the artists, the ordinary reader is not likely to pay much attention to it.

Which is a shame, because overall Tim Pilcher and Gene Kannenberg, Jr. (both comics historians, a Brit and an American respectively) have constructed a well-organized overview of the erotic comics genre. Pilcher discusses right off the bat Picasso's famous "Dream and Lie of Franco," lending the rest of the book an art-world respectability and planting the seeds of its modernist thesis, summed up in Viennese architect Adolf Loos's pithy dictum "All art is erotic." The authors go on to chart the development of erotic comics from the turn of the century's "saucy postcards" (the prolific Edwardian Donald McGill will be a revelation to some) and hardcore but satirical Tijuana Bibles (amply discussed with a range of examples) through the Men's Magazines and subsequent underground comix that continued pushing the envelope on sex and social mores. Pilcher and Kannenberg are detailed in their histories of these artists and their cultures, and occasionally discuss technique as well (pin-up artist Bill Ward's intriguing use of white-out, for example) while not being oblivious to the rampant sexism that underlies so much of this work.

Erotic Comics concludes with a discussion of “Abandonment Abroad,” and while it features some Latin-American art amidst the Europeans, it would be a better survey if comic artists from Africa, parts of Asia besides Japan, and other parts of the world could be seen here. Even more, we could wish for more women artists, whose ideas of erotica might be as distinct as the few pages devoted to Women's Liberation-era comics (i.e. Wimmen’s Comix and Tits and Clits) suggest. Perhaps this is the proper job of future Best Erotic Comics volumes. For now, the books on the shelves do at least provide a glimpse of the range of possibilities.

Click here to purchase Clean Cartoonists' Dirty Drawings at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Best Erotic Comics 2008 at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Erotic Comics at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

MAHMOUD DARWISH, EXILE’S POET
Critical Essays
edited by Hala Khamis Nassar and Najat Rahman
Olive Branch Press ($25)

THE BUTTERFLY’S BURDEN
Mahmoud Darwish
translated by Fady Joudah
Copper Canyon Press ($20)

by Robert Milo Baldwin

Best known as the poet of Palestinian resistance, Mahmoud Darwish has a poetic range far wider than his politics. While resistance to Israel may be the engine for part of his work, the pain and isolation of exile is the fuel. In Mahmoud Darwish, Exile’s Poet, fourteen essays examine both his work and how an existential if not permanent exile is woven, if barely, with dangling threads of hope. As Darwish himself says, “be present in absence.”

Born in a village in Galilee in 1942, at age six Darwish fled with his family to Lebanon in the 1948 war, only to return a few months later to the new state of Israel to find his village gone. Growing up in Israel, he lived under the legal status of “absent-present alien” despite having been born there. For publishing and reading his poetry, he suffered house arrests and imprisonment, until his self-imposed exile to Egypt in 1970. From there he moved to Beirut, only to be expelled with the PLO in the 1982 Israeli invasion. Finally, after the Oslo Accords, he returned to Ramallah in 1996 to live in the occupied West Bank, where he later endured the 2002 siege of the PLO headquarters. As one essayist asserts:

What space can the poet claim after the loss of a supplanted homeland except the space of a poem? Poetry is the closest thing to granting a sense of belonging for the poetic voice that poses it as a question.

Darwish has written as he has lived, with the emotion of exile perhaps best described by Edward Said:

Exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid, or secure. Exile, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is “a mind of winter” in which the pathos of the summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable.

If we, as Americans, wonder why Hamas lobs rockets from Gaza into Israel, consider how we, as Americans, reacted to Arabs flying planes into the Twin Towers—we invaded two countries. If Darwish and others still long for their homeland, sixty years after losing it, why should we be surprised? The nearly powerless defiance of Palestinians is symbolized as much by young boys throwing rocks at tanks as it is by Darwish’s famous early poem, “Identity Card”:

Write down I am an Arab
You stole the groves of my forefathers,
And the land I used to till.
You left me nothing but these rocks.
And from them, I must wrest a loaf of bread,
For my eight children.

In the Arab world, poets are considered persons of vision and prophecy, feared not only by Israel but also corrupt Arab leaders. With only exile and no homeland, Darwish has often re-invented ancient myth, as if the reshaping of myth itself might become a new homeland, a “land made of words.” In so doing, he may astonish those in the West ignorant of how much common ground we share with the Arab world, such as Darwish’s allusions to Adam, Jericho, the Song of Songs, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus. As Darwish well knows, poetry sometimes allows a journey between different cultures and languages. By reshaping ancient stories, Darwish has attempted to form a bridge between cultures, so that a new version of an old story becomes “a counter-text, a kind of replacement of the original text by a new understanding, thus enabling the reader to confront the canon of the ‘other’ with a newly established or newly affirmed canon of his own.” Consider how Darwish retells the story of Adam and Eve:

Like Adam, the [poem’s] speaker even cedes a part of his body to make the creation of his female companion possible. The new Eve, Adam’s companion who is thus emerging and who receives her name through the poet’s creation act, is none other than Palestine.

This religious imagery has also been adopted by other Arab poets, some of whom draw a parallel between the crucifixion of Jesus and the injustice against Palestinians. If such imagery, for some, might quickly dissolve into anti-Semitism, Darwish asserts that the victims of the Holocaust do not have a monopoly on victimhood, and that the reshaping of myth is intended to remove us from the assumptions we’ve made about them and their “suffocating knowledge,” and to expand the dialogue among us all. For those who might question the intent of such a dialogue, it bears repeating that Darwish, as a young man, fell in love with a young Jewish woman—even though he later recognized such a love was “impossible to live,” and “located in sites impossible to inhabit.”

Where this leads, at times, is to the powerlessness of poetry, as if it has no value. Yet Darwish has never ceased to write, acknowledging that “the poet cannot but be a poet,” for he must “put himself in the wind and madness,” even if action is demanded over aesthetics. Yet the alienation of exile never leaves, as Darwish says so eloquently:

Perhaps like me you have no address
What’s the worth of a man
Without a homeland,
Without a flag,
Without an address?
What is the worth of such a man?

For Darwish, this no man’s land is one in which “I cannot enter and I cannot go out.” The bitter irony is that the refugees of the Holocaust resulted in the refugees of Palestine. This reality is often at the center of Darwish’s thinking; he rejected the Oslo Accords because it would lead to the apartheid of two separate states. Unlike Hamas, which seeks the destruction of Israel, Darwish apparently advocates “Israeli and Palestinian coexistence in a binational state with equal rights and secular citizenship.” In other words, he seeks the right of return to his homeland, with the full rights of a citizen to vote and otherwise participate in self-government.

Such political views often overshadow Darwish’s accomplishments as a poet. In The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady Joudah (a Texas physician born of Palestinian refugees, and a member of “Doctors Without Borders”), the best poems are not so much about exile or oppression but the wonder of life, as in these lines from “Sonnet I”:

If you are the last of what god told me, be
the pronoun revealed to double the “I.” Blessedness is ours
now that almond trees have illuminated the footprints of passersby, here
on your banks, where above you grouse and doves flutter

In some poems, Darwish adopts the persona of a female narrator, as in “Housework,” saying, “A rain made me wet and filled with the scent of oranges.” In “Two Stranger Birds in our Feathers,” a woman asks a stranger to slowly undo her braids, saying:

Tell me some simple
talk . . . the talk a woman always desires
to be told. I don’t want the phrase
complete. Gesture is enough to scatter me in the rise
of butterflies between springheads and the sun. Tell me
I am necessary for you like sleep, and not like nature
filling up with water around you and me. And spread
over me an endless blue wing . . .

While poetry of politics and protest may wither past its time, the poetry of love can be timeless. What Darwish does is join the two together, as in “I Waited for No One”:

And go with the river from one fate
to another, the wind is ready to uproot you
from my moon, and the last words on my trees
are ready to fall on Trocadero square. And look
behind you to find the dream, go
to any east or west that exiles you more,
and keeps me one step farther from my bed
and from one of my sad skies. The end
is beginning’s sister, go and you’ll find what you left
here, waiting for you.

Perhaps Darwish’s poetry is best described by a line from “Maybe, Because Winter Is Late”: “a guitar that has opened its wound to the moon.”

Click here to purchase Mahmoud Darwish, Exile's Poet at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Butterfly's Burden at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

Conducted in Turkish and translated into English by Figen Bingül 

Adalet Ağaoğlu’s works are significant not only for their rich content, surveying the dialectic between the individual and society, but also for their technical and stylistic innovations. One of Turkey’s leading writers, Ağaoğlu has written about the social upheavals of the Republican era, namely the period of Westernization resulting from reforms and the struggles of individuals during this time. She has also dealt with issues relating to the intellectual’s confrontation with him or herself and with society.

Born in 1929, Ağaoğlu first achieved prominence as a playwright, writing for various theaters during the ’50s and ’60s. In the early ’70s, she began writing novels; the first, Lying Down to Die (1973), was heralded as a groundbreaking departure from the classical Turkish novel, and her first short story book, High Tension (1975), won the Story Award of the year. She has continued winning major prizes in Turkey ever since. Ağaoğlu was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by Ohio State University in 1998.

My English translation of Summer’s End (Talisman House, $ 18.95), one of the author’s major novels, has just been published. Summer’s End is a good example of Ağaoğlu’s works, as the main theme is the search for individual happiness amidst the harsh realities of society. Taking place in an Eastern Mediterranean town at the end of the ’70s, the novel deals with issues springing from modernization and social conflict. While transporting the reader to a region with unmatched natural beauty and historical and mythological richness, Ağaoğlu analyzes her characters, affected by the political upheaval in the country at the time, as they struggle to find meaning in their lives.

In this interview, conducted late last year in Instanbul, Ağaoğlu talks about everything from the Turkish avant-garde to the political problems facing her country.

Figen Bingül: Your 1980 novel Summer’s End is now being published in the U.S. Why did you choose this specific novel for American readers?

Adalet Ağaoğlu: For America, or let’s say for the Western world, I chose this book because it talks about a region in the Eastern Mediterranean that has had a connection to both the East and the West, and the conflict between secular and religious cultures today. Since Turkey is a country whose three sides are surrounded by sea—the Mediterranean, the Aegean, and the Black Seas—we are considered to be a Mediterranean country. However, when the Mediterranean is mentioned, especially in literature, it’s mostly about the Aegean shore which neighbors Greece. But there’s a different reality in the Eastern Mediterranean, which stretches from Alanya to Iskenderun, to Mesopotamia, to the Middle East. The Western Mediterranean was already Westernized long ago; for foreigners to understand Turkish society, they need to know about the Eastern Mediterranean, too. Also, historically there are many cultures that have prospered here. Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman civilizations have left many traces in this region. You can see many Roman and Byzantine ruins; there are bridges from the Roman era even in the forests. A portion of the Silk Road, along which spice caravans from Mesopotamia and Egypt passed, was located in this region. And according to mythology, Cleopatra lived here at one time. I talk about all these things in this novel, which in a way represents the cultural diversity and the conflicts of Turkey.

FB: It has been 27 years since this novel was published in Turkey. And during this time there has been a change in the Eastern Mediterranean, too. You predicted this change in your novel in terms of modernization, the building boom for the sake of tourism, and you voiced a concern that the natural beauty there would be ruined. Now, when you compare today with that time, do you see that your predictions have come true?

AA: I wrote this novel because that region had extraordinary natural beauty; it is located on the skirts of the Taurus Mountains, and in time, people from the mountain villages have come down here as part of a migration from villages to cities. And therefore, the change here has happened suddenly. The mountain people suddenly saw women in bikinis, men in shorts, when they came down to the shore. The conflict in the Western Mediterranean is not this strong, because in the East, the education level and economic level are much lower than in the West. So I predicted two things here: that the region’s nature will be ruined because of over-development, and I also said that there will be a great clash of sexual mores. You know, in the novel, there is an abandoned old house standing next to a huge motel construction. And now, that shore is full of resorts. Also, the highest rate of rape has been in this region. I had sensed this back then. After the ‘60s, people began to have cars, and this gave them mobility. People from Mid-Anatolia were able to come down to this shore directly, through Konya to Alanya. Back then people used to change their clothes on the beach, however the villagers did not even show their legs. This was the clash of sexual mores I saw. There has been great trauma for these people when they have been exposed to nudity—trauma that could be the subject of a novel. I think what I have predicted has come true.

FB: You have talked about “the geography of a novel” as opposed to “the novel of a geography.” What does this mean?

AA: For the last few years, I have been talking about this in my lectures. Is it the life of the author or the life of the novel that determines its geography? I think that it is more meaningful in terms of literature to say that the life of the novel determines its setting. It’s easy for an author to write about his life, the setting he lives in, the places, the food, the weather, and so forth, but if I’m going to talk about the conflict between secular and religious groups, then the life of the novel should choose the setting. And for this novel, I discovered the setting through living. We had a house in this region for many years. And I knew that that the nature there would not stay the same.

FB: You immortalized that place with this novel.

AA: Yes, I hoped to do that. I said: this place will be ruined by the huge development projects, but this novel will survive. There are numerous descriptions of the natural setting in this novel, unlike my other works. I also wanted to have the politics in the background, not in the foreground. In most of my novels, society and politics exist at equal levels; here, I preferred poetic language because poetry suited that nature. It is the life of the novel that chooses the setting. For instance, I chose Vienna for another novel of mine. What do I know about Vienna? I am a Turkish author who knows about her country, its geography. On the other hand, Turkey is now trying to get into the European Union, and in our history textbooks it’s often recounted how the Ottomans came as far as the “gates of Vienna.” Even though the Austrian Empire was weakened at the time, they got help from the French and the Polish, and they repulsed the Ottomans. I find this similar to our situation today: we are now waiting at the gates of the European Union just like we did at the gates of Vienna. This is also about the denigration of Turkey by the West. They’ve always seen us as a religious state. However, secularism and Westernization started with the reformist period of the Ottoman Empire. Also, the repelling of the Ottomans from Vienna came about through the cooperation of the Western countries. Now, they want to repel us from the European Union. I wanted to talk about these issues, so I chose Vienna as the setting for my novel.

FB: You’ve said, “This novel wrote itself,” about Summer’s End. How so?

AA: I wrote this novel at the end of the ‘70s. The protagonist is a woman whose son has been killed during the political upheaval that took place in that period. She has separated from her husband, but they support each other. These people are in the minority; they are intellectuals. The coup d’état that happened in 1971 isolated the intellectuals. On the one hand, there is grief for her son’s death, on the other hand her isolation and loneliness. Six people—she, her ex-husband, brother, and friends—come together at this remote, quiet place for a vacation. This woman is in such a terrible state that she doesn’t want to write anything—she is a translator who writes once in a while—but even though she doesn’t want to write, things around her, the momentary realities, and her imagination compel her to write this story. It all starts when she sees an abandoned old house and someone walking there; and throughout the vacation, she slowly imagines the story of the people who lived there. The associations evoked by nature, even the waves, bring back her memories and make her write this novel in her mind. She completes it when she goes back to the city. The potential in her finds a way out.

FB: You frequently talk about the ‘moment’ in Summer’s End.

AA: Yes, I always wanted to write novels spanning short periods of time, the novel of a moment. Summer’s End is like that: the narrator writes the novel starting from the moment when a woman is seen under the shower in the garden. I especially expressed this in this novel. My first novel, Lying Down to Die, takes place in a hotel room. It is a novel that spans an hour and twenty minutes. In another novel of mine, ROMANTIC: A Vienna Summer, the story originates from the moment of seeing a retired history teacher. And Summer’s End is a novel about many associations—there are numerous citations from foreign authors like Chekhov and Lermontov. I wrote it without knowing it would be called a postmodern novel. Back then, there was no mention of postmodernism in our literature. Years later, in a study done at the Turkish Studies department of Leiden University in Holland, they examined this novel, and, after evaluating it extensively, they concluded that it was a pre-postmodern novel. Later on, postmodern writing developed in Turkey, too—of course, imported from the West.

FB: You are known as one of the innovators of the modern Turkish novel. What did you change in the classical novel?

AA: I was tired of classical novels. They always used the present tense and the past tense, nothing further. I was not satisfied with the limited usage of grammatical tenses. I thought we needed a multi-tensed narrative, a multi-leveled narrative. Also, there was a genre which was popular at the time called the “rural novel.” It took place in villages or the countryside. There weren’t many “urban novels.” And if there were, they were only about Istanbul. I wasn’t happy with the classical novel, and I wasn’t satisfied with stream of consciousness writing either. This was Freud’s influence upon writing in the West, and then we adopted it. They wrote the parts in the stream of consciousness in italics or underlined and so forth. I thought: might it not be possible for me to write without doing these things, using my own language? When I tried to do this in my first novel, the critics found it odd, because I had used all styles of narrative together: memoir, dream, poetry, letter, and play. Then I also wrote a book of dreams. Dream narration is a different form of narration. What kind of language should you use to describe a dream? I used all grammatical tenses simultaneously. And also, Turkish has a special type of past tense, used when you pass on some information you’ve heard from others, and called the “indirect past tense” or “story past tense,” which other languages don’t have. I used that, too, in my novels. This is how I attained a multi-leveled narrative. I wanted to change both the style and the setting of the novel. I wrote the urban novel by playing with time and using different narrative styles together.

FB: Besides being multi-leveled, there is no definite ending in your novels. Do you refuse to be an omniscient author?

AA: Very true. I have always felt that the classical novel prevented the reader from thinking for himself. I want the reader to have a share in the story I tell. I want his imagination to work, too; I like him to create. I am not a godlike author, I do not know everything. I started writing with plays for theater and radio. If I could have done what I wanted in theater, I would have continued. But theater is a collective art, and there is censorship as well. I thought the novel was a better channel for me to express myself. It is a freer creation—well, of course, there has been the issue of banning books, but still, you’re all by yourself while creating it.

FB: You reject being a godlike author, and you have also said you do not write for the ideology of feminism, and you don’t want to be called a “woman author,” either. What sort of an author can we call you then?

AA: I don’t like to be categorized within any literary trend. I knew that when I wrote ROMANTIC: A Vienna Summer that they would categorize it as a postmodern novel. I even put a note at the beginning of the novel asking the reader not to think of this novel in terms of predefined templates, but determine what it was for himself. And about not being a feminist writer: I believe we write for the sake of the human, we write to understand and describe the human. We have to understand men as well as women. We see mostly a one-sided view for the sake of defending women’s rights: the woman is mostly portrayed as the good one, good mother, good wife, while the man is evil. But this is not about being good or bad. Two sexes live together in a society and there are conditions that shape them, making a person what he or she is. We have to understand these conditions to understand why they are the way they are. If a woman is repressed, why is that? What makes a man macho? I wrote a novel called A Chill in the Soul which takes place in bed, while a man and a woman make love. They both have their own baggage accumulated over the years, their own histories. Of course, as “women authors,” we have experiences a man cannot have, such as giving birth, menstrual pain, and so forth, but my writing is about uniting people. And I always look to answer the “why”.

FB: You’re one of the most prolific and eminent authors of Turkish literature, but your books have never been bestsellers. Why do you think that is?

AA: I think that the consumption economy disintegrates people and estranges them from themselves. I know that a book is a commodity and a tool for making money. But it is not a t-shirt or a kind of cereal. It is an intellectual product, and it never made me happy to see intellectual products on the market emptied of their content. I never wanted to be like that. I see production as a matter of continuity; I wouldn’t want to be here today, gone tomorrow. My publishing house included my works under the classics. They are being taught in schools. I’ve never been a bestseller, but I’ve never made a publisher lose money, either. When they ask me, “How do you regard the bestsellers?” I say, they taste like hormoned fruits. They look shiny and attractive, so one can’t resist buying them, but they taste nothing like real strawberries. I always say, let there be some writers to meet the demand of those who look for organic food.

FB: Is that how you became “a reader’s writer?”

AA: This is how it happened: I was accepted as a playwright in the beginning. Then my first novel, Lying Down to Die, was not received so well by two of the leading critics of the time. And in our literary world, when those two critics did not like your work, you had no chance to survive as an author. However this is not how it happened in my case because despite the negative reviews, readers liked this novel, both in terms of style and intellect. And when the critics realized this, they changed their mind. So I became a reader’s writer. It’s the reader’s appreciation, really. I believe the responsibility of an intellectual is not to go down to the level of the majority, but to raise the level together with them. Also, populism is not for me because I try to understand why the majority is what it is. I don’t expect everyone to embrace me. I accept loneliness. I think we have to question the human mind. We always consider the human mind as something sacred—of course it’s important; we wouldn’t even be able to have this conversation if it weren’t there. However, the same human mind makes inventions to enable massacres. We need to look at things that are exalted, held sacred, too. And also, there are the impossibilities and hardships that make us create and produce. I am a skeptic by nature. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t bother to write. It is always provocation that underlies creativity. Just like the invention of the wheel and fire.

FB: If we can say that there is an inclination to imitate the West in Turkey, has your work ever been compared to those from the West? Have you ever looked up to a Western author?

AA: I certainly might have been influenced by some. I loved reading. I read both native and foreign authors as much as I could. Of course, I had a language barrier. Even though I studied French in college, I cannot say that I understood everything in French, such as philosophy books. But I could read the plays, since dialogues are easy. I remember I was deeply affected by Camus; I have thought about him a lot. This may have had some influence on my writing, but I don’t know anyone that I looked up to. When I published my first novel, they said it sounded like Virginia Woolf or Christa Wolf. This was really strange because I had no idea about their works; I had not read any of them. So I didn’t like these comments. Let me tell you an incident about this: I was 22 years old when my first play was staged for the State Theater in Ankara. I had just graduated from college. And after the final act, I received a big applause—so much bigger than a male playwright would have received. It was as if they were saying: “There it is! The Republic of Turkey has produced its modern Turkish woman!” I felt that I was being presented as the victory of an ideology, and I didn’t like it. So I refused to get on the stage; I didn’t want to be shown to people as if I were a doll. I always wanted to be myself.

FB: Only one novel of yours, Curfew, has previously appeared in English, and it was published by an American university press. Even though you have produced such important works, why are you not translated more into English? Is this a common problem with Turkish literature?

AA: Believe me, I don’t know the answer to this question. Curfew received very good reviews, but it wasn’t printed a second time. On the other hand it has become a course book at Columbia University. I don’t know anything about this business, really. Maybe I don’t have a good agent. I think your agent should be able to comply with the new trends worldwide.

FB: Can we say it is difficult to translate Turkish into Western languages?

AA: Let’s face it, Turkish is not a common language, I mean the language of the Republic of Turkey. Otherwise, there are many Turkic languages. It is sad that many authors who have come before me are still not translated. But there is an interest now in Turkish literature because of the possibility of Turkey entering the European Union. And also, Turkology professors used to know more about Ottoman literature; they were unfamiliar with the new Turkish. There occurred many changes in our language and Turkologists were confused. During the transformation from Ottoman Turkish to the Turkish of the Republic, there were many additions and new concepts, so it took a long time for Turkologists abroad to learn about these changes. Other than this, I don’t know why I haven’t been translated, because there are some new authors who are not widely read in Turkey, but they are translated in such a short time. This still puzzles me. I don’t know how this mechanism works.

FB: You received an Honorary Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1998. Would you tell us about it?

AA: It was really surprising, because I didn’t even have one book published in America. I was told that Ohio State historian Carter Findley nominated me for this. He had listened to one of my conferences in Turkey, and he was interested in my view about fantasy in literature. My book of dreams had been published recently and I had talked about the contribution of dreams to history. So they evaluated the nomination and bestowed me the award. It’s funny because I had resided in Columbus when my husband was working on his Masters degree at Ohio State from 1957 to 1959. When I went to OSU to receive the award, I had to give a thank you speech. So I told them that I thought they gave me this award because I had helped my husband type his thesis forty years ago!

FB: You’re dealing with so many serious issues, but you never lose your sense of humor.

AA: I am humorous by nature, I am playful. I can laugh at myself easily. I also swear at myself very often. I can see both sides to events—like the comedy and tragedy masks. I told you about uniting things. Things are not all tragic, nor all comic. We should always find the comedy in sad things; this is the only way to bear tragedy.

FB: Turkey is now facing new challenges in terms of secularism. Are you worried?

AA: The latest elections shocked the people who have believed in secularism. But this doesn’t mean anything. Instead of saying, it’s bad, we should look at why this happened. I wish societies were not under any kind of guardianship. The Republic of Turkey has experienced many coup d’états for many years, and it’s still under guardianship. I am against this. It is a republic, and governments should come and go by elections. I want a constitutional state. I don’t want a military government for the sake of secularism. And I cannot say that I approve any government. What we call belief turns into idolization. Someone who believes in the Koran turns it into an idol; you can’t touch it. To adore the military is the same thing. We have to understand the reasons for these beliefs. To be able to live in a humane society we have to have education, harmony, and communication. If everything had been left to elections within the Republic of Turkey, we might have been somewhere different today. We have to have the right to ask why things happened the way they did. Wherever there is an action, there is a reaction. This is the dialectic. I believe life is very strong, and in the end it will find what’s best for itself.

FB: Just like you say in the opening sentence of Summer’s End: “Everything finds what is true for itself.”

AA: Yes, this is the summary of it all: “Everything finds what is true for itself."

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

 by Kimberly Burwick

The best place to get Kevin Goodan to discuss his poetry is where he’s most comfortable—at home, in nature. Goodan is currently the resident writer at the Robert Francis House in Amherst, Massachusetts, or “Fort Juniper.” He’s in good company with the many writers who have lived there; poets such as Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg have walked Fort Juniper’s modest three acres and have resided in the 20’ x 22’ cabin built of hurricane pine in 1939. Outside the cabin, Goodan sharpens his swede saw and stacks the quickly disappearing woodpile before we begin our interview.

Goodan grew up on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana; though not native himself, his stepfather and three brothers are tribal members. At the age of nineteen, he established himself in the U.S. Forest Service and worked as a firefighter for ten years. Goodan moved to Amherst in 1999 to attend the University of Massachusetts MFA program. His first book of poems, In The Ghost-House Acquainted (Alice James Books, 2004) won the The L.L. Winship/ PEN New England Award in 2005, and a chapbook, Thine Embers Fly, was published by Factory Hollow Press in 2007. His second collection, Winter Tenor, will be published by Alice James in May 2009.

Kimberly Burwick: Kevin, when I first read your work the thing that struck me was the way you use the idea of distance. Seeing as you’re from Montana, do these things have any kind of relationship?

Kevin Goodan: I think it’s a pretty strong relationship, because in a way I’m not where I would actually like to be. So there’s a sense of exile, I think, in the poems. I love it out here, but there is a distance from things that are known. Or things that are cherished. Looking back on it, this probably plays a major role in the poems.

KB: Do you think these poems could have been written back in Montana?

KG: I don’t think they could have been written in back in Montana. I think I had to leave or else my writing wouldn’t have matured. I kind of knew that. I had had good teachers in Montana, but I had them as teachers for six years. It was time to go somewhere where things were different and strange.

KB: Was New England the first place they were different and strange or did you travel to other places first?

KG: I went to other places; I spent time in Ireland, and Northern Ireland, and a little bit in Wales. But that was before I felt confident in writing. When I decided to come to Massachusetts I knew that I needed to write, that I had it in me to write, I just needed to get out of Montana and away from family. It’s hard to do anything when you have 300 relatives watching over you in a small town.

KB: Your poems also invoke the idea of a vanishing point—sometimes explicitly, as in “If I’m Not A Garden.” Is there a relationship there?

KG: Well, I wanted to write the way painters paint, and they all have vanishing points. At least the painters that are important to me, like the Impressionists and so forth. And so that’s what I wanted to do with language. I wanted to paint the landscape as I saw it. Like the way Van Gogh painted Saint-Rémy.

KB: Aside from the actual, tangible world, do you write towards a theoretical vanishing point?

KG: Looking back at things you can say this is what I was doing here or this is what I was doing there, but when I’m writing, I don’t know. I’m trying to push the language as far as it can go and trying to get to something that’s unsayable in the poems, somewhere. And maybe that’s the vanishing point, that place where the essence of language is beyond language.

KB: You talk about pushing language toward the unsayable, but I’ve also noticed you have an amazing capacity to give language to the natural world—as in, for instance, “In The Lexicon Of Rain.” How do you envision language in such poems?

KG: I don’t know if I can answer that.

KB: Let me put it to you differently. Without getting into something like personification, do you think the things you see outside—trees and plants, for instance—have their own kind of language?

KG: Trees do have a language. Which isn’t any “new-agey” idea—they actually do communicate. In a forest when one tree gets infected by some type of bug or spore it actually sends off pheromones to the other trees that tell them to beef up their immune system. It’s not a codified language, but they do communicate.

KB: Is that something you’re trying to tap into?

KG: A little bit. Other ways of knowing the world.

KB: In your readings, you talk a lot about a woman who was the last known speaker of a particular language.

KG: That’s Vi Hilbert. She was the last speaker of Skagit, which is part of the Salishan language base, and I grew up on the Flathead Reservation, which is the eastern-most tribe of that language group. They're called Flathead or Salish; my stepfather is a tribal member.

KB: Did he teach you Salish when you were a kid?

KG: No, he didn’t. He was part of the generation where the parents did not teach their kids Salish because it was easier for them not to know it. If you know anything about the history of going to Catholic schools and so forth, then you know that if the kids spoke native languages, they were beaten. And so to save their children from that, the parents decided to raise them so that they would only know English.

KB: Looking back, do you wish you were taught Salish?

KG: I don’t know if it would have helped me; it may have confused me more, because obviously I’m the whitest thing on the face of the earth. I knew that I wasn’t ever going to be a member of that culture. Besides, I have a hard enough time with English as it is.

KB: You do, though, have a love of Latin.

KG: Yeah, that comes from being Catholic.

KB: How does that work its way into the poems?

KG: Danged if I know, I try to keep it out! Sometimes there’s terminology in other languages that are the things that work in the poem, and that idea doesn’t transfer well into English. So, that’s why I borrow terms from Latin or German or Portuguese.

KB: Have you seen a Latin mass?

KG: I did once when I was a kid and it scared me.

KB: When you put Latin into a poem, are you trying to preserve something in that language even though it’s a dead language?

KG: Maybe, but I think with the ecumenical history of Latin, it ups the ante for the rest of the poem, because the rest of the poem has to be able to hold up to those terms.

KB: It doesn’t seem like artifice, though, it seems related to the ways you explore death—your use of Latin terminology ends up being an artifact of death along with the other images.

KG: Sounds good to me. I don’t really think about how I’m using other languages when I’m writing the poem. I just put down what is available to me.

KB: Does it ever make you feel strange, talking about the poems?

KG: Yeah. I’ve never been good at theoretical discourse or analytical this and that. That’s never been important to me. What’s important to me is what happens in the work, and growing with the poem or the story or the novel that I'm reading. And trying to take from that something that I can use in my life.

KB: You say you don’t think about the poem as you’re writing it, but your poems have a lot of energy, they’re incredibly dynamic. So what happens in the body as you’re writing? Is there a rush of any sort?

KG: Oh, I think there’s a rush; there’s also a lot of coffee that’s been drunk beforehand. In some of the poems, to borrow a term, there has to be some sense of rapture. It doesn’t happen in every poem, but I strive toward that. Maybe the poem at the end gets to a place of stillness and maybe rapture works into that, maybe rapture is a kind of paralysis of the spirit. But that’s what I’m working toward, at least inWinter Tenor.

KB: In your chapbook, Thine Embers Fly, you have a poem titled “The Flame-Front I Maintain Is For This Tinder Only.” This is a word that comes up again and again here and in many of your poems. What’s so special about that word?

KG: It’s this. It’s what is here, now. What is, in the poem, trying to pinpoint. That word is like a pin holding things down. This thing. This tinder. This. It makes the transitory world for a moment hold still. At least in the poem.

KB: Also in that poem you write, “The harsh, the true, / A brightness not the world, / A blinding, like voice surging through keys.” How does music figure into your writing life?

KG: I’m constantly listening to music when I’m writing, and sometimes the mood of the composition I’m listening to helps lead what I’m writing or allows it to contain the mood of the music. In that regard it’s an integral part of what I do. I can’t write in silence and I can’t write when there are random noises around, but with music I can. And I also pay attention to—because I used to play traditional Irish music—certain aspects of the music.

KB: Is it Irish music you listen to when you write?

KG: No, I usually listen to something like Arvo Pärt.

KB: It’s an interesting poem because it ends, “where the fire feasts upon the patterns of other/weathers,” so, you start with “This Tinder Only” and then you get to “other weathers.” How does that transition occur?

KG: It’s like reaching for what some people call the ineffable. The poem works towards trying to catch that unsayable thing. It begins here, because everything begins here, in this, and then moves towards that. So the poem is a movement outward or inward to the idea or realization of other weathers, that there are other things out there that we can’t see. Even though we can’t see it or codify it, it dominates our lives.

KB: In another poem, “Come Take These Words From Me,” you write, “I look out and know my place, / I, because of love.” It seems there’s a dialogue going on between I and love.

KG: I think most poems are a situation of dialogue even though the person or the thing or the non-thing that a writer is speaking with might not be responding. Dickinson once called her poems her “letter to the world.” There weren’t any replies back.

KB: Weather is really important in your poems. What your first memory of weather?

KG: Sitting after a rainstorm outside my window on the roof of the porch listening to the semi trucks go by and whine on the wet pavement.

KB: How old were you?

KG: Three.

KB: In your poems weather tends to be something that brings the soul into place. Was weather ever something traumatic?

KG: Well, when you fight fires weather is pretty important because if you don’t pay attention to it, your soul’s going to be crispy. So weather has always been an important thing for me. I’ve been lucky to live a life where it is important, where you can’t change your environment into something more friendly to you. And it does change, it’s not always nice.

KB: I’ve seen you get really excited about storms. Is there something about watching weather patterns come into being that works its way into the poems?

KG: Well, I think that storms that have a certain violence to them make life more tangible. They alter things. Lightning certainly alters not just the thing it strikes, but everything around it. Or a really strong wind or a blizzard or something like that. So yeah, I pay attention to those and I like when there’s turbulence because it changes the constant.

KB: You joined the U.S. Forest Service in Montana at the age of nineteen. What were the circumstances that lead you there? Did you think of this as a long-term career?

KG: I started doing it because they were short of people in 1988, because of all the fires in Montana. And also, someone once told me that I would never be able to fight forest fires, that I wasn’t strong enough. So I decided that I would prove them wrong. Initially, I didn’t think of it as a long-term career, I thought of going into teaching and this would be one way to pay for college.

KB: The Lolo National Forest in Western Montana is over two-million acres, and has an eco-system that is influenced by both continental and maritime climates. How do you approach a fire which fuels off of such diverse forest land?

KG: Very carefully! It depends on what the fuel type is. If you’re in an area that has a lot of flashy fuels, but also has some kind of canopy, some sort of overstory that’s continuous like an open pine stand and it’s on a steep slope like the Mann Gulch Fire, you have to be very, very careful. You wouldn’t think so, but you do. In the thicker, more dense areas, you approach the fire differently, because it will be slower moving. Unless you’ve got a storm cell sitting on top of you.

KB: What did you do in the off-season?

KG: Starved. And washed dishes. Went to school. And went to Ireland for a while.

KB: How did these winter experiences tie in with your fire life?

KG: I don’t know if they really tied in until later. In the midst of these things I was thinking they were all separate aspects of living, and now, they are all sort of combined. I think I went to Northern Ireland for the violence and because I needed the adrenalin that fire gave me. I needed the risk. I needed that thing going on in the brain. And that’s why I went there, to prolong that endorphin high.

KB: Growing up in Montana, you’ve had many long, long winters, but you don’t seem to be a person who minds that. What happens in winter in terms of writing?

KG: Since you don’t fight fires in the wintertime, winter is a time for writing. And initially I was forced into that, because of fighting forest fires and so on. So it’s become the habit. Most of the work gets done in the winter.

KB: I know that you were an only child until the age of nine, when the first of your half brothers came along. In what ways does being an only child figure into the writing?

KG: I don’t know if it figures in or not. That’s a good question. My brothers are all in the military and I’m sort of the weird one doing what I’m doing, so in a certain respect I always felt like I didn’t really fit in. And maybe that sense of “outsiderness” has helped me with whatever I do with writing.

KB: You mention the word “brother” a lot in your poems. Is this a reference to your actual family or is it something more that that?

KG: It is probably more than that… at certain points I am speaking through the poem to my brothers, but often it’s about something larger than immediate family. I think in certain respects we all are connected with each other. Even the things that aren’t human, there’s always something to connect with.

KB: You weren’t able to join the military.

KG: No, I wasn’t. My lungs kept me out. They said my lungs weren’t fit for military service, so I went and fought forest fires.

KB: I don’t know if it’s going too far to call you a sniper of language, but in some ways it feels like you ambush the natural world.

KG: Don’t let the earth-first folks know that! But that could be. I’m trying to capture things as I see them, and so in a way I suppose you do have to ambush the world, to try and capture it at that moment as much as you can—to make it visible, to make it visceral, to make it tangible for the reader.

KB: Take us into your writing room. What do you have in your writing space?

KG: There’s a desk, or a table. A window. A typewriter. And some paper.

KB: You don’t type on a computer?

KG: No. I use an old 1923 Royal portable.

KB: Why?

KG: Because I like the physical action of typing and hearing the keys hit the paper. And it also makes you focus more on the words you’re going to put on the paper, because if you make a mistake, you can’t just hit the delete bar. You either have to take the page out and start over, or you have to use the wonders of white-out. It makes me focus more and it makes me be more intentional with the words I put on the page.

KB: Do you write by hand as well?

KG: I do. I usually write down notes and fragments of things. And at a certain point, when I feel there might be enough fragments that I can put together that will lead me somewhere—maybe they won’t even be part of a poem, but they will lead me somewhere—then I will sit down at the typewriter and type.

KB: When you finish a poem, do you feel exhaustion or relief that you can move on and do other things?

KG: It depends on the poem. The really, really good poems, the “god-given poems,” those make me exhausted when they come up, because they are few and far between. The other poems are kind of like doing your homework before you can go out and play.

KB: Before we began this interview, I saw you outside sharpening a saw. How does physical labor figure into writing?

KG: That’s important. I believe you should have a well-rounded life. I don’t want to just sit at a desk my whole life. But physical labor, like cutting trees or digging ditches, also lends itself to what I write about, which is the natural world or the occupations that have to deal with the natural world.

KB: Let’s talk about your first book, In The Ghost-House Acquainted. I’m wondering about the poem “Something Like Blood.” In many ways it seems different from the other poems in the book. It almost has the fragrance of springtime and trauma.

KG: Yeah, that was one of the first poems that I wrote as an undergraduate and it’s the oldest poem in the book, so it probably does feel different because it is the beginning of things.

KB: You have a line, “My mother touched my hand.” And towards the end of the poem the speaker says, “I tell myself I will act / man enough for my mother to kiss me / when I come home with nothing but my hands.” How does your mother factor into the poem?

KG: Well, it’s really a poem that deals with a bad father. A mother is always going to accept what you do even if you fail—that’s what mothers do. And so for me to go fishing and come home with nothing to show for it, and yet to be strong enough to accept that and strong enough to accept a mother’s tenderness at a moment of failure, that to me was important, because I was starting something that I didn’t know if I was going to fail at or not: this whole writing business.

KB: In a lot of the poems it’s as if you take the reader by the hand and give them a pair of binoculars and have them focus specifically on something, and then immediately you change perspective and have them focus on something else. If you were a reader of one of your poems, how would you put together these images?

KG: I think it’s a situation of juxtaposition. Your mind puts together the things that follow each other. So once I understood that, or once anyone understands that, the poems can go wherever they want and the reader will follow even if there’s no narrative; if there’s just images, the mind will create a story about those images. It might be an irrational story, or a story that even the reader can’t understand or put into words, but it’s there, they all link together.v

KB: Almost all your poems deal with the world in a really tangible way, but “Trees of Heaven” gives us an alternative landscape. Is it a realistic poem?

KG: Parts of it. Sometimes snow is not very nice. And sometimes in situations of mourning you do lay everything out that remains of a person.

KB: The “you” in that poem feels particularly assaulted. Was that your intention?

KG: I don’t know… sure, I’ll go with that. I didn’t have a particular situation in mind, but I had a friend in high school that got shot and killed in a bar fight, and it could have been that. It’s slowly been leaking into the poems that I write, he has. And so maybe that was the impetus.

KB: The “you” in many of your poems seems like it could be not only many different people, but a divinity of sorts. Is it a multifarious you or is it ever specific to any person?

KG: Well, I think you hit upon the answer, that it’s multifarious. It’s a blank or a vague you—it’s you the reader, but it could be other things as well. You’re not able to pin it down all the time.

KB: In many ways you collapse the distance between the reader and the speaker.

KG: I hope so. That’s what I would like. I would like them to see the things that I put on the page the way I saw them when I put them on the page.

KB: However the “I” in your poems is arguably stronger than the “you.” Is it always you or an imagined speaker?

KG: I like to say that it’s me, I like the fact that you’re making me stronger than you. It could be another situation, but usually it’s me. I think.

KB: In The Ghost-House Acquainted is the title of your first book. It’s clear that you become acquainted with death in the poems, but what else do you become acquainted with throughout the book?

KG: Life. Well, there’s always the search for things beyond the world. Often times I feel that maybe God is here, he’s just put down in shorthand and we have to capture little pieces of him or his language, which is the natural world.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008