Sunday Poem

AFTER LOUISE BOURGEOIS’ MAMAN 

eight arched arachnid legs
giant ice picks en pointe
joints knobby, ropey muscles twined
tight as a girl’s braids 

at once nurturant tent
rigid mother superior
gargantuan black
widow    how 

to flee this vault of exalted
expectation, detoxify
the paralyzing venom
of self-doubt   the porous 

space between
the sinewy legs of steel
unbarred but charged
with the force field

of your mother’s love how sharp
the bite of disappointment, nagging
disapproval     why can’t you sew
your own clothes like Elizabeth, practise

piano as regularly as Grace, help
in the garden like Carol Ann
summa cum laude not
enough, good manners never

good enough, and though
you broke free never out
from under the smothering
ambivalence of Maman, her power

to gestate, loom, enmesh

From Realignment (Palimpsest, 2015) by Ruth Roach Pierson

No Mystery

Danny Jacobs unpacks some of the qualities that make Anita Lahey's book of criticism, The Mystery Shopping Cart, so special:

Lahey rarely falls into the common traps of the reviewer: vague descriptors, scant quotation, goofy swagger, and forced conclusions that result when a stumped or bored critic tries to jam the square peg of a poet into the round hole of a preconceived poetics. The outcome is essentially jargon-free reviews that contain adept interpretations of representative lines. Lahey is confident enough not to equivocate; she gets to the heart of what a poet is trying to do, and with aplomb—all we can ask for from a reviewer. When she’s on, when her enthusiasm is palpable on the page, she has a way of getting at a poet with just a line, a meaningful summing up in a deftly worded phrase: “Davies has a convincing way of turning one thing into another simply by letting us in on the revelation-in-progress” or “Though it fumes, [Owen’s] poetry does more; it has become that finely wrought thing on the other side of anger: what we call art.”

Jacobs also singles out one of the book's most intriguing aspects:

Throughout the book, Lahey makes the peculiar and perhaps risky choice of adding afterwords to most of the pieces. These short additions, no more than a page (often less), may grate on some readers. However, the afterwords ground the book and serve to connect the pieces through a “present” voice. Among other things, they are background tidbits, asides, second-guessings and admissions. After her long essay on P. K. Page, she amusingly tells us that she “tried the glosa and failed. Tried it time and again, with godawful results.” She sometimes questions her reviews in the afterwords (“Was it fair to review Avasilichioaei’s first book alongside her translation of Stanescu?”): the present self reviewing the past self. The afterwords remind us that reviews (and our opinions) are hardly holy writ, a valuable lesson in a book of criticism.

“Why the heck didn’t they just say so!”

In an excerpt from his upcoming collection of essays. Echo Soundings, Jeffery Donaldson flags an important truth about the art.

Poems are made of words, words that are everywhere outside you and inside you. We are in the midst of words. They do things, tell us things, tell us to do things, convey information, cajole, argue, and convince; they lie and feint and finesse; they go before and between; they explain and justify; they are well nigh indistinguishable from our thoughts and perceptions, our mindset, the culture we inhabit. The poem sits in the midst of all this verbal noise. It is hard not to assume that poems are trying to do the same thing in the world as other linguistic conveyances. So much of our criticism about literature and our teaching of it falls back on the assumption (often useful, as far as it goes) that the task of a poem, just so, is to convey information, convince you of something, argue a truth, compel or command, sway a disposition. But it can seem to do so very poorly, since it often makes so much fuss about the business. It seems coded by nature to make its own kind of trouble. Keep the teachers in business. Confronted thus, a young student thinks, quite reasonably: “If that’s what the poets meant, why the heck didn’t they just say so!” Poems are out of their element, in over their heads when they try to do the work that an instruction manual, a conceptual argument, a treatise, a political speech, a weather or news report, a science experiment will do much better.

Sunday Poem

IN WHICH A LADY CROW CONSIDERS HER CIRCUMSTANCES 

No romantic, he warned me right off—
Cuckoo, hitch your wagon to this star 

and it’s a crow’s life, all dirty tricks
and rot-gut cuisine, snaffling up 

the last slice of pepperoni pizza. Now
I’m stuck here, tree-high, nest-bound, 

bored out of my violet-flecked head, but, hey,
someone’s got to do it, sit on these eggs. 

Plunderers everywhere. Turn your back
and a blue jay will rob you blind. I don’t believe 

in happiness but I do caw something
like joy when I see his glossiness pummeling 

the dusk-sharp distance, I do weep
glad tears when he’s winging toward me, 

road kill clamped between his beak.
Love him or leave him? You tell me. 

His cornfields and back alley dumpsters,
his thieving genius and high wire acts, 

the showy, pyrotechnic stunts.
This life with this crow—

witty as a pickpocket, shiny as tin foil.
Oh my dark carrion, circling, circling

From Summertime Swamp-Love (Palimpsest, 2014) by Patricia Young 

(Illustration by Nicholas Di Genova.)

Sunday Poem

THE ASCENSION OF SQUACCO HERON 

Vagrant dewdrop drips
along elongated head feathers
as wings press air. A great quiet
thudding, trickle of marshy feet
rising up out of reeds.
There in the space between—
breath and sigh; sunlight
and fire: transcendence in flight:
tawny-orange goes sudden-white
and beyond shallow water, nothing
but sky, and sky, and this
crested bird’s rough calling cry.

From As if a Raven (Palimpsest, 2014) by Yvonne Blomer

Sunday Poem

THE MACHINE GUNNER

I saw them. They came like ghosts out of ground-
mist, moving
over ruined earth in waves, running, 

no, walking, shoulder to shoulder
like a belt of bullets or like
men: tinned meat lined on a conveyor belt as the sun

exploded in thin shafts on metal
buckles, bayonets, the nodding
spires of helmets. I heard faint battle cries

and whistles, piercing through the shriek
of fire and iron falling, the slurred
cadence of big guns; as they funnelled

like a file of mourners into gaps
in the barbed wire I made quick
calculations and slipped the safety catch.

But held my fire. Alongside me
the boys in the trenches worried them with
rifles, pistols, hand grenades,

but they came on, larger now, their faces
almost resolving out of hazed, hot
distance, their ranks at close quarters amazing

with dumb courage, numb step, a sound of drugged
choking in gas and green mud, steaming...
Who were these men. I saw them penitent,

sagging to knees. I saw their dishevelled
dying. And when finally they broke
into a run it came to me

what they had always been, how I'd always,
really, seen them: boys
rushing towards us with arms

outstreched, hands clenched as if in urgent prayer,
sudden welcome or a reunion
quite unexpected. Yes. And more than this

like children, chased by something behind the lines
and hurrying to us
for rescue—

I spat and swung the gun around. Fired,
felt the metal pulse
and laid them three deep in the wire.

From Stalin's Carnival (Palimpsest Press, reissued 2013) by Steven Heighton

Giving a Damn

In an excerpt from her new book of essays, The Mystery Shopping Cart, Anita Lahey argues that writers—especially when it comes to reviews—need to toughen up:

An author’s ego may be a fierce and flimsy thing, but it’s not the reviewer’s job to mollify or tame it. As a writer, I know that when I put my work in the world, I’m letting it go: to be taken up, interpreted, misinterpreted, enjoyed, disdained or ignored as the case may be. If a reviewer doesn’t “get it,” that may be my own fault. If a reviewer is not caught by my subject, or finds my treatment of it clumsy, shallow or been-there-done-that, I want to be told. Sometimes a reviewer’s bluntness is a relief. This is not to condone nastiness or attacks disguised as reviews. We should never be blasé regarding someone’s heartfelt endeavour: humility and common sense demand basic awareness of the difficulty inherent in creating anything. But here’s the thing: I want to be challenged. By readers, by editors, by reviewers—by people who give a damn about what I’ve written and what I may be capable of writing and who make no bones about letting me know.

First Efforts

From his introduction to the reissue, Ken Babstock celebrates Steven Heighton's poetry debut, Stalin's Carnival:

To employ that sly little descriptor, "early work," so often flags a creeping apology or caveat, as though we’d be well-advised to read with an eye to the binder marked "juvenilia." This simply is not the case here. Heighton’s enduring and consistent themes, and the tropes he employs to investigate them, are all here in force. Erotic and familial love, the body’s kinetic energies, a mature awareness of time’s designs on that body, history manifest in the present, violence, death, and our stubborn urge to sing in its shadow. Heighton seemed to be zeroing in on the eternal themes of lyric verse right out of the gate, yet his real sophistication shows its mark in how very many of these poems insist on embedding or naturalizing the heart’s concerns in a pulsing, tactile, dynamic context and frame. The poems are a picture of the world first—and within that recognizable theatre we watch the poem wrestle its devils to no clean decision.

Sunday Poem

LEG PRESS 

Nearly prone, heels ceilingward, then
ceding to gravity, to fear, knees descend to
sternum, a worthwhile grind in the hamstring.
The new pain like gouging your own wound,
a willingness to suffer and in that extremity,
transcendence, freeing oneself from triviality.
The weightlifter says, pain is weakness leaving
the body. Each day a different muscle group,
yet always seeking symmetry, balance. He knows
it's not what you lift, how many pounds, but how
you lift it, that the range of movement is what
quickens the muscle to consciousness. The bulge
of the quadricep surfacing like that awful awareness:
my love did not have to die, but I had to kill it.

From Hard Ass (2013) by Sharon McCartney

Sunday Poem

A MEAN LITTLE STORY

Claudio’s English girlfriend Stephanie

just left him for his best friend Maurizio,

he’s blasting my scooter, Stronzo

di merda! he hollers, me on the back,

over the rainy cobblestones of Trastevere

near Porta Portese, we both are grief-stricken,

Figlio di puttana! screams Claudio

into a payphone, at Maurizio’s mother!

my marriage with Inge is over so

these weeks he & I dance at discos, drink wine

at the vineria at Campo dei Fiori, do coke,

me blabbing in Italian like a Jamiroquai record

set on forty-five, we’re in his Audi

blaring Pearl Jam’s Ram, at Pyramide,

a string of puttane like Fellini’s Cabiria

in castiron light, but exactly, except

these are trannies, contraltos, sinewy boys

in crinoline, pinfores, prom dresses,

Claudio laughs, rolls my window down,

my heart pounds, blind with excitement,

with fear, a lewd hoopskirt-dolled swineboy

face-like-Cary-Grant’s-pummelled-with-a-pipe

bitches in a savage Romano clip, his

endocrine-born paps spilling into the car,

I reach out, the breast in my hand

like a soul, a mean little story, turgid & warm,

a scar, un bon mot, a limping grackle,

la Tevere limpia, the dream where I’m a scorpion

sipping venom out of my own stinger,

a daisy, a pillar of salt, the myth of the palace

of rotting meat, a soft crystal carapace,

the last scene of Antonioni’s La Notte,

sweet sweet immaculate indigestible fruit.

From Hummingbird (2012) by John Wall Barger.

Sunday Poem

COUNTRY DOG

real-estate baron,

in a field he is

the incarnation of field.

his cutting, racing

figure eights, feints and

about turns in tall grass

a hockey game against joy

summoned or coaxed to the scratched

back door he carries

seeds, the smell of wind and

the temperature’s date stamp

in his fur. burrs and leaping

insects latched with the barbed

malice of a computer virus

sheriff of the domestic lowlands

each half-floppy ear a catcher’s mitt

for the distinct plunk of itinerant food.

paratrooping carrots, sandwich emigrants

gravity’s scraps

desire on four legs he

animates the rooms

routinely visits the provinces

of nook and expanse

leaving warm oblongs of floor,

tumbleweeds of hair

in angled stretch, diagonal

sprawl or insistent stand

he is enormous, equine and then

enfolded, a black muff

beseeching both my hands

or a comma curled,

life’s hairy pause

the winter in his beard

is my discontent

the clicking ratchet of one hip

or glaucoma’s indicting blue fingerprint

on each eye of my animal self.

mortality’s mute

shaggy ambassador

From Origins (2012) by Darryl Whetter.

Palimpsest

Dawn Kresan opens up about her experience starting a literary press:

"My first four years of relative calm anonymity in publishing suddenly turned into a thrilling and terrifying rollercoaster. It’s a lot of ups and downs and I never know what is around the next corner. At this point, I am just trying to hang on."

Read the rest here.

Palimpsest Launch

Our friends at Palimpsest Press have published Elisabeth Harvor's new poetry collection An Open Door in the Landscape (it's her third -- we published her first two).

If you're in the Ottawa area this Thursday September 23rd, at 7:30 pm, you might consider attending the launch at Collected Works, 1242 Wellington Street West.