On Saturday, November 20, at 7 pm, I’ll be reading from Fighters & Writers (Mongrel Empire Press). I’ll be joined by a trio of poets who’ll be reading from their new books:

Tobi Cogswell is a Pushcart Prize nominee and co-recipient of the first annual Lois and Marine Robert Warden Poetry Award from Bellowing Ark Press. Her work can be read in SLM, Penumbra, Spoon River Poetry Review, Decanto, Illya’s Honey, Slab, Rhino and Blue Earth Review among others. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review. She will be reading from Poste Restante (Bellowing Ark Press).

Fred Voss has been a machinist for thirty years and a poet for twenty-two years. He has twice been the subject of feature programs on BBC Radio 4, and he has done six reading tours of Great Britain. He will read from Hammers and Hearts of the Gods (Bloodaxe Books; U.S. distribution by Dufour Editions).

Joan Jobe Smith, founding editor of Pearl magazine and the Bukowski Review, has published seventeen books of poetry and two cookbooks. She’s a Pushcart Prize recipient and her PowWow Café was a Forward Prize finalist. Ambit has published chapters from her memoir Tales of an Ancient Go-Go Girl, a James Jones First Novel Fellowship finalist. She will read from Joan’s Own Good-4-You Cook Book (Pearl Books).

On Saturday, November 21, at 7 pm, SLM contributors will read from Volume 4, Number 2.

Both events are slated to occur at the same site:

Borders Books

2110 N. Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach, CA 90815 (between Sterns & the 405 fwy)

Mongrel Empire Press has posted details about these events as well as Wordstock, where I’ll be reading in October, on its events page.

The Sore Throat & Other Poems, Aaron Kunin (Fence Books) $16

In Peter Gizzi’s introduction to a selection of Kunin’s poems for Boston Review, he makes the comparison to Jack Spicer that often came to my mind while reading The Sore Throat:

“In short, Kunin’s poems belong to the great tradition of the tragicomic. Jack Spicer once wrote that ‘A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary,’ and Aaron Kunin has outrageously written an entire book using no more than two hundred words.”

Conceptually, it would be difficult to get much stranger: a book that loosely translates Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” and Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande into a vocabulary of the psychological interior, using a lexicon of words generated by a nervous habit of “compulsively transcribing… all the language [he] can pick up—into a kind of sign-language” of his own invention. The repetition never reaches annoyance because it so quickly achieves a haunting psychological quality, with the recurrence of “rats” and “bladders” and “Jesus” all building toward narrative obsession. The book’s tiny vocabulary allows simple emotional statements—like “I no longer wish to remember / Seeing you gasp with laughter”—to resonate with their directness. One portion of dialogue from the recurring poem “Sore Throat” sums up the tone of the entire book:

XXXXXXXThere’s a word in my throat!

—Can’t you let it out with your voice?

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXNot possible.
The word is too wide, my throat too narrow;
there’s something in the way.

And in another poem, “What Music!” he articulates the difference between The Sore Throat by describing how contemporary poetry often hides more than it uncovers:

XXXXX…My eyes are bad, they are “good
for weeping but not for seeing,” and eyes
not good for seeing are good for nothing.
But what good is seeing, what is seeing
for? Seeing is just another way of
concealing what is there. The purpose of
the eyes, the purpose of the body, is
to keep the mind from knowing anything.

Elsewhere Kunin uses his spare vocabulary to achieve a religious questioning of Rilkesque proportions, to exercise his gentle cynicism, and to articulate, in its basest terms, the fears and desires of love. The book ends with a peculiar piece of prose, in which Kunin describes, in third person, the genesis of the book and the development of his binary hand-alphabet. At first glance I was dismayed at his third-person narration, but upon reading the text fully I found that, as in his poetry, the person allowed him an uncommon freedom of expression, a heightened honesty of self. Kunin’s Sore Throat is ultimately a great success, and I imagine it like some of my favorite Spicer books—perhaps After Lorca—lingering in the consciousness of a generation before breaking through to greater popular acclaim.

A Business Idea

I’ll start a business!
(And I won’t let you in it, maybe . . .)

“Let’s start a business!”
(in a voice that sounded like money)

“Let’s do it!” “We’ll start
a business, my brother and me. We’ll

invent a machine
to can laughter, and anybody

can have our laughter
for two dollars a can.” “You think your

laughter is your own,
to do with as you wish; you think you

can keep your laughter
in a can where is will last, if not

forever, longer
than you will, anyway; you think you

can can it and change
it for money (not much, however).

Maybe someday when
you’re down, and you think the sound of it

would heal you, you’ll wish
you had your laughter, but all you’ll have

is the money.” “Mind
you own business.” “I’m in the money

business.” “That’s a good
business.” “There’s no other business.”

Find the Girl, Lightsey Darst (Coffee House Press) $16

The poems in Darst’s first collection are also linked throughout, but less formally, exploring the poet’s obsession with girlhood—more accurately the sexual curiosity that awakens with the dawn of womanhood—and the CSI industry. Her collection is littered with the graves of known and unknown murder victims, over the span of several thousand years. The collection is dedicated “to the girls at Fairview Middle School,” and much of Darst’s imagery comes from the locker rooms of adolescence:

We slide off our skirts for dirty gym shorts
scatter grackle-like across cracked ground to the field for
a moment adult then panic gaping
like sinkholes inside & now

you will run around the gravel track quickly without knowing why.

Throughout the collection Darst uses frequent asterisks to break strophes and even phrases, an effect that works most of the time, achieving a narrative compiled of clues and images like “rosebud ovaries” and “her coccyx filigreed in gold.”

She incorporates details from a wide range of actual murder cases, including the JonBenét case and Jack the Ripper. The book’s imagery balances the very dark—”I didn’t realize how little love a frame like that admits” and “This? A skull with roots / tunneling where once there was a dream.”—with a sexually charged natural world—”…woman’s sex /   —fiddlehead still tiny, furled in a spangle of dew.” Altogether a success with only occasional hitches: some too-wide gaps of imagery, some distracting punctuation, a contagious obsession, and an overwhelmingly successful use of tone in the face of such potential bathos. The collection brings contemporary sensationalism into focus, raising (but not answering) many of the moral questions most poets don’t ask.

Lung Soup, Andrew Elliott (Blackstaff Press/Dufour Editions) $30.95

Andrew Elliot is to me a mystery, but a very satisfying one. Lung Soup begins with two head-shaven women wrestling “while aliens, en masse, to the glass of the French doors cling like spawn,” at the exact moment of a murder—and this all within the first poem! His collection traces those two women, Amy and Sabrina, as they journey around the world, from Berlin to Hackney, with an extended time in a perfectly described America. It’s a long book, with many long narrative poems, marked by a keen British wit and intelligence, with a note of self-consciousness that’s not overdone. His descriptions combine precision with meandering:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX…Cheese, to his right,
is a fatso whose beetling brow breeds beads of sweat, like lanterns

jiggled in the middle of the night from the eaves of a shack in
XXXLas Cruces,
by the banging of his Paw taking out on his Maw the frustration at
XXXthe mess
of his life, until — with the rocker rocking faster and faster — they
XXXdrip
on the crotch of his pants which is as taut as the teepee of his
XXXboyhood.

They take place in the fifties, during the War on Communism, in California, in FBI-rented hotel rooms, and in Midwestern housewives’ foyers. There are recurring themes of household appliances, the poet’s confusion of his protagonists’ gender, and mid-century American politics. It’s a vast and magnificent book that could only be properly described at much greater length, so suffice for now, a poem:

States of Anatomy

Minnesota

Amy comes home from work, opens her blouse and looks at
XXXher breasts
like a man might quickly look away from two sisters sitting shoulder
to shoulder, their backs to a dancehall wall so thin they can feel it
being peppered by snowflakes blowing over the border from Canada.

Texas

Amy sometimes thinks of herself as a cave a child balked at
XXXthe mouth of,
so that when, at the age of forty-six, she gets taken in hand,
shown the way, it almost blows her head off and Sabrina, on all fours,
can only do what she can, like Jackie Kennedy that day down
XXXin Dallas.

New York

Taller than all but the tallest of men, Amy is not what Sabrina
XXXcalls heavy
and so suffice here to say that at Woodstock she appeared to tower
above everybody like a reed waist deep in water
which rocks very slowly one way and then just as slowly the other.

California

Not since the late Neolithic has hair of all kinds enjoyed such a rage,
taking to the streets in defence of the lengths to which it is prepared
XXXto grow …
Still, one has to ask: is there another pair of ‘pits here as hairy
XXXas Amy’s?
Were each hair a thread of saffron she’s be worth her weight in gold.

Florida

There’s a part of Amy’s anatomy would be of fascination to the best
XXXof us.
In the middle of her chest, a little to the left, it will sometimes beat
a little too rapidly though by no means as rapid as a hummingbird’s
XXXheart …
Poor little bird, burning sugar, one sweet-lipped flower very much
XXXlike another.

North Carolina

Forgive me (don’t if you don’t want to) if I return to Amy’s breasts,
which are more than made up for by her nipples. Sabrina, amused
by how long they can grow, takes them between the Vs of her fingers
like cigarettes. By the time she’s smoked the one she’s ready to
XXXlight up the other.

DS

Acclaimed anthologist and poet Joan McBreen has compiled a selection of younger Irish poets, the majority born in the sixties. Most names will be unfamiliar to even quite avid readers of poetry in America, but include Loius de  Paor (in translation from the Irish), Mary O’Donoghue, Patrick Quinn, and Nuala Ní Chonchúir. Despite its origin in a Derek Mahon poem, the title retains some triteness: it is hard, in America at least, to seriously consider any volume of poetry with the word “heart” in its title.

In her introduction McBreen writes that these poets should be considered part of the ongoing dialogue of Irish poetry and poetics. Owing to the limited space allotted each poet—a mere three poems—the book reads just like that, a sort of introductory conversation with the poets themselves, all who have published at least two books, none of whom the reader can fully comprehend here. Unlike Graywolf’s New British and New European anthologies, which are generally more generous in their selection of poems (especially the former), The Watchful Heart does not offer any critical introductions, however brief, but instead begins each selection with a simple biographical note.

Like several other UK anthologies—notably Carcanet’s OxfordPoets series—McBreen’s pairs original poems with brief essays by the poets. The essays are particularly noteworthy, often contextualizing the poetry that precedes them or more satisfyingly expounding on topics ranging from the relationship between poetry and work to poetry in the electronic age to Patrick Chapman’s “Fortune Cookies” aphorisms, a sort of Irish Sargentville Notebooks without Strand’s whimsical surrealism.

The poetry itself is contemporary, fully engaged in conversation with European, American, and world poetry. Irish in origin but universal in theme, the poems within make for good, enjoyable reading. Like the best anthologies, one can open to any page and find something worthwhile.  Leontia Flynn, in her poem “Art and Wine,” writes,

And would you, I mused, perhaps understand me more,
if I could, for a single second, shut the fuck up?

Though in context the question is certainly rhetorical, I speak to the included poets as well as their anthologist when I request that they not shut up but continue to dialogue with world poetry.

Oaxaca Siete Poetas, ed. Raúl Renán & Jorge Pech Casanova (Almadía/Luna Zeta) $75 MXP

In his introduction, Jorge Pech offers a thumbnail sketch of contemporary poetry in the Southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico, beginning with its relative absence—owing, he argues, to its role as a solemn keeper of tradition rather than the innovation needed to fuel good poetry—then detailing the oral poetry of mystic hero María Sabina, the rise of the Isthmus Zapotec poets of the 1970s—whom he claims, with some truth, have never been translated well enough into Spanish to reflect their skill—the eighties, when Oaxacan poets began to write in earnest, and  today, whose poets he praises for having shed the provincialism of past generations.

The volume’s poets, born between 1967 and 1978, are represented generously, in Spanish only, with over ten pages apiece. If trends in translation continue, it’s unlikely that English-language readers will see much, if any, of these poets’ work within the next few decades, when availability is more often the result of professional relationships than quality. Still, for Spanish readers and translators alike the volume is a valuable snapshot of contemporary Mexican poetry. My favorites include Abraham O Nahón, aphorist and aphoristic poet:

Light

Darkness converts us into mystery
& cedes to other senses.
Light has no limits,
its wounds are infinite.

*

Definition

Night:
XXXthe scum beneath day’s fingernails.

*

Tactic

There exists a word that draws our shadow,
that we inevitably are,
that I will never tell you,
that will make me necessary.

*

Creation

Poetry
has created more monstrosities
than God.

the considered nostalgia of Alonso Aguilar Orihuela:

Floor 3

XXXI
We had to walk up 72 stairs
to arrive at our paradise
—which was also a hell—:
a kitchen without a stove or fridge,
the room with its crazy dreams,
the balcony where we made love
& a bedroom to be lulled by the ocean.

XXXII
We lived with so little!
You put on the Beatles CDs,
you danced & sang across the space,
I brought home a few pesos,
everyday stories, a pair of dreams
& poems that we’d read that cat at sundown.

XXXIII
I miss
Everything
that inhabited this
empty
house.

and Guadalupe Ángela’s mythic tales:

XXXI
In the well, a carp lives
there’s no space or horizon
only falling & darkness

XXXII
The carp rises to the surface
& looks at the light,
blind, she falls again.

XXXIII
The carp floats in her solitude,
a mosquito approaches
& she, stunned, eats it.

XXXIV
The carp draws
the thousandth circle
of her existence.

XXXV
The carp crashes
against the curve of its house
& dies for negligence.

XXXVI
There is no carp
in the well
just a cloud of mosquitos.

all translations mine

Essential Pleasures: An Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud, ed. Robert Pinsky (W.W. Norton) $29.95

The fattest of these three anthologies, Pinsky’s is also the most predictable, certainly because its target audience is not the same. The volume’s concept sprang from one of Pinsky’s most public passions: the auditory appreciation of poetry, which he manifested with his Favorite Poem Project as Poet Laureate of the United States (from 1997 – 2000) and in his short book The Sounds of Poetry.

Even with a general interest audience in mind, Pinsky is keen to include a diverse line-up of contemporary poets. Among Shakespeare, Byron, Whitman, and Dickinson: Simic, Kenyon, Koch, Harper Webb, (C.K.) Williams, Hass, Dobyns, Collins, Corn, and even Hejinian. The poems are grouped into seven categorical chapters, with titles like “Short Lines, Frequent Rhymes” and “Parodies, Ripostes, Jokes, and Insults.”

To further maximize the volume’s accessibility it includes a CD of 21 tracks of poems by 20 different poets, all read aloud by Pinsky himself. While certainly a noteworthy reader, the CD is difficult to listen to in its entirety, as any reading of poetry at that length. Still, the book is altogether a pleasure. As Pinsky writes in his introduction:

Pleasure in poetry, like speech itself, is both intellectual and bodily. Spoken language, an elaborate code of articulated grunts, provides a satisfaction central to life, with all the immediacy of our senses. Though complex, the pleasure is not arcane.

DS