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Robert Duncan: The Collected Early Poems and Plays

Levi Rubeck — Tue, 21 May 2013 21:26:46 +0000

ISBN978-0520259263

It’s hard to justify a $50 book nowadays. Unless you’re a scholar looking to pore over every character in an author’s archive, a volume of collected work can easily overwhelm. Is there a non-academic audience for a tome like The Collected Early Poems and Plays by Robert Duncan (University of California Press)? I can’t speak for the market, but as a young poet scrambling through the poems of the past, as well as the growing morass of contemporary offerings, I finished this beast of a volume feeling refreshed.

It’s clear that UC Press has a plan for Duncan’s collected works, which are stylistically in tune with The H.D. Book. While poems often share pages, pages rarely feel overwhelmed. Economy of space is understood. This book feels like a chronological collection of published and uncollected works, so we are given a particularly instructive timeline of Duncan’s growth as a poet.

The breadth of that poetic growth is in itself a fantastic teacher. Duncan burst out of the gates hungry, publishing as an undergrad beginning to engage with the politics and metaphysics he would engage with throughout his career. But his line is inquisitive rather than didactic; he chose not to build a pulpit, but to immerse the reader in his investigations. The Years as Catches then shows, if anything, that all poets must start somewhere, and it’s comforting to see the seeds from which Duncan’s poetic dexterity would grow, while at the same time appreciating that this is the work of a young man with much to learn. In every stanza, his potential glimmers: an inexperienced poet, winding his way through language until his own voice emerges.

It does so quickly, as Heavenly City, Earthly City slips into the picture and Duncan more fully embraces his political opinions. His voice takes shape, as does the melody within his lines, and, along with the poet, we learn the strength of verse as a spoken activity. Melodious, rhythmic, and willing to take risks linguistically and stylistically, the book moves into Medieval Scenes with the assuredness of a man who more fully finds his footing after every line.

Duncan—and by extension this volume—really begins to shine with A Book of Resemblances. The strength of this book, and the argument for the price tag, is not only the accessibility of all of Duncan’s work between two covers, but the process of working along with the poet as he searches for his ultimate expression. He earns the poems in Resemblances, which sing and swell and traverse emotional and metaphysical landscapes. But these poems were not born out of a black hole. Duncan climbs to this height, and ever higher, throughout these pages and those in the next volume. The true joy in reading a poet like this is the journey. Duncan walks with Pound, Williams, and Stein as influences, wearing them proudly on his poetic and fanciful flights through drama and poetry. If ever there was an argument for an oeuvre, this is it.

Review: Contrapuntal by Christopher Kondrich

Levi Rubeck — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:30:53 +0000

Contrapuntal
By Christopher Kondrich
Parlor Press, 2012
ISBN 978-1602353671

Music, for being such a well-diffused cultural product, can be challenging to adequately write about. Like many creative disciplines, it commands its own lexicon and sits atop a tall barrier of entry. But this shouldn’t preclude anyone who wants to get hip-deep; we’ve all experienced music to some degree and should attempt to verbalize our reactions to its influence.

Then you have folks like Christopher Kondrich, a poet who is clearly comfortable writing through the influence of music in his latest collection, Contrapuntal. The first instinct one might have with a book titled after the musical theoretical concept of counterpoint (two or more melodies moving with respect to each other), is to look for counterpoint’s influence on the book’s metrical and sonic aspects. Such an approach would not be a mistake, but Contrapuntal is more than a book of poems informed by musical theory. Kondrich transposes counterpoint and lyrical melody in a book that, yes, deserves to be read aloud (as most books of poetry do).

Four sections comprise the book, and each one is made up of mostly single-page title-free poems that read with a clear, slippery speed. The lines are mostly short enough to slide into one another without any friction on the surface, prompting the reader to stop and revaluate the lines being read. This is a metrical way of demanding a closer inspection, and the poems work for it. Without titles to ground (or disrupt) particular readings of each poem, it’s easy to lose focus on what the aim of each page may be, but the poems channel and direct the reader well.

Between “T”(“Tim”), and the narrator, a slight narrative emerges, but the dates and times are unclear and not really the point. They’re more like those previously mentioned melodic lines swirling around each other, occasionally harmonizing or just meeting within and throughout the poems. More so, there is a sense of self, and self-contradiction and counterpoint, that also swings throughout the book. Early on we get (from I feel it all time):

but either way I can
empathize with you,
not to mention empathize
with myself as I felt
that day telling you
that I can because
I did at the time
and I do now.

Like notes, certain words are emphasized and repeated within and between poems. Here Kondrich brings those notes into play, twining the threads of “you” and “I” and the various identities within the self. Rather than simply penning “I” poems, these lines drill down past the subjective, and by the end the “I” is almost lost. Later we get (from Tonight, the piano will project me into a dream):

threaded outside into something wonderful
and this is called counterpoint

a need to return to a previous state
buried beneath years of habit and rationale

Here the illusion of time rendered through music is brought into play with regard to the self, which is never really static or concrete, but a series of states paved over in sedimentary layers. On the next page:

that’s what one of your colleagues asked me
the man asked me if I felt looped.

If not looped, then maybe even conversing with the self, digging through layers—or not—and bound to repeat the same actions. The first poem of book 4:

Lying awake
I heard two voices
both of which were mine.
I was always afraid they
would remove what I held
in my invisible hands,
and then came the hour
I had to accept
because living meant
accepting the loss
of one hour after another,
of what felt like an hour,
which could be two,
which could be none,
a mere few minutes
compressed into a rock
the size of a thumb.
I spent part of the night
on the couch another part
at the kitchen table—
I would like some tea,
said one of my voices.

This is a solid example of Kondrich’s ability to express the experience of music, listening to music, and collating the voices in and around us. This is the final dissemination of self into segments, parts, a non-centralized existence without the core.

Contrapuntal is not a book about diametrics, bipolarity, or extremes, but rather a sonic and sonorous exploration of the way music, sound, time, and relationships exist throughout the body, mind, and self. Such a read is what contemporary poetry is poised to accomplish, and Kondrich has a measured and meticulous style that winds well around the musical and interpersonal ideas he’s presenting here.

Continues

Levi Rubeck — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 19:06:06 +0000

Continues" />

Levi says…

Continues was written in my first couple of years in New York, the only substantial amount of time I had ever been away from my homeland of Wyoming. It was something of a personal challenge to write about Wyoming, as I had expressly avoided home and family as poetic subject matter for a long time. Of course distance and the heart do what they do, and thus was born this loose crown of reversed sonnets.

The theme and the characters are lifted from folks back home but a lot was redacted, adjusted, and obscured, so no single person is in any danger of exposure, hopefully. But I feel that this one of the most fully realized collections of poems I’ve had the pleasure of wrestling with, and they need to really be taken in as a whole to be enjoyed. Maybe I’m wrong, whatever. I hope you enjoy it and feel compelled to share.

cast of characters

Our main mope is Steven Malakova,
light-hearted, lounging in county on his Jesus tattoo,
hours dropped reconnecting with D O’Connor,
tight bros from way back when. D’s in and out of

jail and Wen Island, AKA Ponytail,
who has D’s baby girl but neither know
hail from Mary. Wen, Steven and D thrash
through Wyoming sharing solos and

throwing bottles until Rebbecca (with
Two B’s in her name and under her shirt)
mows through town to strip at the Hive and
move past some scary shit. She often

wakes up under unfamiliar sheets with the
shakes, a stable of young ghosts at her feet.

Download Continues by Levi Rubeck

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Poem of the Week: Cathy Che

Levi Rubeck — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 19:24:51 +0000

Doc, there was a hand

Doc, there was a hand, my bed
was pushed across the room,
the wallpaper looked, I drew
faces on the flowers, this one
with closed eyes, and when I woke
they suddenly opened. I watched
my father wash his hands with gasoline,
he always smelled of something
burning. He held out his hands,
twin flames, volcanic rock.
In the room, I mapped out
an archipelago of needs—
mine, then his, then my father’s.
Stray rocks, a map. Doc, you call it
schema, me shut-eyed, my cousin’s
hostile need. I dreamt
my arms were raised. I think
in surrender. I’ve been studying
Freud’s On Dreams, wish fulfillment,
my cousin’s hostile need. He returns
like a wild obsession. (There, like a skein
in my dreams.) Archipelago of desire.
I skip stones, one to another.
My mother’s shame, father’s cold
and brutal shielding. There was
more tenderness in the rain.
I woke with an archipelago
of bruises. It wasn’t my father.
It was a rolodex, scattering
pages. A child’s hips and fingers
long and thick.

_______________________________________________________
Cathy Linh Che’s first book of poems Split will be published by Alice James Books in 2014. She has received fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Kundiman, and Poets & Writers. She currently lives in Brooklyn, where she co-edits the online journal Paperbag.

Poem of the Week: M.A. Vizsolyi & Ronnie Yates

Levi Rubeck — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 09:30:58 +0000

Author’s statement: In the summer of 2012, M.A, Vizsolyi visited Ronnie Yates in Houston, Texas, where it was hot as a mofo. They took walks beneath the live oaks, sweated their asses off, and at night, on the roof of Nick Flynn’s apartment (Nick was away in Paris), they began a collaboration tentatively titled, “It’d be a little cooler not to Rock This,” from which this poem is taken.

Houston Poem 26

this moment
she’s flowering
there were boys around her

that does suck
i agree with that
talk about that grief

i would have been like ‘whoa’
morality is a bitch

but dude

morality will grind your ass
it will fucking stripe your ass
it’s a cat of nine tails
rightous indignation
that’s a legion of decency

oh my shit

that’s like scarlet letter styles
that’s like dragging that girl by the hair

terrible humiliation

nah!

i don’t think that’s what one should do
i don’t think that’s what one should give one’s energies to

_____________________________________________________________
M.A. Vizsolyi’s first book of poems, The Lamp with Wings, was a National Poetry Series selection. His poems have recently appeared in the journals Ploughshares, Tuesday: An Art Project, Ninth Letter, and BOMB. He currently rocks it in Brooklyn.

Ronnie Yates‘ poems have appeared in Ploughshares, POOL, and Colorado Review. His manuscript, Inconsolable Garden, was a finalist for the 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award. He is currently rockin’ it in Houston, Texas.

Poem of the Week: Elsbeth Pancrazi

Levi Rubeck — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 09:30:13 +0000

When you fell asleep with your fingerprint on the sensor

I kept your hand warm. I kept my hand above the hand
on your controller, and we scrolled through the menus
together, punched your dream onto the screen.
It was a first person shooter. You navigated through
levels reserved for early adopters. Every portal
glowing in the dark. Of course I’d never dream
you’d cruise through rooms of memory. How you used to
sleeptalk about the startup, in the morning beg me
tell exactly what you’d said. A room filled with diamonds
and enemies, the exit a sewer stacked with rubies
and man-size rats. Aboveground, the circuits of the sky
surge on. A figure on a bridge rimmed with gold coins,
no railing, goes down. You muscle your way into a villa
stocked with backstabbers and portraits of riches.
I never recognize myself in any of the victims.

__________________________________________________________
Elsbeth Pancrazi works for the Poetry Society of America, serves on the editorial board of PEN Journal, and sometimes binds books for Small Anchor Press. Her poems and book reviews have appeared on BOMBlog, Bookslut, Boog City Reader, Forklift, Ohio, H_ngm_n, and elsewhere in print and on the web.

Poem of the Week: Laren McClung

Levi Rubeck — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 09:30:25 +0000

FOR IBRAHIM QASHOUSH

They found you like a river stone
in the Orontes where the people fished
you out. And like oil on water
you take the tint of all colors.
Now a streetwise nation wakes,
thousands on the Brooklyn Bridge,
down Broadway, Cleveland,
L.A., on the lawn of the Capitol
jailbreaking our jobs and mountains,
our houses foreclosing or falling down.
There’s no due process to undo
a quarter-century of bankers
clapping the beat of a pop tune,
people lost to a blindfold of interest.
Listen. They’re singing your song
in the square, old and young, a voice
wading out where the cameras can see.

____________________________________________
Laren McClung is the author of Between Here and Monkey Mountain (Sheep Meadow 2012). She lives between two cities.

Poem of the Week: Brian Trimboli

Levi Rubeck — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 09:30:55 +0000

from (Opera)
Asylum

1.

______Here is the proof,
____________everything about me.

I couldn’t stop thinking
___________about myself as him,
so the revelatory parts of me
_____like confetti undropped
grew dusty and apologetic.

“It isn’t enough
_____to tell you any more.”

____________*

_____“I’d like to think myself
_____a generation who stayed married.”

Back here, while walking past the foreign languages,
my daily discussion with the parrot behind me,

_____above all I am unaware
who is trying to help.

____________*

_____Given an infinity to write this,
___________you might. On courage:
so much is trial and error.

_____To adapt though, to take
the raw materials
_____of predestination and refine
to a convenient last name.

_____Once, my father
_____said something accidentally
better than any he ever thought.

____________*

_____The closest I get to being alone
an unanswered phone,
_____the showers even crowded.

_____Nancy the butcherbird changes
_____the sheets and rallies discrete
with nicknames and subtle blames
_____we carry
_____with teaspoons
_____to our bedrooms.

______________________________________________________
Brian Trimboli graduated from NYU with his MFA. While there, he held a fellowship for The Veteran Writers Workshop, and was the Poetry Editor for Washington Square Review. He has poems most recently in Gulf Coast; Forklift, Ohio; and No, Dear. He’s been pretty occupied lately with gardening and baseball, but still finds time when necessary.

Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book

Levi Rubeck — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 14:00:21 +0000

More capable writers have written about Robert Duncan and the circumstances surrounding The H.D. Book, notably the poet Lisa Jarnot whose review I highly recommend. It’s impossible not to concur with her on every point with regard to this, but I can’t speak to such a deep relationship with Duncan. As such, The H.D. Book, for me, was more a lesson on how to read poetry, perhaps at the most extreme.

Divided into three books, the short history of The H.D. Book is a somewhat common tale. One of those pieces that a writer is constantly writing, editing, tinkering, refining, adding to, etc., thus never really receiving a “finished” stamp of approval. Which is the exact way for a book like this to evolve, as it is essentially a record of Duncan’s two-step with poetry. This dance began with H.D. early in his life, and as such, she is present through all his thoughts on poetry and vice versa. Everything Duncan has pondered in poetry must first pass through H.D., not so much as a gatekeeper, but rather like a pair of glasses that put verse into focus for him. Thinking back onto my own experience with poetry I can (and often have) pointed to that first instance of poetic reception, the poet and poem that cracked the walnut of possibilities open. Like a scientist, or a theosophical philosopher scientist, Duncan approaches his walnut from every conceivable angle, often at the exact moment he conceives of each individual angle.

Which of course lends to the overwhelming magnitude of this tome, part of the multi-dimensional narrative going on here. A conversation in constant engagement was never meant to be read a second time. But how could this book have been anything other than what it is? There is no editing Duncan’s thoughts, references, asides, clips of Randell Jarrell and Pound and Williams and Eliot in turn faulting and praising and (ultimately) faulting H.D. again for her digressions against the flow of the academic canon. Duncan comes out firing in H.D.’s honor, though is not a qualifier by any means, casting no stones but rather approaching each point respectfully and discussing it through other evidence, references, and inferences.

The H.D. Book is larger than H.D. or Duncan then, a treatise on reading itself, as something between academic decoding and personal interaction between reader and text. Neither Duncan nor I seek to disparage criticism or academia, but this book doesn’t fill the needs of that style of literary interaction. Rather Duncan is writing down what he researches, thinks, and dreams about while working through H.D. and modernism in general. Book 1 is more akin to the historical reading of H.D. and greek mythology, working through the symbology she presents. For me, Book 2 was more engaging in that it investigated H.D.’s work directly and it was cross-pollenated with and within the work of Williams, Pound, and other and (post-)Imagists. Here we think along with Duncan, dive deep into quotes and references within and between sentences. It can be dazzling just by the enormity of his inquest, and rather than trying to take stock of his many references and asides, I took in this book as a direct call to knowledge.

In terms of describing this book as an argument for reading, though, I was primarily entranced by Duncan’s graciousness and patience. Even taking as long as I did to read this book I felt rushed, as every sentence was a thesis, an argument for the poetic and real legitimacy of the verse of not only H.D. but in many ways the 20th century as a whole. I wouldn’t know where to begin to quote from the book as it itself is comprised of so many quotes, inter-connected thoughts, and seemingly simple.

If nothing else, reading The H.D. Book has left me feeling something of a failure for not engaging so intimately with this art as Duncan had. Which is far from what Duncan would have wanted, I believe. This book is critical but suspicious of academia and the idea of “canon”. He was vested in readability but couldn’t help himself with regard to the density of his work, but such is the price of passion, and this book is the image not only of passion but of poetry’s impact on passion. It’s a life-long affair, and we are lucky to have this collection of thoughts. Though daunting and challenging, they’re intimately readable and inspiring for a poet such as myself. Trust no writer with a shelf that lacks this book, and spare the time to let Duncan show you that to write you must love to read.

Oyster Perpetual

Levi Rubeck — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 10:02:12 +0000

When charm works, the connection established between individuals is palpable. Flow becomes effortless and meaning is instantaneous. Hearing LaGrone read his poems out loud can deliver this, in a way. Such fluid links are also temporary, made all the more constrained by the instant in which they exist. Having this chance to really interact with Oyster Perpetual as a whole rather than through workshops with LaGrone extends the charming band-leader qualities of his poetry, but also elucidates the temporal nature of these poems.

He leads his parade of broken but non-pitiable scoundrels around urban, natural, and temporal topographies, usually branching off between lines. He has no qualms about naming the people, bars, drinks, smokables, poets, car parts, and more that populate his worlds.

Charisma can be a liability, though. LaGrone is aware of this. Throughout the book he casts wide for characters of all permutations but uses them as a foil for the “self” of the writer. This is the narrator’s world, and he understands his own limitations. Take the end of “Bonding”:

There was almost no wiggle room
around the dropper loops. Laid well,
there was enough temporary whipping
to hold me—so I fashioned a josephine
across my neck for a little flash.
When you got scared, running
into the shed for a Swiss Army,
I knew you’d never learn.

It’s due to the author’s earnestness that we, the reader (and the you of the poem) trust him, despite the fact that he’s volunteering for every conceivably uncomfortable position available in this sex dungeon. “Love is a gimp” is the kind of clever theme that wears itself out quickly, but this poem delves deeper into a position where one becomes non-charismatic, that the narrator’s very desire for shared pain when every partner acts to free him with a “Swiss Army”, showing that they will “never learn” his desires. Even LaGrone’s sweet talk has its limits, and it’s in those limits that this book becomes revelatory.

Part of good chemistry comes from balance, and LaGrone balances his sentimental conclusions with the grit that many of his influences touch on. Levis, Gilbert, Levine, and so forth, are all old men to whom the words of “common” men mattered greatly. LaGrone cracks the nut wider though, allowing not just the questionable decisions and epiphanies of flawed men but also women, oftentimes in juxtaposition. Charm and codependency blur throughout “Tableau with Rockets Redglare”:

… My ex-wife
sleeps with the television on,
says the flickering light
scares away the roaches.
We make love on Thursdays
as though we are still married.
It is comforting and effortless,
and afterwards we play ‘Deluxe’ Othello
and watch Down By Law with the volume
down. The Newton’s Roach and Flea Powder
I sprinkle on the floor makes little difference;
week after week they return
to an understanding.

That LaGrone can give us a tender catalog of bondage knots in one poem and a despair-soaked game night in another speaks to his versatility, not only in terms of setting and vocabulary, but breadth of emotional experience. The roaches return, “as though we are still married.” So too do we return to these verbose, complicated poems that swim in their syntax, though LaGrone never leaves us hanging. Believe the whistles and the winks, because though these lines may only love you for a moment, he makes that moment worthwhile.

Read Sarah V. Schweig on Oyster Perpetual here.

Kevin Young’s Ardency

Levi Rubeck — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:18:40 +0000

By this point in his career Kevin Young is an old hand at the psychic restoration of outside source material. His books, including Jelly Roll, To Repel Ghosts, and Black Maria, have each found something lyrical in the dry air of various historical and cultural archives while maintaining a crucial link to his own personal experience and sense of family. This is key to the work in Ardency because it’s his least personal book so far, but in many ways that allows him to approach those same emotions within the book’s historical characters from a more objective stance. Kevin Young rehydrates history with the often impenetrable abstract motivations of humanity, those emotions both feral and civil that run through us all.

Those human characters, and their voices, are the cornerstone of Ardency. This epic embodies in verse their experience as men, boys, and girls kidnapped from the paths winding through their home country of Sierra Leone, illegally (as opposed to amorally) sold into slavery in Cuba, who then rebelled on their ship and attempted to sail east to Africa only to find that they were being misdirected towards New York at night, where they were tried, and with the intervention of abolitionists and a president, set free. But that’s all the testable material.

For everything past the introduction, Kevin is filling in the cracks and doing so with warmth, music, and brevity (only a handful poems last longer than a page). Headlines, locations, and names are bandied about to serve the poem and its multi-dimensional enterprise:

__________________The whole country flocks
to watch you at play, a flea circus somersetting
the prison Green. Warden claims the proceeds
for your bail & newspaper reviews of jail
go well:—They crouch like tailors, teeth like stars
in inky faces, black headlines blare. No one dares
how you still may be sold, stolen like a scene.

[from “Blackmarket”]

The language is somersetting around itself, becoming the textual embodiment of the circus while we read aghast as twenty-first century ignoramuses of this experience. We read “black headlines blare” and trip over the subtext but it’s all part of the spectacle that the poem reenacts so concisely. Reenactment is a fair approximation of what this poetry accomplishes, as something beyond reportage but free of the budgetary and chronological constraints of cinema but fully immersed in the drama of experience. From “Testimony”:

You call us rebels____we were spoons
in that ship for so long____the wood
dark, drowned as the men who
made it from song____sold on land
like ships____like us____christened
out of water

This is the type of historical document that should be read, taught, and discussed from classrooms K through Ph.D. Kevin is so clearly integrated with the tools of poetry that even first time readers can sense the distance it keeps from fiction, what is conveyed through an image of men spooned together at the bottom of the ship as literal cargo surpasses statistical analysis. This book comes closest to the actual experience on the Amistad, and more importantly, afterwards.

The strength of the first two sections is such that the third, “Witness”, initially left me gasping in their wake. “Witness” is the majority of the book and is definitively elegant. But where “Buzzard” and “Correspondance” teem with character, setting, and energy, “Witness” gives a slight advantage to quantity over quality.

I frequently found myself wondering if I’d read this poem or that poem earlier in the manuscript, wondering where the fervor went. No single poem is bad, each carries the same weight, but by the end that weight begins to feel repetitive. “Witness” pulls down on the eyes and the mind. Which might not be a terrible thing: it’s easy to breeze through some poems about the hardships undergone by these rebels, get a sense of their misfortune, then throw a movie on or step out for some falafel. Elements of song are interspersed with the single eyewitness account of Cinque, leader of the rebellion. But it’s hard to determine Cinque’s character, especially after the captivating montage of the first two sections.

My mind
were winter.

Never
did I know

that word
till Merica—

then, learned it
was white

and silent and covered
even the trees.

__________Steal Away.

Inside my cell
snow.

[…]

There neither do lions
speak, nor preach

till the sand beneath
the sea shifts

and swallows—
till the waves

erase the names.

[from “Tabernacle”]

By the time we hear this poem Cinque feels less like a man and more like an amalgamation of suffering, endurance, and trial. Job is the easy comparison, which may be why these poems initially felt so thin to me. But upon second consideration, “Witness” is more than just viewing. It makes the reader the witness, emotionally enduring the same tolls heaped upon Cinque and his fellow rebels. Names are erased, everything is left cold and silent, the mere adoption of the language and religion of the West is enough to obliterate these rebels. Which is sort of how I felt after reading this section, a sense of obliteration, exhaustion, but a need to carry on.

The themes of cold and snow, this new world Merica, and home bounce around “Witness” in constant rotation. This mimics the thought of a captive, someone kidnapped from their home and forced through horrific ideals, someone who has to find something to hold onto mentally in order to maintain some level of sanity. A 240-page historical epic poem already carries the potential for exhaustion, but perhaps this last section is meant to be more meditative. Like overwhelming the trees with silence, or the tides that erase the names of the dead, the trauma of witness can overwhelm the human psyche, and perhaps this is the feeling I approach when reading through the section.

Despite my first impression, the impact of “Witness” has caused me to more deeply ponder the effects of this history on Kevin Young and the readers of Ardency. I may not have felt as much throughout reading it, but I can hardly flip to a page without finding the nuance and pace of the first two sections working in a similar way, albeit one that must simmer. While I still feel that those poems of “Witness” don’t quite shine as individually as the ones of the first two sections (and the final “Afterword”), the bulk of its reading is subliminally affective, which may be closer to the truth of these rebel’s experiences than any proclamation.

Ultimately, Ardency is a poised, fantastic collection that I can’t wait to share with my students. In terms of documentary poetics and its potential, this book is quite fitting as another feather in Kevin Young’s cap.

Tall Poetry: James Copeland’s To My Plants

Levi Rubeck — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:04:30 +0000

James Copeland is a tall man, who rides a tall bike, drinks tall drinks, and writes tall poetry. To My Plants is a tallish, stiff chapbook of words arranged by James, printed on cellulose by James, and containing a DVD of a short film shot by a friend of James, from which the still photographs interspersed throughout the chapbook originate. The cover is two-sided, both unassuming, without any words to indicate title or author. You get clouds and mountainous valleys at first glance, but the sleuthy reader will check under the flap and be delighted, or maybe teased, with a string of automobiles as silent as any natural wonder.

You’re right, I’m stalling, but only because To My Plants already says everything that needs to be said about itself. It’s a book that delights in a cat-like batting about of your preconceptions: Plants, oh, James is a hippie, or: “Science arises from the green and yellow star, / ready for panoramas, radiant with facts”, oh, James thinks he’s smarter than me. Which is where he gets you, feeding us lines we think we get (or don’t) but seconds later instinctively reconsider. It isn’t slippery so much as twisting, squirming, revolting, linguistic revolutions around the star that bore us.

Plants and science greet us throughout this slim book/tall poem. The long lines mirror time’s inconstant rhythms (despite what the atom says) and throws everything into transition. The “Children, too, are present, looking at their final bowls of cereal / before being called into service.” From plant to paper, child to servant (soldier? cubicle drone? janitor?), things are shifting throughout. Mountains are unsettled, lions act like men, “The sunlight washes over the mustard on the man’s fingers / like the visions of violent wealth that wash over the young girl’s sleep.” There’s our yellow and green star again.

But if everything is moving, where is it going? Even random paths, viewed from far enough out, can’t help but cough up a pattern. To My Plants offers the returning lion, which may be us, unless we are the plants, or the men and women, or maybe the “dollop of carbon” left on the fingertip. There are animals, and plants, both are carbon-based and can’t help but be. We can’t help ourselves, “We are part of the ocean, the gorge, we lurch into the surrounding smell / to know nothing except volume.”

There is hardly an “I” to be found in this book amidst the swirling patrons of planet Earth, but James slips, shows us that he is human, that “Like anyone else, he enjoys the feeling of corn syrup running down his forearms. / And by enjoy, I mean he swears by it.” We are what we enjoy, even if, at this point, that enjoyment is bringing the whole works down. James is no prophet but his poetry is a telescope turned on this place we call home. Sitting on this messy, throbbing rock, overrun with planets and animals, James gives us the pattern in one fell poem. Would that we may learn something about ourselves by it.

The Silver Book

Levi Rubeck — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:00:46 +0000

Ephemeral, almost spirit-like, this book can be read in under 15 minutes if one rushes or pondered for days and cannot be fully appreciated on a Kindle or as a pdf.

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Ronin Poet: Kalkbrenner’s Foul Feelings

Levi Rubeck — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 13:00:14 +0000

At a recent Poet’s House reading, Demosthenes Agrafiotis had some harsh things to say about haiku written in English. They fail not only because English can’t possibly pack as much information into a syllable as Japanese does, but the form itself is tied to a cultural imperative, a way of thought that one learns for so long that to even ponder how it works unravels the meaning.

That said, Brian Kalkbrenner’s Foul Feelings is the closest thing in English, spiritually, to haiku that I can possibly think of. Sure, the poems are pithy and zazen, which is an easy link to the Japanese form. But these often tiny poems are ponderously gargantuan. Brian is a modern western ronin, wandering the new nature of urban living (as urbanized development has taken the majority of the Earth’s surface, it might as well be the modern rendering of nature) and living the poet’s path, sharpening his pen and honing his skills.

Such a road is not easily traveled, and to compound his difficulties, Brian has chosen to commit poetry seppuku by self-publishing Foul Feelings. How is self-publishing like slicing open one’s belly in disgrace? Samurai committed ritual sacrifice for many reasons large and small, but I believe that Brian has chosen to publish this book himself and therefore alienate the work from a large segment of the larger (read: academic) poetry world because that world has gone from focusing on art to focusing on the numbers, specifically the number of dollars given as prizes, scholarships, fellowships, etc.

You might as well save your Stegner application fee and invest in some Mega-Millions tickets because you have about the same chances of winning either. And even if you do make it, what guarantee is there that you will be a better writer, let alone a “successful” one? Brian bypasses the lottery of modern poetic politics, instead choosing to release these poems of their own volition. One would realistically consider this a grave mistake, given the stigma against self-publishing, if not for two things: the poems are sharp enough to parse atoms, and no journal would ever accept them. Brian had no choice but to climb the mountain and meditate on his craft.

It’s hard to talk about these lines without giving anything away, though there isn’t really much to give away. They are mostly small, ranging from seven words to paragraph-length prose poems. Not all of them are philosophical but neither are they simple narratives. They’re surreal in the way that you are given two things that don’t exactly connect logically but don’t exactly disconnect either; they are reflections from a broken mirror. Any meaning pulled from the lines are refracted through the reader.

Not that Brian is only writing about the big pictures here. In fact, that’s what makes these poems so haiku-like in the first place: modern life is explicated through the small moments, images, and thoughts of everyday life and everyday language. That same daily word choice, the common words we all utilize hourly, transformed like sand into glass by Brian’s capable hands. That’s the strength behind Foul Feelings and poetry at large, the way it can take something we thought we new and twist it into new meaning. Any publisher would be honored to have Brian in their ranks, but perhaps it would be best for us if he continued to walk the way of the warrior-poet.

the the poetry blog» Levi Rubeck

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