Caroline Hagood is an Art Monster, and the more I read her prose and poetry, the more monstrous she becomes. She is Frankenstein, Ursula, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Lady Gaga rolled into one. She is also, by the way, not “in the way,” a mother, but as Hagood declares in her new book length essay, Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2022), the two are not “mutually exclusive.” “I absolutely find it to be practically a fight to the death,” she says, “to ensure that the duties and expectations of ‘mother’ and ‘woman’ don’t suck up the artist in me . . .I think if you fight tooth and nail for your art, being a mother can feed it.”
Yes, this is a monster story, a mother story, a declaration of independence perhaps, a “taking back of art from men . . . for mothers—even if it is a bloody battle.” Woman as monster. Monster as artist. Woman as artist. Monster as mother. …” the M of Mother and the W of Writer as flipped versions of each other.’ “When I got pregnant,” she says, I “contained multitudes.” She is the best monster her kids know. “I chase them around the house while roaring loudly and they love it. . .And then it starts: the monster questions: “Are there any nice monsters?” They ask. You don’t have to be afraid of monsters,” she tells them, “Because I’m queen of the monsters. Mommy Monster, and they’re all afraid of me.’” Her children are her inspiration. These sticky creations are also her art. She sees her “literary and biological creation as feeding one another.”
Hagood is keen on “crafting a new genre for women in ‘my workshop of filthy creation’ just like the one Dr. Frankenstein had. This time I’ll make do with this sticky desk in my kid’s room.”
Indeed, according to Hagood, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein “can simultaneously be read as a book about three kinds of creation: the creation of an actual monster, the creation of a book, and the creation of a child.”
Then there’s Lady Gaga, a particular favorite in the author’s “art monster coven of women,” Lady Gaga, who “march outside the expected gender and sexuality borders,” whose song Frankensteined “creates an alternate reality, a safe space, in which the woman monster lives to tell her story.” The Bride of Frankenstein is doomed to destruction in both novel and film, but in Gaga’s Frankensteined, she lives to dance to the beat of her own ‘twisted rhythms and create create create.’” Gaga becomes mother monster “to what we can only imagine will become a gaggle of ‘little monsters’ . . . She too, like Shelley becomes the tripartite monster giving birth to herself, her music, her fans.
Entering Caroline Hagood’s mind, is like entering a living room, or maybe a “sticky kids’ room,” littered with lots of esoteric fun and games for the imagination, dog leafed books and journals, notepads with brilliant insight and grocery lists of who and what we should all be reading. When listing all the “hybrid and super cool work being done by women writer’s today,” she parenthetically tells us to “email me and I’ll send you too long of a list.”
This book length essay is made up not so much of chapters but of chapterettes, observations, allusions, conversations, fragments, revelations, suggestions, asides, creating a whole book, like body parts stitched together to make a whole monster, reflecting the author’s intention to “derange reality . . .fragment it . . .make of it a mosaic, a collage.” Reading this book, sometimes I feel like Frankenstein’s monster, leaping from chapter to chapter, thought to thought, speculation to speculation, as if from one craggy mountain or beautiful azure lake to another.
Hagood takes us, as usual, on a wild journey, through body and mind, from the reality of her kids’ poop and dirty diapers to the mythical labyrinth of the Minotaur, “that real world counterpart to our inner space, external corollary to the thrilling but baffling inner tangle within us.” How wondrously entangling, how grammatically labyrinthine is that sentence alone!
“Perhaps.” she reflects, “philosophers link labyrinths to thought structures because of this eerie sense we have that we inhabit something that seems patternless but if we can only rise above ourselves and take a look, we’d suddenly get it.” Indeed, the structure of the book itself is somewhat “patternless” as if she has constructed her own labyrinth, her words, her memories, her aspirations, leading herself and us along the winding road towards revelation.
“. . . the labyrinth fascinates me,” she continues, because of the monster at its center, at the center of us all . . .as a writer I don’t run from the monster but towards it, beg it to haunt my labyrinth. The monster is the story, the inspiration, the beating heart of the narrative. . . The writer is the one who navigates the labyrinth, encounters the monster, and lives to tell about it.” And it is in the “telling about it,” that we begin to hear our own hearts beat louder, as with joy and anticipation we welcome another great art monster to the world.
Mitch Levenberg has published essays, reviews and short fiction in such journals as Fiction, The New Delta Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Local Knowledge, The Assisi Journal of Arts and Letters, The Same, and others. His collection of stories, Principles of Uncertainty and Other Constants was published in March 2006. He teaches Writing and Literature at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y.
David Greenspan’s debut collection, One Person Holds So Much Silence,explores, at its heart, the
relationship between mind and body, and what happens when one- or both- fall
apart. The collection opens with, “Poem for a god of my own understanding,”
which situates us in the pressing needs of the collection: corporeal existence,
mental illness, drug use, and the myriad ways a person can slip through
society’s cracks. See how the poem starts with, “Opening my palm on a fence,”
and then later, “opening / my knee on a mirror” after “the doctor / sputters up
lust small / tablets.” We see the speaker’s body mirror the speaker’s mental
health; both are unraveling.
The
speakers of these poems struggle: addiction, mental illness, poverty. In
“Skinny Fisted Sons,” the rural setting is rife with decay, alcoholism, and
other “magnificent ways to die.” We see the ways that poverty kills, causing
the “sons” to turn not on society, but on each other. Their life, a cycle of
abuse and decay, is eating them alive. Generational trauma is present in
“Skinny Fisted Sons” and can be traced throughout the collection. In “Three:
The Dead,” the narrator states, “we lived with memory / we have no answers.” In
the closing poem, “A Poem to Pass the Time,” the speaker relates a traumatic
experience with his father. “He anesthetized our dog / beneath a pignut hickory
sky / I was a child / I wanted to be / nothing.” There is no escape; to be
alive is to live with memory, to live with memory is to live with trauma.
Greenspan’s
collection is concerned with the ways that we, as humans, continue existing
despite reason. In “Where are the worms in my mouth brother in your mouth,” the
Q speaker, filling the role of therapist or doctor, asks, “How are you doing
threaded together so.” Later, A responds, “Beneath my skin is a zipper. Beneath
the zipper is more skin. Shapeless, without tuft of muscle, bone, organ.” The
body is held together so delicately, paralleling the speaker’s mental health.
“I’m sad enough / to put real thought / into how I’d kill myself…but not sad
enough to do it” confesses the speaker of “I don’t like to sing about boxing
but I hope you’ll understand.” There is no hope to be found in medication,
which keeps the speaker “at an acceptable level of sad.” Medication becomes
another source of trauma, a way for the speakers of these poems to lose
themselves in escape.
Drugs
appear and reappear, slipping out of the poems as quickly as they enter. In
“Where are the worms in my mouth brother in your mouth,” the speaker bleakly
states, “Endless reaches of lithium flavor.” Later, “I was as much as anyone.
Grafted and grifted the first time she found needles. Slouching toward death,
both of us.” In “Poem for Florida,” the speaker mentions “lemon bright
distraction,” then, “Pills and pills.” “Palliative on Rooftop” is about a group
of friends hanging out “with clonidine and gabapentin / prescribed off label.”
Within these drugs is not liberation or relief, but instead, “overdoses and
tumors,” the slow slide towards death. “Unspool with us,” states the speaker of
“Body by Adderall.” The process of slipping through the cracks becomes
communal.
This book is a coming to terms: with mental health, addiction, place, personal history. The failings and wailings of the body. The collection closes with “A Poem to Pass the Time” which poses Greenspan’s response to his traumas. “Here’s what I have… culpability of language/ a rush of pencil on paper,” and despite the claim that “the poem isn’t very kind,” there is relief in the process of creation. “I can’t understand anything / unless it’s wet with metaphor.” Poetry becomes the act of meaning-making, and in meaning, there is the shimmer of hope.
Nikki Ummel is a queer writer, editor, and educator at the University of New Orleans. Nikki has been published or is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Adroit, Hobart, The Georgia Review, and more. In 2021 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry and awarded an Academy of American Poets Award. She is currently the Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine. You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com.
I’m
imagining Charles Baudelaire shaking off his signature melancholy and “viewing”
his way, for a devilishly delightful hour or so, through Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine, Nick
Potter’s new collection of “Comics/Poems” (as it’s category-tagged on the
front cover). No question, the nineteenth-century
Parisian poet savors his twenty-first-century counterpart’s synesthetic blend
of sound-sense-color-image splashing rhythmically across the book’s pages. And then, just before his return to the past,
that sullen Frenchman tenders a nod of approval in fraternal recognition of Potter’s
artistic vision. What vision? A dark-humored, offbeat scrutiny of the confounding
dread and indecisiveness, the obsessions, hesitations, and foreboding uncertainties
that constitute the human experiment on this fragile laboratory planet of ours.
Global spleen.
To be clear, Potter is not pretending
in this collection to plumb the philosophical depths of our existence, but he
certainly is leading us, like
anxious surfers atthe shores of Teahupoo, towards some monstrously heavy
waves.
Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine opens with a pair of erudite epigraphs,
mischievously misquoted so that “comics” rise to the manifest aesthetic stratosphere
of “music,” “architecture” and
“geometric space.” First alert, we’re to be engaged in serious business here. What
follows then is, well, to call it Comics Poetry is eminently fair, but. Perhaps a tad too easy? Semantically efficient,
but. A bit cautiously genre-neutral? What
the product of Potter’s creative process really merits—deservedly so and not
for the sake of disruption—is that we tweak tradition and stre-e-etch
conventional boundaries, like “Hey, make some room there.” BGJM delivers a combo of words and pictures metaphorically akinto
nuclear fusion’s release of energy – so why not just call it what it is, “Sheer
Poetry” and leave it at that? Sheer poetry vested in the verbal and visual, a
marvelous marriage of past traditions and present day pop culture, of classic
conventions and contemporary sensibilities.
In one
spot the artwork reminds us of Renaissance sketchbooks, in another of French
Fauvism; look over here it’s abstract, over there, representational. At one
moment words appear as the integral and distinct elements of speech and meaning
that we’d expect from daughters of the alphabet, at another they spring a
surprise — fracturing into separate letters consigned to corners, or peeking
out from a puddle of
colors, or—in
grey calligraphy againstgrey background— playing hide and seek with us ready
or not. Some words and letterstransform
themselves into lines of art, improvising as they curlicue over and across
comic book panels, challenging us to join all this jazz, to enter these boxes of
poetry and endeavor to make sense of what we’re reading and looking at—or what
we’re viewing, to attempt a term that might or might not better focus our
attention on the graphic design, the fluid blend of text and image on the page.
And the
poems we view leave little room for doubt that, all influences considered, we’re
not in Da Vinci’s workshop circa 1500 or the Belle Époque studio of Matisse. Why, we’re even a whole century
past Krazy Kat’s first comic strip appearance. We’re in the very here and now.
Yes, in our own fraught post-aughts, where Potter casts an unerring and
apprehensive eye on us humans in an absurd new millennium as we sink or swim to
soundtracks by FKA twigs and Phoebe Bridgers.
Welcome to
a world where vacationers, “People being who they are,” casually ignore a man
who catches on fire, while the one woman who does respondintentionally addsgasoline,
to extinguish the man, not the flames. An absurd fable fueled with a mean
moral.
In this
world, the
eponymous Jazz Machine of the book’s title leaves a trail of suffering, chaos, and
erasure in its wake, while a building’s infrastructure, rather than providing
support, bends and hobbles and collapses into rubble.
Here, guests
go missing and the disappearance of “Alvin Dillinger’s Brother” is conveyed by
means of a worrying Beckett-like monologue with some wordless panels, several blotted
black ink stains, and omnipresent forebodings of death.
As for Domestic
Objects and Phenomena? Sinister. They portend Life’s design to fill us with
recurrent dread, and they include uncertain dinner plans, dying plants, hidden
wires, and threats by mom to sell our creature comfort television set. The unremarkable
occasion of going for a haircut becomes a “Maybe”
filled with indecision, hesitation, stuttering thoughts, and Kierkegaardian
angst, all packed into a grid of claustrophobic rectangular panels better suited
to an Excel spreadsheet—that product of dispassionate, dreary binary digits,
over and over—than to capturing the relaxed atmosphere of an everywoman
enjoying a pleasant talc-scented grooming.
And, yes, in
this world, water is for drowning.
Not even an
“Interlude” brings relief. In scratchy black and white, it suggests storyboards
for the ill-fated fetal creature in David Lynch’s underground film Erasherhead. And by book’s end, the whole earth’s
ecological catalog is reduced to smoke, flood, and cyclone. Despite a momentary
hint and tint of some exquisite Japanese woodcut, we face a landscape bereft of
animal life and a horizon devoid of any particular promise, fading off into a
colorless “Epilogue” in grey and black and white, ovoid and jagged and wormy
and flinty and sad.
Many of
his themes may be dark, but Potter evidently enjoys plying and playing with the
tools of his trade, all those letters and lines, words and crayons and colors
and grids, fashioning them into his poetry, at times creating a sort of variation
on haiku form.
“WHA/ T S/ HOULD
WE DO/ A BO UT D IN
NER ?”
reads
across four panels awash in soft lavenders and blues, the words doing double
duty as both semantic and graphic elements, the pictures not just sitting there
looking pretty but propelling the narrative.
“A
HIDDEN / KNIFE BUTTERS / MY HAND IN /THE LEAVES”
reads another
set of panels, florally decorated and channeling the brevity, lyricism,
elusiveness and, yes, pressed leaves of Emily Dickinson.
True,
piecing together these poems requires a bit of cryptographer’s determination,
and patience, but the rewards of penetrating the space of the panels, of
“reading” into the Rorschach of Potter’s imagination and solving the puzzles he
proffers are payoff enough.
Sure, the world might be a dread-full place. And, of course, we readers will recognize characters and circumstances on these pages all too well, as Taylor Swift intones in another context. Who hasn’t felt fretful at times? Boxed into the corners of an existential crisis? Fearful of an uncontrollable future, whether it be minutes, or months, or a millennium away? And yet, when a true artist interprets, depicts, and shares with us that world, those feelings—well, that, that is a joy-full experience. Such is George Potter’s Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine.
Alan Zelenetz is an East Coast – based writer and educator whose most recent publication is the collection Kull the Conqueror: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus.
A bath can be a lot of things, and Jen Silverman holds a magnifying glass up to each of these meanings and incarnations in her gorgeously wrought poetry chapbook Bath, available May 24th from Driftwood Press. Silverman writes about baths that are baptisms, baths as floods, baths in dreams, baths of dust—all while holding the reader in literal baths of words (the poems are entitled “Bath 1,” “Bath 2,” and so on). From the opening’s pairing of a Bible quote about iniquity with a defiant “don’t fuck with me” line from Joan Crawford, Bath holds the reader in spaces that boldly confront the meanings of redemption, rebirth and love.
The
chapbook consists of eleven poems that are set in cities around the world, from
American towns like Iowa City and Louisville to faraway places like Cairo and
Cuzco. The words stretch across time as well as space, with nods to ancient
pharaohs, sacrifices and gods, and images of Egyptian stone bathtubs and the
streets of Alexandria that “are sheets of dust and ochre.” Silverman’s encompassing
worldview also includes the future. Characters on New Year’s Eve “set ourselves
towards the people we wish we were” and one poem’s narrator dreams of “talking
to children / I haven’t had.” In a particularly compelling passage in the
chapbook’s final poem, Silverman describes how all times coexist, concluding
with the lovely line, “and my partner is a bright horizon that has yet to
arrive.”
A sacred, biblical
tone permeates Silverman’s writing, particularly in “Bath 2” when the narrator
waits in Cairo for a flood:
The
locusts. The plagues. The pharaohs,
long-dead
and staggering over the sands from beyond.
But
no gods showed up to punish us.
And yet
the poetry is unmistakably contemporary. Silverman’s tone is often casual, even
blasé, with lines about relationships like “the sensitive ones will leave your
bed and go / out into the cold, hearts bruised, and what can you do” and “Oh,
he has panic attacks / all the time now.” Other moments are emotional and
poignant, such as the way a father’s love for his daughter “becomes a
weather-system / of love.” The poems are resplendent with powerful images,
including “the wind / flakes like mica, our skins glitter, / our hair is
jeweled with sand.” Silverman beautifully intertwines the moments in love and
heartbreak that hold us inside them with the weight of an ancient past,
revealing the fragility of humanity in between. In “Bath 2,” she writes:
We’re
not so special.
Just
a story so old it has escaped its meaning:
How
things of one fabric fall to pieces.
The eleven
“Bath” poems are divided by a contrasting poem between “Bath 6” and “Bath 7”: “The
Devil Dogs My Steps, But If It Weren’t Him, It Would Just Be Someone Else,” a
four-part poem about the Devil visiting the narrator with an unexpectedly
nonchalant, whimsical reckoning. “The Devil peels potatoes,” begins the third
section. “He’s throwing a dinner party. He / invited my landlord and all my
exes.” Unusual images abound, including the Devil lingering at CVS and sitting
in a hotel sauna. Throughout this poem and others in the collection, the
narrator expects punishment—desires baths to wash away sins and make redemption
possible—but doesn’t actively seek it out. In “Bath 4” the narrator echoes Mary
Oliver with “You do not have to be good,” and “Bath 10” includes a reference to
its characters’ “lack of shame,” suggesting there is not much that can be done to
eradicate living with sin.
Bath is a journey of relationships ending and going, of water and dust, of the containers that hold us and release us. With stunning syntax and captivating characterizations of times and places as well as people, Silverman considers the redemption and purity that humanity aspires to, and ultimately explores what it is to be submerged in it all.
Lillie Gardner is a writer based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in the Delmarva Review, Long River Review, Sentient Media, Funny-ish.com and more. Her screenplay American Virtuosa won Outstanding Drama Pitch at the 2021 Catalyst Story Institute and was a Top 3 Finalist in the Big Break Screenwriting Contest. She reviews books for EcoLit Books and writes for Feminist Book Club.
The worst kind of reading can become a tussle for tyranny. It is this sort that turns people off of poetry – the feeling that the poet must shroud something important in complicated diction or syntax, dangling a carrot the reader must work to decipher. In this struggle, both author and reader vie for supremacy. The author obfuscates meaning with symbols or other poetic devices, and the reader penetrates the text, lifts its skirt, revealing its hidden meaning through analysis.
Wayne Koestenbaum’s Ultramarine, the third and final book in his trance poem trilogy, calls into question this struggle between writer and reader, or poses another question altogether. In order to read Ultramarine, one must relinquish control. These deeply personal musings are impenetrable if you try to understand every reference or connect each logical leap. Relatively early on in this 472-page tome Koestenbaum asks, “who dominates? or does / no one dominate? and is / domination not the issue?”
Koestenbaum intervenes into the question of domination by blowing it up completely. One is both completely inside the mind of the writer – as evidenced by lack of explanations, shorthand in place of names and other devices – and completely outside insofar as the text remains opaque to us – for example the first page includes a character denoted by “M” whom we will never know. In exchange for submitting to the tyranny of the text, the reader is endlessly entertained. After all, how many books ask “why isn’t smegma / more frequently discussed?”
The themes of these poems revolve around the body: sex, the performance of gender, alienation. The first poem in the book, “#1 [my prostate is a shopping mall]” leads with a paradox: “I meant to begin / in Barbra’s voice / but I’m speaking in my / own voice as Ralph Fiennes.” Here, we have a speaker who starts at the point of failure and moves in to the self as persona or performance. From the outset the idea of the atomized self so popular in Western thought is no longer tenable when a speaker declares they speak in their own voice as the voice of another. We are always already influenced by the cultures around us; there is no possibility of purity.
The poem goes on to move through a dizzying array of thoughts before landing on “her discovery / of my cock began / to equal my own / apprehension of its / rumored existence.” The alienation of the self from the body becomes clear and collides with external anxieties: in the mind of the speaker other people talking about his cock is more real than his physical cock itself. The notion of self-formation the first poem offers pivots on an idea of influence.
In “#2 [do-it-yourself-placenta],” we arrive at a completely different manner of constructing the self. Here Koestenbaum offers a self forged through otherness. He writes, “closest companion / is my cough – I hug it.” It is through defect or disability that the self recovers from the alienation the previous poem expressed. What does not work in a normative fashion announces itself, thus bringing the self into the body. Later in the poem, “the turtle beheld / [the speaker’s] inhumanity.” The animal returns the experience of the speaker back to himself, allowing him to be seen the way he feels. These explorations in the ways otherness can behold the self point to the possibility of relationality.
Throughout the text,
Koestenbaum returns to the performance of gender. Early on, when the reader is
learning how to approach the text, he writes,
never taught
how to shave, a lost scene –
figuring masculinity out
by myself, and I never
figured it out
Here, masculinity becomes something that must be learned–staged, repeated–rather than an innate quality. He goes on later to return to this scene:
waiting for father
to notice that it was time
for me to start shaving –
he never noticed – I wanted
him to buy me a razor
and shaving cream and teach
me how to use them
Desire meets the
performance of gender. The speaker wants his father to acknowledge his
burgeoning manhood and commend it by teaching him to become even more
masculine. However, if we return to the previous scene, the reader already
knows this recognition never happens. Thus, desire and manhood meet in a clash
that emasculate the speaker, leaving him without the knowledge to perform his
gender in socially normative ways.
Similar moments of confrontation and investigation pervade the text, for example “desire / intensified by talking / to my father.” The speaker sidesteps the incest taboo and Koestenbaum accentuates this reveal by breaking the line between talking and the subject, thus raising the reader’s level of surprise. Not only does Koestenbaum surprise us with content, but also with form. The text incorporates all manner of writing from dreams to factual news. It resists privileging one mode over another. Gossip, too, has a place in this world: “Peter / Hujar’s lover called me a sissy / intellectual, a dying breed.” By flattening the hierarchy between different forms of writing, Koestenbaum queers the form of the book. Further, he questions the idea of owning language. One short passage reads:
I cut hair
for the Shah of Iran,
I had an internationally
known hair salon on
Long Island, please
text me a photo of your
Vermont hot tub
This reads like found language, something said to the speaker, or overheard. By choosing not to place quotation marks around this language, Koestenbaum problematizes the notion of ownership.
Despite the self-interested nature of the journal form, this text brings in themes beyond the personal. Questions of antisemitism and the Holocaust arise throughout the text. “#8 [pumpkin childbirth]” ends “when the pustule / vanishes, a pock remains.” This seems to be a key way of understanding Koestenbaum’s project with history – that which is gone is never truly gone. Rather it leaves scars, wounds, the trace of itself on the body.
One hundred years after publication of “The Waste Land” and its ending invocation of “these fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Koestenbaum reimagines the fragment. If Eliot’s magnum opus is made up of gathered fragments compiled into a dam to protect his life from some external force, Ultramarine attempts “to assemble life from fragments.” A century on, it seems all we have is fragments. They no longer protect us from ruin, rather they are the very thing that makes up our lives.
—
C. Francis Fisher is a poet, translator, and critic based in Brooklyn.
She is currently pursuing her MFA at Columbia University. Her writings have
appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Pacifica Literary Magazine, and the
Columbia Journal among other publications. Her poem, “Self-Portrait at
25” was selected as the winner for the 2021 Academy of American Poets
Prize for Columbia University. Currently, she works as the poetry editor for
the Columbia Journal.
In 1949, at a
Berkeley symposium on poetry, the young Jack Spicer complained about the
smallness of the audience for poetry.
Poetry should be as entertaining as popular culture, he argued. “The truth is that pure poetry bores
everybody,” he said. “It is even a bore
to the poet.” Instead, according to Spicer, poets “must become singers, become
entertainers.” If poetry managed to be
more generally entertaining, Spicer thought, it would be less insular, it would
have many more readers.
The situation for
poetry hasn’t changed that much since 1949. Though in the US today there are
more outlets for poetry than in Spicer’s time and many vibrant nationwide
poetry communities and festivals, it’s probably a safe bet that most of the
audience for poetry consists of people who write or have written poems
themselves. In terms of the general US
populace, poetry has sunk into a mighty insignificance. (I’d be very happy to be wrong about this.)
One only needs to look at the NY Times’ list of 100 notable books of
2021 for evidence. (Two books of poetry made the list.) Or look for the poetry section in one’s
favorite bookstore or local library.
What’s there? (The Boston Globe, which lists 20 best poetry books
for 2021, appears to be one of the few media outlets that take contemporary
poetry seriously.)
If Spicer is right
and entertainment is an essential factor for increasing poetry’s readership and
significance, Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini is more than up to the
task. Her book is disturbingly
entertaining, in a rubbernecking at the accident sort of way. The book delights in picking apart illusions
of humanity’s goodness, dignity, and value, instead presenting us with a nightmarish,
absurdist poetry that is as bizarre as it is horrifying. In Bock’s inside-out,
upside-down, Lewis Carroll-ish scenarios, humans are the deadly
accident, the catastrophe. Art is the
first thing to go: the opening poem “Overcome,” with its biblical overtones, starts
the book off with a whacky sense of belatedness and loss. With art gone there is little left that
provides us with the inspiration for changing what got us to here. Museum galleries
have empty walls. People are entertained by the degrading antics of other human
beings. They piss in DuChamps missing
fountain, weep “for what might have been”:
And it came to pass, art became extinct. Still, we flocked to museums and stared into barren rooms. Look! Someone would exclaim. There’s a man rolling around on the floor, acting like an unbalanced washing machine, knocking into things and coughing up wet rags. Isn’t it horrifying? Oh, yes, excruciating, someone would yell out. People whizzed in Duchamp’s missing fountain. They blew each other like whistles where L’Origine du Monde used to hang. They wept under restroom signs for what might have been. People shredded their clothes, oozed from chandeliers. … And thus began the gnashing of hair and the pulling of teeth that lasted for the rest of the unknown world.
(My ellipsis, Bock’s italics)
The poems that follow, some with ghoulish titles such as “Snuff Poem,”
“Everything Coming Up Rifles,” “The Killing Show,” “Postcard from the Coffin”
pull us along with their inventive, unsettling strangeness. Monsters, mannequins, dolls, robots – the
almost human – populate many of the book’s poems, in competition with actual
humans. (The humans are losing.) The
book’s overall atmosphere is menacing and creepy, often involving the human
body’s dismemberment:
No, those are not starfish scattered on the sand.
Those are hands curling in on themselves, making
little nests on the beach. Sometimes, they scuttle
away to cut off other hands.
(“The Island of Zerrissenheit”)
Along the same lines, in another poem Bock cuts up body parts to chart
humanity’s eventual evolutionary demise:
Some time after the extinction of whales, babies were born in pieces. Lungs, feet, spleen all separate and in heaps. We dumped the remains of our babies in the woods, in the fields and into the seas. To our dismay, the single parts rose and animated. Heads without necks rolled around trying to connect with other parts. Hearts, arms, and tongues crept over the Earth in grotesque parades. Organs and limbs clumped together and survived for a time. …
(“How Rabbits Finally Took Over the World”)
At the same time, Glass Bikini is darkly humorous, provocatively
so. (Think Jonathan Swift, A Modest
Proposal.) The humor here is
double-edged. While Bock makes it clear
that humor may be one of the few psychic defenses left in times of existential
crisis, she also dilutes its power by reminding us of some laughter’s
underlying cruelty. In one of the poems that I see as central to her project,
she stages an evolutionary reversal, with humans trying to escape back to their
watery origins. The poem starts at a
party, where the speaker’s mother “curls into a set of ovaries and vein-blue
tubes.” The speaker picks up her mother
and carries her upstairs. What follows
is a laughter that is deeply disturbing:
…. I drop my mother, and everybody laughs. It’s just so funny. She slumps over and throbs in the corner. My brother slouches toward her. I try to grab him by the stumps, but they are slick from the forewaters. I keep dropping him in the rising muck. Everyone is convulsively laughing. We can’t stop. We slip, go under. It’s hilarious. All of us grabbing onto each other. All of us ill-made, laughing, and trying to get back inside.
(“Get Back”)
“Get Back”’s suggestion that humans are “ill-made” comes up in other
poems. In “Belief Is a Default
Setting,” newly-made human replicas “sense something ugly and festering in the
heart of a friend. Where there is none.”
In “Prometheus Report,” human characteristics are explained by mutations in the
genes: “Do you have the M-T-H-F-R mutation?
You know, the “Motherfucker” gene? You can’t detox with that one.” Such deterministic notions of genetic
composition, begging the question of whether human life is worth preserving,
place Bock’s work within a distinguished line of dystopian writing. Kurt
Vonnegut’s Galapagos immediately comes to mind. (In his book, humans end
up as seal-like animals, with no hands.)
A reader might understandably wonder if the book provides any relief
from the near-apocalyptic visions which dominate most of Glass Bikini’s
poems or if the book is a complete downer. I would say there is a
modicum of relief, if one looks carefully. I’ll point out two
possibilities. The first is the poem
“Invitation,” where Satan is unexpectedly the hero. On Monday through Saturday, Satan takes out
the garbage of the world. On Sunday, he
writes a short note to the “Dayside Creatures,” a note with lovely lyric
simplicity that stands out against the horrors in the surrounding poems:
I am a boy who lives in the woods.
I’ll leave the moon on
all night among the leaves.
The other poem I want to mention, “The Inside-Out,” is also lovely, though sadder and much more complicated. It could be read as a commentary on the book as a whole, in that it validates the imagination via a “dark specter” that “grows so heavy inside, it’s hard to carry around, hard to bear through the dream of the inside-out, where the wind whistles through the bones of birds choking on their own feathers….” It’s imagination, even a delusional or despairing one, that compels one to carry on with one’s life, “as if no one can see it beating you down.” The fact that such imaginative poems, however outrageous, actually exist in Glass Bikini – the book’s pages are obviously not blank, in contrast to the barren museum rooms of the book’s opening poem – gives us at least some short term hope that readers might be moved by Bock’s scathing critiques of our cultural moment. (See the poem “Pluto” for a catalogue of human miscreants.) Like the Emily Dickinson quote that Bock uses as an epigraph to one of her sections (“Tis so appalling – it exhilarates -“), this collection is unsettling, but by no means boring. It demonstrates that the comedic mixed with horror can be more scary and enthralling, more memorable, than pure solemnity.
—
Catherine Imbriglio is the author of two books of poetry, Parts of the Mass (Burning Deck), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Intimacy (Center for Literary Publishing), which received the Colorado Prize in Poetry. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in After Spicer (John Vincent, ed.), American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, Conjunctions, Contemporary Literature, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Green Mountains Review, New American Writing, Pleiades,West Branch, and elsewhere. A selection of her poetry was anthologized in the Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, ed. Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press). She is a senior editor in poetry for Tupelo Quarterly.
Rohan Chhetri
does not write poems for the faint of heart. Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a book divided into four parts, the first of which is titled Katabasis,
a word that translates to mean a downhill retreat or a descent into the
underworld. True to the word, Chethri opens with a monolithic poem that first evokes a bloody folk story before
leading into sharp lament for the poet’s own deceased relatives, a transition that weaves subtle
inferences of love into a framework of mortality. If the meaning
of Katabasis escaped the reader, this introductory poem ought to be a clear
forewarning. This physically slim volume of poetry is an emotionally demanding
work of art, as Chhetri turns an
unblinking eye towards the violent, death-filled nature of reality and questions
how it is possible to live in harmony with and to produce poetry alongside the darkness.
“The
King’s Feedery,” as the first poem, contains likewise the first lines of the
collection, lines that are jarringly
stark. “After the rape and the bloodbath,” writes Chhetri, setting the stage
for a panoply of poems about sincere
pain, but also signalling that the heart of the book extends beyond the actual rape and bloodbath. While Chhetri rarely shies away from graphic details, Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful seems more attuned
to the complexities of the “after.” This is a book concerned with the process of remembering desolation and telling
stories about agony.
In the first part
of the book, the Katabasis section,
Chhetri exposes the brutal nature of reality,
dwelling on stories of war and genocide and massacres. In “Lamentation
for a Failed Revolution,” Chhetri
parallels the corporal and psychological effects of violence with a poetic style of disjointed lines, vivid diction,
and spliced paragraphs. The images in this poem are horrific: he writes about a man with “blood sluicing down an
eye” as he walks to a pharmacy, about
a nurse patching together on a fifteen-year-old boy “a medieval coin-sized
chunk of skin fallen off the
areola,” about “paint-thick blood on the rained streets.” The poem is
exhaustive, spanning five pages and
nine stanzas; the story does not come quickly or easily to an end. How could it? There is a haunting character
to suffering that does not end when the event itself has culminated, something that Chhetri understands keenly. “They dragged our children’s fathers down to the river/ Held them by the hair,
pulled their tongues out of their mouths taut like catgut.” This is a historical trauma, one that will affect
not only the tortured fathers but the children
who observed and will inherit that trauma.
The poems take on a personal note in the second part, called Locus Amoenus in reference to a literary utopia, and seem to describe an intimate effort at reconciliation, as the poet shoulders the lasting legacy of generational trauma. In “Dissociative Love Poem,” he writes that “We are nothing but/ A sum of our history of shame. Grandfather rising/ from a ditch, blood-washed face bloated purple,/ Single pulse beating behind ear, left to bleed out/ By the man who married hisonly sister- / That’s as far as we talk about in the family.” This is the voice of a man struggling to live in a world where violence is so prevalent, even though it may not have happened to himself in particular. Even so, while Chhetri frequently writes about the violence-marred past of his grandparents and the unspoken griefs of his parents, he also alludes to a lover, who has presumably died, adding a deeply personal layer of sadness to the poems. Indeed, the third section of the book is named Erato, after the Greek muse of love poetry. In Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful, the pain is universal and unique and at all times overwhelming. And yet the words are invariably ornate and powerful, while gruesome at times, sheltered in verses that are appropriately unstructured and free-form. This is one response to tragedy: to frame the tragedy in exquisite language, thereby creating a kind of locus amoenus out of the agony. Chhetri’s poetry, however, challenges this response. Is there truly any way to shape the language of ruin into something permanently beautiful, or is the beauty only found “in transit,” the rest blemished by the reality of death?
There are brief and brilliant moments when the poems reveal a glimpse of beauty. “Bordersong” begins quaintly, deceptively so. “We lived downwind of a bakery,/ butter sesame roasted black cumin.” But it becomes clear that the loveliness of the bakery image is short-lived, as the poem spirals into despair, ending with the line “Downwind blew kerosene & ragsmoke/ in some young martyr’s evening.” It is as if the trauma is inescapable, despite the best efforts of the poet to invoke gorgeousness. Nowhere else in the book is the struggle to move beyond grief more evident, until the third-to-last poem, a pentych entitled “Recrimination Fuge” that a forward-motion is suggested, as the poet manages to refine hope through the simple process of remembering grief.
“Recrimination Fugue” arrives in the fourth and final part of the book, Grief Deer, the name of which derives from the title of one poem and is echoed in the imagery of the closing piece: The ravens calling for the wolves to split/ Open the light from the dead deer’s belly/ Jeweled in the dark purse of its pelt. It is not until this moment in “Mezza Voce” that Chhetri finally admits to the discovery of beauty in spite of horror. “We are each given heaven for brief so heavy./ We put down dance small around it.”
In the confusion
of these final lines, there is of course a sense of still being lost and murmurs
of woundedness, of still being
hurt. But there is also, at the end of the arduous journey that is Lost, Hurt,
or in Transit Beautiful, something that truly can be called beautiful,
something beautiful that can perhaps be made permanent through poetry.
—
A native of
northern Michigan, Hannah Riffell is an upcoming graduate of Calvin
University, where she is a Writing major and a member of the Arts Collective.
Her poetry has been published in the on-campus creative journal Dialogue, as
well as The National Writers Series Journal and the 2018
book Beyond Stewardships: New Approaches to Creation Care. In
2021, she received the Academy of American Poets University and College Prize
at Calvin University. She intends to keep writing and reading poetry long after
graduation.
Katie Farris’s A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving (A Net) is a short, powerful book chronicling the emotional voyage and struggle to survive of a woman diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer at age thirty-seven. In twenty-six poems told over thirty-seven pages (the entire chapbook can be read in a half an hour), A Net narrates a sequence of events following the announcement of breast cancer: a revelatory phone call; an MRI; getting dressed on the morning of surgery; sitting in the waiting room after surgery; looking in the mirror and seeing a monster without hair or breasts; a desire for sex during chemo; spousal tenderness; a walk in the woods; a conversation with Robert Frost; and the finding, beyond the bodily strength and support of a loving husband, of spiritual strength in Emily Dickinson. Each of the poems illustrates one facet in the complex drama of Farris’ trauma: shock, pain, grief, loneliness, terror, alienation, self-loathing, and joy. Winner of The Beloit Poetry Journal’s 2021 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize, A Net is as easy to read as a Dick and Jane book. Partly because breast cancer is a common scourge (one in eight women are diagnosed with the disease; eight in eight women fear it); partly because the book is so well written; partly because the book’s purpose is to write “love poems in a burning world,” I doubt many English-speaking humans would put the book down without first finishing it. Everything, every poem and every moment in every poem, tells the story of Farris’s cancer, making the chapbook a unified and suspenseful, hard to turn-away-from story of a person dancing as fast as she can on the head of a pin called death.
Twin American poet
mentors preside over this book, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. In a “Row of Rows” Farris and her husband
argue about whether Whitman or Dickinson is the greater epic poet. Farris
chooses Whitman in the argument, but Dickinson is clearly the mothering rib
from which Farris more naturally springs (“you, the voice, I the faithful echo,”
she writes in “Emiloma.”) In the book’s last explosive elated poem—“What
Would Root”—Farris finds a home in Whitman. For the most part otherwise,
Farris is all Dickinson. Like Dickinson,
Farris is a tiny female (“have you seen me?” Farris writes, “so skinny you
could shiv me with me”) whose poetry is also “tiny.” Indeed, Farris’s poems are
even shorter and slighter than Dickinson’s. “A Week Before Surgery”—which
describes Farris’s mental preparation for surgery (“like Giotto’s angels,” the
poem begins, “sketched from his studies / of sheep, I open the jaws of my back
to the sky”)—is six lines long. “Ice
for Me” is seven lines long. “The Man You Are the Boy You Are” is nine lines
long.
Dickinson’s importance to
Farris is apparent not only in stylistic and cultural/biological similarities
(brief, hyphenated poems written by a slight, white American female on either
side of the twentieth century), but in Farris’s frequent references to Dickinson.
Dickinson is the subject of five of the chapbook’s twenty-six poems and she
carries three of the book’s titles. Dickinson is Farris’s poetic mentor; she is
her spiritual mentor as well. In “Emiloma” the breast-afflicted Farris writes, “Today
I placed / your collected poems / over my breast, my heart / knocking fast / on
your front cover.” In “Finishing Emily Dickinson” Farris grieves the
“loss”—the coming to the end—of Dickinson, for she has finished the Collected
Poems (some maybe, like Plath’s, written hastily before her death): “Oh,
Emily, goodbye! / We met in April and parted in July.” But Emily is not gone, for Dickinson’s body is
the steeple on Farris’s “Church of Mystery—” and the bonging tongue of her
steeple-bell rings “on, beyond.”
The most common character
in the book besides Farris herself (whose traumatized subjectivity is explored
throughout) and Emily Dickinson, is Farris’s husband (the real life poet Ilya
Kaminsky) who figures in the following poems as caretaker and lover: “Why Write
Love Poetry in a Burning World?,” “In the Event of My Death,” “The Man You Are
the Boy You Are,” “Marriage, An Exercise,” “A Row of Rows,” “An Unexpected Turn
of Events,” “If Marriage,” “I Wake to Find You,” and “Against Loss.” These love
poems—mid-trauma marriage analyses—comprise a third of the book, or nine of
the book’s twenty-seven poems. No sisters, brothers, mothers, or fathers wander
these pages. Dickinson, Kaminsky, and Farris herself are the book’s primary
characters. They alone are Farris’s guideposts; her rock-solid turn tos in a
frightening world.
The poems are full of
pain, but they are also funny, reveling in black humor. In “Standing in the
Forest of Being Alive” Farris writes: “some of us are still putzes / in death, catching
bird shit on our tombstones.” In “An Unexpected
Turn of Events Midway through Chemotherapy,” Farris announces “I’d like some
sex please.” In “After the Mastectomy” Farris writes, since it’s hard for a
“watchtower” (a mastectomy survivor) to hide, “I go to the world with my tongue
out / and my shirt unbuttoned, my keys / in the lock” wearing “a six inch scar
instead of a nipple.” Funniest of all, Farris writes in “If Marriage”: “If
Marriage is a series / of increasing / intimacies, a slow / sweet collapse into
/ oneness, I / would still beg / your forgiveness / for asking / your
assistance / unwinding that pale hair / from my hemorrhoid.”
Besides being brief (a
couple of poems are one sentence stretched into a skinny vertical line), the
poems are characterized by occasional rhymes stacked on top of each other
(attuned / soon; on / beyond; Lupron shot / in the gut; stone / palindrome) and
by the knitting together of image patterns. The image of a braid as a ladder recurs.
Farris’ braid, lost in chemo, is the rope she tells her husband to keep, for
she will need that braid to let herself down into earth if she dies. The word “puppet”
comes and goes. Pain enters Kaminsky’s face “like a hand hunting inside a
puppet.” Similarly, the sky “always / has its hand in you / as if you were a
puppet.” Another recurring image is of a door. In the book’s prefatory poem,
“Why Write Poems in a Burning World,” Farris describes herself as stuck in a
wedged-open door that is at once a barrier and a shield. The door signifies the
moment of annunciation. In that moment when she learns she has breast cancer,
Farris becomes trapped like a fly in amber between innocence and experience, looking
by necessity into a terrifying future the end of which she cannot fully see.
A Net ends
with a truly spectacular breakthrough love poem, “What Would Root.” In it Farris
comes to terms with her death. “What Would Root” differs from the twenty-five
poems which precede it, first, because of its length (it is five stanzas of
eight unhampered lines; eight Whitmanian ego-bursts, each), and second, because
of its unrestrained exuberance. The lines are longer; the emotions less
bridled; and there is an acceptance of death-in-earth reminiscent of Walt
Whitman who described grass as the “uncut hair of the dead” and who said “look
for me under your boot soles.” As if it were an exhilarating dream, the poem
describes Farris going into the woods, being among the animals, and becoming
eventually a part of the woods. Twigs grow from her eyes, she lies down and
feels the hairs on the back of her neck rise, and realizes for the first time
they are not hairs but roots and that “everything [is] everything.” As she lies down, the roots in her skull
shift “beneath her own branches” and the top of her head blows off, allowing
the tentacles that come from her to root in earth and drink. In this poem Farris
relaxes at last and the self affixes itself in a kind of permanence to planet
Earth.
The poems hold occasional
missed notes and ineffective lines, but mostly Farris captures the essence both
of tenderness and terror with a few amazing deft strokes. She steps easily, poem-by-poem,
from initial diagnosis; to CT scan; to pre-op prep; to surgery; to post-op
doctor visit, to being stared at for breast-less-ness; to moments of comfort
with the beloved; to staring at herself transformed in the mirror—hairless and
without breasts; to relaxing finally in the book’s spectacular ending. Pinioned
by diagnosis in a spot of time, she trains herself to live with this terrifying
new reality that cannot be avoided; that must be borne and somehow survived.
To the initiating
question—“Why Write Love Poems in a Burning World?”—Farris offers several
answers. First, the poems express love, both for her husband and the burning
world itself. (In “Against Loss,” Farris says she writes the poems to give
Kaminsky memories of her and to memorialize their relationship to one another
in the event of her death.) Second, the poems form an emotional “net” or
hammock to hold her body as it falls. Third, they teach her how to survive, offering
her a vision of “what is not hell in hell”; reminding her that the world is
beautiful, whatever her condition, and that she is beautiful, despite what
chemotherapy has done to her body. Finally, they leave a legacy. They mark
Farris’ presence in this world and provide a boat to ferry her from it. Not
unlike Emily Dickinson’s stacks of poems tied in neat ribbons left for those
who came after her, these poems are Farris’s legacy, written and organized not
at age fifty-five, but at age thirty-seven because that’s when the threat of
death came to Farris’s body.
While modern poetry is often
derided as unreadable, readability is one of A Net’s most wonderful
features. The poems are metaphorically subtle and emotionally ambitious but they
speak plainly. Ted Kooser writes that poetry’s highest calling is to move the
reader, to change the readers’s experience of the world. A Net meets
that high bar well. (My first reaction on reading the book was to tell my
friends who have had breast cancer to read it, immediately!) I defy a reader to
not instantly understand and be moved by the book. Ted Kooser also writes that
the purpose of poems is to be read, to form bridges; soul-altering connections between
poet and reader. Again, Farris’s book fits this bill well. Farris’s very purpose
is to connect, probably first and foremost with her husband, knowing that her
life and legacy depend upon connection, but also with the common reader. In a
world where Farris is doomed to walk alone, even without the hand of her
husband, she walks less alone in the presumed understanding of the reader to
whom she can tell her deepest secrets and speak her most unspeakable pain.
The inscrutability of
modern poetry is notorious, blocking even the most enterprising reader from
entry, like a dog at the gates of hell. But Katie Farris’s A Net to Catch My
Body In Its Weaving is not inscrutable. Step-by-incisive step, A Net
chronicles the stages in a plot of terror until we feel first-hand what it is
like to face the loss of everything one lives for: life, love, marriage, and happiness.
In A Net we learn what it is like to live beneath the waving scimitar of
death and to be forced into hand-to-hand combat with it. Farris comes away from
her cancer diagnosis awash in a brutality, different and knowing. We come away different
and knowing, too; rewarded by her strength; sunk in that terrifying claw as if
it were our own.
—
Lisa Elaine Low’s poetry has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, American Journal of Poetry, Evening Street Review, Free State Review, Good Works Review, Phoebe,The Potomac Review, Delmarva Review, Broken Plate, and Tusculum among other literary journals. She is co-editor with Anthony Harding of Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press in 1994). She received her doctorate in English from the University of Massachusetts and spent twenty years as an English professor, teaching at Cornell College; Colby College; and Pace University. Visit her at lisalowwrites.com.
… I worry about you, puckerdash. You were my favorite
while you lived, and now that I wait until sunset
to congratulate our fathers killed, smokes another
so pearly you lost a car accident image “node” to claw
waiting to light the candles with a triggering glare
you’re crossing the road to post and might find
a common mind eating eggs alone to survive. Empty
pockets. Back readies weekend not that personally,
a master form so long as you keep us real from
dome kin post-address play toms on lock wrestle
when I wait for bad faith morphology graphs a play …
J. Gordon Faylor, Phone and Pencil, p. 67
The cover of this new collection allows the reader to
enter the text seamlessly. Brett Goodroad’s Expressionist monotype is
reminiscent of an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting or, better, of Edvard Munch’s
famous artwork, “The Scream.” Angst is the prevalent mood, possibly,
symbolizing the human condition, itself—reflecting subjective emotion rather
than “the thing itself.” This subjective perspective is woven throughout the
text that follows the haunting cover image—including, occasional insertions of
referential elements [Gompers; Nina], radically distorting what may be the
author’s intended meaning or creating a carefully crafted, indeterminate long
poem for the reader’s emotional effect and evoked responses.
Phone and Pencil
is the most compelling full-length collection that I have read in recent years,
and J. Gordon Faylor proves himself, once again, to be a seasoned writer whose
practice has not settled into a predictable style—linguistically, in terms of
structure, or with regard to content. His brilliant 2016 novel, Registration
Caspar [Ugly Duckling Presse], is a haunting, futuristic tale of a humanoid
whose end is near. Faylor, now living on the East Coast, has been called a “Bay
Area Beckett.” In addition to writing, he is a museum curator, and, as a
publisher and editor [GaussPDF], has highlighted the experimental, often,
hybrid, work of seasoned, as well as, early-career artists. Faylor mines the
potential of the personal landscape with particular regard for understated,
respectful communication with his reader in a way that is, at once, intimate
and detached. The rare nod to the lyrical “I” or to overt statements never
detracts from the author’s resistance to the literal or the didactic, even
though political motivation is a constant undertone throughout his oeuvre.
Indeed, the expressionistic sub-text of Faylor’s new
long-poem is, itself, political, the modernist artistic movement,
Expressionism, having been a rebuke to Impressionism active on the artistic
scene in Europe, more or less, from before WW I to the start of WW II. Phone
and Pencil disrupts our understanding of what the mainstream regards as
conventional verse, employing “language games” and other innovative compositional
features in the service of what is often termed, “associative poetry,” possibly
derived from Surrealism’s “automatic writing,” but, crafted with the skills in
Faylor’s “toolkit,” an automaticity that has been refined and tempered by an
apparent intentionality that, nevertheless, preserves the experiential “flow.”
A good example of the author’s facility with quiet
referentiality is Faylor’s use of “Nina” as a repetitive element throughout the
text. Nina, the name of cartoonist, Al Hirschfeld’s, daughter, was embedded in
many of his drawings as a hidden element or concealed message, not unlike the
veiled verbal techniques employed by Faylor that, at once, hide truth and cloud
perception. These methods land Phone and Pencil squarely in the domain
of postmodern poetry that rejects grand narratives to adopt a tentative and
fractured world view. In addition to “Nina,” the collection includes several
references to [Samuel] “Gompers,” the famous British-American labor leader
active during the late 19th Century to mid-20th Century
period.
Like John Ashbery, Faylor’s occasional references to material
that the reader may be uninformed about does not interrupt focus—an effect that
is very difficult to master. Indeed, once I began reading this book, it
sustained my attention in a manner that stimulated my emotions and my
intellect. Faylor’s methods of concealment do not deceive or foreclose the
receiver [interpreter?] of the literary composition
whose effect is balanced and understated—even though I would speculate that the
author’s act of creation must have involved a fair amount of
“free-association.” Each word seems to have been carefully selected as a
stand-alone, as well as, a companion to other words and phrases. Faylor’s
expert use of monosyllabic, “hard” words exposes the hand of a mature poet,
enhanced by the characteristic that the composition is not self-conscious or
studied.
Other features of Phone and Pencil make this a singular literary experience that all readers of innovative poetry will value. Furthermore, anyone curious about experimental writing will find this volume a stellar vehicle for entering the sub-genre. This brief review is an inadequate introduction to the many techniques employed successfully to create a work that is, at once, accessible and challenging. Among these techniques are repetition; neologisms; infrequent, though, effective use of [apparently] “found” phrases bounded by quotation marks; humor; image; music; rhythm—yielding a text that is cohesive, though, non-formulaic. I am, particularly, struck by a playful conceit that enhances the depth, complexity, anticipation, & enjoyment of the experience—that many phrases and sentences appear, upon first encounter, to be sensible, yet, provide a pleasurable, “Ah, hah!” phenomenon upon realizing that veridical meaning is only apparent. Even if you are not a regular consumer of poetry, I recommend Phone and Pencil enthusiastically. This book deserves a large audience, and any new collection by Faylor is to be celebrated.
—
Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA.
Why can’t women write great American novels? What does it mean to be a woman, rewritten by the male gaze, actively striving to tell your own story, imbue your own importance, all while the American canon makes you a fragile, breakable, sexual thing? Caroline Hagood’s Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel demands much of all celebrated, American male writers. Norman Roth III, also known as “Herzog,” is a professor, Vietnam veteran, and well-known American author, visited by the ghosts of women who were the subjects of the novels he’s written.
Herzog, a white male professor and author, the spitting image of lackadaisical literary success, is introduced as a painfully honest man, who takes almost nothing seriously, especially not women. His novels on Jaqueline Kennedy and Valerie Solanas have not only received critical acclaim, but “gotten [him] laid since the 1980s. Because what is literary academia if not the overweight, ugly, balding white guy’s tenured ticket to young tail?” Herzog is a sort of caricature of a lazily patriotic, white, aging, authorially academic, lewd male American man. He speaks profoundly then immediately undermines it with a vulgar, superficial quip or lack of care.
Hagood’s feminist look at the idea of the canon, at the male American writer and erasure of female traumas and histories, is artfully done through the simultaneous retelling and condemnation of the author in one. In the format of A Christmas Carol, Herzog is visited by these women he’s subjectified to the male authorial gaze, and made silent as they retell their stories. Much of the piece feels like a class, a history lesson, but one that is so vital. frequently ignored, unseen, deprioritized. Hagood’s women retell their stories, restore their tongues into their own mouths, relieve themselves of the trauma and the triumph of living through it. We begin to hope that this sort of reckoning Herzog gets becomes an epidemic– that historical women everywhere who were made into objects just for the story will get a change to haunt the authors who imposed their gaze.
Herzog
spies on a nude neighbor, defiles women in every other sentence, burdens us
with his… personal habits, and seems
oblivious to the women he’s used to garner his awards and “get laid.” In all,
he’s a self-interested, oblivious academic who still has some profundity to
him, and in that way, he is a perfect archetype. He is not only his cruelty but
also pensive thought and understanding. In one moment he is recounting when he,
“Cut [his] hand on broken glass while sloshed, then rubbed it around on my
typewriter paper like something good would ever come of it,” and in another, he
writes, “a whole history of building empires on others’ backs. The language of
equality in our Constitution was never a promise, but just a super clever and
sneaky way of controlling the greatest number of people.” Herzog is not
unintelligent, and that perhaps, is what is most truthful about the paradox of
it all– he is bright and sexist, he is not uninformed, he is uninterested in
knowing. Hagood crafts Herzog’s character, however coarsely, into the perfect
mirror image of every man known and unknown who gained praise writing about
women who were nothing but tools.
Jackie
Kennedy is the perfect pious woman–survivor of tragedy and still standing. A
warrior written as a fragile woman made into a First Lady by her husband and
broken by the same hand. Jackie’s story is given the most time and is the most
informative, and for good reason– Jackie speaks out as a hero, the main
character, the protagonist victor, instead of the supporting actress society, and Herzog had seemingly made her.
Jackie does not start when John F. Kennedy enters her life, and though she is
changed by his death, she does not stop when he leaves. She is “already dead,”
but she continues to live, and that is her heroic story, not her downfall.
Valerie
Solanas is the woman made crazy by her story. She is the newer sort of woman,
who understands, “and yes men are also abused and have to survive it, but I’m
not qualified to write that book.” Her more modern take, her futuristic way of
being, makes her seem eccentric, but through Hagood’s intricate prose we see
that Solanas is not crazy but a visionary–a woman who speaks what she sees, a
woman who has been harmed by the male world she attempts to live in. She says,
“Nobody knows this, but to be defiled is to attend your own funeral, but you’re
on the ceiling and nobody can see you,” and its lines like these that strike us
within– Hagood speaks through the characters into women. You feel it deep
inside, and suddenly, you are Valerie or Jackie or Medusa or Philomela– Hagood
has a sneaky way of making all women one, with just a line or two. Hagood, in
contrasting Solanas and Kennedy, allows for both extremes of women– the crazy
woman and the perfect woman– and shows us how, through the very same author,
they are both inadequate, weak, fragile, sexualized in all the wrong ways. It
is not only a compelling story but a strange sort of belonging.
The piece is subversive, entertaining, and informative, in that order. Once Jackie appears, the narrative captures the reader and keeps them. Herzog, though he seems to intentionally be this way, is quite an uncomfortable and hateable character, and grinding through his introduction proves to be a challenge. The male gaze is critiqued, revised, and therefore closely examined through a sort of isolated reckoning– this book is not only a literary work, but an act of revision and restoration.
Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel reframes the ghosts of America as women, true heroes alongside valorized men, and rewrites the consistent wrongs of the canon. In short, through almost fragmented chapters, Hagood’s quirky story takes a gander at redemption– for the canon, for women, for America.
—
Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Voyage YA, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, the Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year and The Dramatics of St. Louis Prize for the 2020- 2021 year. She has also published two chapbooks, Fog (Bloof Books) and Safe Passage (Radical Paper Press).
![[PANK]](https://pankmagazine.com/wp-content/themes/pank/assets/images/pank-logo-large.png){kind=logo}
