Hoagland: Application for Release from the Dream

Tony Hoagland's Application for Release from the Dream is a soft and sad collection of poems, observing and reflecting on yearning and loss. I loved reading these. They were comforting in their beauty and their gentleness. There is wit and bitterness here, and there is also love, kindness, and regret. A wonderful book by a poet I very much admire.

From the last stanzas of "Crossing Water":

Each time I make the trip, I get the strange idea that this
is what is waiting at the end of life --

long stalks slanting in the breeze, then straightening --
flowers, loose-petaled as memory, grey

as the aftertaste of grief.

Tonight, I'll lie in bed and feel the day exhaling me
as part of its long sigh into the dark,

knowing that I have no plan,
knowing that I have no chance of getting there.

I will remember how those flowers swayed and then held still 
for me to look at them.

And here's some favorite lines from "Controlled Substances":

Like money,
         which teaches you to strangle time,

or the narcoleptic trance connected with a small lit screen?

proxy

proxy, by r. erica doyle, is an amazing poetry book, a sort of long poem exploring erotic relations and tensions between the self and desired. The language is incredibly raw and alive and beautiful -- short prose pieces that each glimmer on their own and create a deep, dazzling whole.

Here is an example:

Everything is a terrible color.

Gather in her breasts like sails. Like nets and draw deep, The hand pumps between. A link to turning inside out.

All the displaced lust in the world would not pacify this quest. The fist in the center of your chest is turning. Everything behind is wet and begging. Your ears pop in the tunnel. Fragrances of sound emerge dully. Postulate, postulate, gratiating consciousness. Around the fist the scar tissue thickens. You were born with that wound. It's getting deeper.

Rod Roland: Best Loved

I just finished the lovely and perfect Best Loved, by Rod Roland. This chapbook published by Old Gold in 2013 is a collection of poems that all convey an emotional sweetness and masterful command of language. They are sturdy and delicate at the same time. They are beautifully held together by a quiet and assertive poetic voice.

So many favorite poems here, so many delightfully surprising and longing and smart lines.  Here's a particular special moment, a section from "Long Live Gregory":



call the priests to the locked tower
where they sent you
the pills are good
you love an alcoholic
she's savage and weeps
locked in her room
hope she writes often
and sends lots of cash
             you're a big deal
your poems are better than happiness
you have that one sorrow I love

Rise in the Fall

The poems in Ana Bozicevic's collection, Rise in the Fall, are stupendously, achingly beautiful. They carry a range of emotional content, poetic sensibilities, and intellectual subjectivities -- there is so much there, yet the lyric voice has an identity, or integrity, throughout. It holds as a whole in a way that is itself holding. That is, these poems may be provocative at times, they may contain confrontational or biting moments, but there is a presence throughout that never quite releases the reader from the loveliness of its poetic embrace.

My copy of Rise in the Fall is now marked up with so many underlinings of the gorgeous language -- I couldn't keep my pen away from the phrasing and beautiful moments.

Such as:

"On the Christmas of my death when
I swam by myself in the peeling
blue of the pool, and
the pines addressed me, saying:
take me to the riot"

or:

"I'll stand here and look at you
and invent nothing"

and:

"I thought I was supposed to be
Well-oiled. I though there's something
In toothpaste that wakes us up."

and:

"Oh I'm too tired to worship at your kittenish emptiness."

These excerpts to not quite capture the power of the poems in their entirety, all of which burst with energy, imagery, masterful language.

This collection is illustrated, hauntingly, by Bianca Stone. These images add an otherworldy virility to the text.

Margaret & Dusty

Oh, the poems in Alice Notley's Margaret & Dusty have such a bitter-sweet sting. There is the intelligent playfulness of the language, and softly lurking themes of death and loss, combined with a fresh ingenuity of perspective... This a truly beautiful collection, truly lovely. A gift.

Here is an excerpt from the poem "In Ancient December", this is the last stanza:










Can you worship loss? I can't remember it. I forgot to
sing it off from happening I had to arrange the flowers,
thousands everywhere, & thinly & it being purple I forgot
to see it ten thousand times. She forgot to. She
forgot to too. She would have forgotten anyway. She
didn't forget at any rate, she didn't anything. I didn't
either. I woke up I woke up again & I can't remember I
guess that's just it, but I didn't forget to sing this
time, but I forget what I'm singing. What am I singing?
Singing singing? What am I singing?

Citizen

I just finished a beautiful book, Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric.

The prose poem is a meditation on contemporary black experience and subjectivity -- the endurance of racism and it's omnipresence into so many layers of human life and interaction. The loveliness of Rankine's writing is a wonderful enigma, that through such beauty she exposes such ugliness.

Citizen presents her words in juxtaposition with many haunting images, such as the art of Glenn Ligon, Nick Cave, Carrie Mae Weems. These images dialogue with the reflective prose in a particularly powerful way. Citizen confronts the racist murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner. It moves in and through these horrors with writing attempting to make sense of it -- but there is such senselessness:

"because white men can't
police their imagination
black men are dying."

A Certain Slant of Sunlight

I just reread the truly special Ted Berrigan collection of poems, A Certain Slant of Sunlight. I hadn't read these in over a decade, and I experienced them as wondrously fresh today. It is one of my favorite book of poems. Although there are many wry  moments, and some mildly and humorously cranky, it's a book of poems that really carries the air and pleasure of sunlight hitting in a particular way. The poems all have Berrigan's unique conversational lyricism and almost all of them contain little surprises, unexpected turns of phrase. I remember once reading or hearing that art or poetry is supposed to make the familiar strange. I think Ted Berrigan's poems are so comforting and elevating because the both familiar and strange at the same time.

Famously these poems were all written on blank postcards, which gives them all a similar length, but within this space the poet goes in so many directions, and the poetry is more expansive than it is contained.

Here's one of many, many good ones:

STARS & STRIPES FOREVER

 for Dick Jerome

How terrible a life is
And you're crazy all the time
Because the words don't fit
The heart isn't breakable
And it has a lot of dirt on it
The white stuff doesn't clean it & it can't
       be written on
Black doesn't go anywhere
Except away & there isn't any
Just a body very wet & chemistry
which can explode like salt & snow
& does so, often.


And some random favorite lines:

"never be born, never be died."

"... O lovely line that doesn't give an
    inch, but gives."

".... I had the unmistakable signature
of a mean spirit."

Free Cell

Years ago I had the pleasure of hearing Anselm Berrigan read from a wonderful long poem, "Have a Good One", at the Poetry Project. Since then, at so many random regular moments, when I hear myself saying "have a good one" to someone, I hear echos of that poem. So even though it took me over five years to finally sit down and read it, I feel like it's been a part of my quotidian life all this time, in a way that I thoroughly enjoy.

Free Cell contains three poems: "Have a Good One"; "Let Us Sample Protection Together"; and "To Hell With Sleep". The first and third poems are long, and the central poem is a sturdy two pages.

The book works marvelously as whole. I was mesmerized throughout "Have a Good One", drawn in and out through the writer's perceptions, images, declarative statements, and play with language. Humor woven through the whole, wry and quiet and smart.

Like I said, the phrase that the poem hinges on is such a familiar and regular utterance. Seeing it beginning each section, had a strange effect, as if I were walking through the poem and greeting each section as it began. This poem, and "To Hell with Sleep" are beautifully arranged on the page in non-traditional forms. My favorite sequences were those that began to the right and slanted down left. This did two things: something about it was vaguely trance-engaging, as the downward motion seemed accentuated; and something about it was jarring and disruptive, as the eye has to move counter to reading habit. The length of the poem is just perfect, the roaming quality, and the soft release at the end.

There are so many segments I want to share here, but most of my favorites are on the page in a way that I know this blog won't capture, so here's one that I particularly like and is all left justified:

Have a Good One

They went for it is not
the droid I'm looking to

for convivial disengagement
from soul. For that I've come

to your cadaver's waltz
of a special place for

lonely childhoods. I wasn't
lonely until just now, love

all around like an historical
landmark. They'll be

expansive, those original specs.
That rusted gate has to meet

its own dignitay. Get
as they say, your own.

Loneliness will merely gnaw
at our vocabulary.


The final poem, "To Hell with Sleep", has a veering, into and out of consciousness feel to it that also engages language through disruptions of expectations. Like "Have a Good One", it carries emotion and social observation within these lovely frames on the page.

The middle poem is really spectacular. I won't quote it in full, but it can be read here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240736

I am looking forward to reading more Berrigan poetry books!

Don't Let Me Be Lonely

Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine is a beautiful reflection on mortality and subjectivity in the late post-modern contemporary age. It is a prose poem divided into segments which are separated by images, usually a TV screen filled with static. The static seems to represent the noise of the larger commercial world that we are continually bombarded with and through which and in spite of which we strive to find perspective.

The writer's voice is filled with a warm sadness; it creates a gentle intimacy with the reader. The writer's subject is condition of being a body in the social world. Don't Let Me Be Lonely contains both longing and acceptance, mourning and loss, and finding "in this life in this place indicating the presence of."

An excerpt:

"It occurs to me that forty could be half my life or it could be all my life. On the television I am told I don't want to look like I am forty. Forty means I might have seen something hard, something unpleasant, or something dead. I might have seen it and lived beyond it in time. Or I might have squinted my eyes too many times in order to see it, I might have turned my face to the sun in order to look away. I might actually have been alive. With injections of Botox, short for botulism toxin, it seems I can see or be seen without being seen; I can age without aging. I have the option of worrying without looking like I worry. Each day of this life I could bite or shake doubt as if to injure or kill without looking as if anything mattered to me. I could paralyze facial muscles that cause wrinkles. All those worry and frown lines would disappear. I could purchase paralysis. I could choose that. Eventually paralysis would sink in, become a deepening personality that need not, like Enron's 'distorting factors,' distort my appearance. I could be all that seems, or rather I could be all that I am -- fictional. Ultimately I could face reality undisturbed by my own mortality."

Poet in New York

Frederico Garcia Lorca's Poet in New York is a lush collection of poems written during a nine month period he spent in the city (1929-1930). These poems are so richly lyrical. It is like eating the most high quality dense chocolates. His imagery is classic and naturalistic, and his sentiment is poetic and aching. These are poems of sad lament. These are poems that cry out, that mostly wail, though at times they whisper.

His language is unforgettable. Some favorite lines:

"Prepare your skeleton.
Hurry, love, hurry, we've go to look
for our sleepless profile."

"and the Jew pushed against the gate chastely the way lettuce grows coldly from its center."

"The architecture of frost"

"This is not hell, but the street."

"Look at this sad fossil world"

"While the people look for pillowed silences
you will pulse forever, defined by your ring."

"It's a capsule of air where we suffer the whole world,
a tiny space alive in the crazy unison of light"

"What matters is this: emptied space. Lonely world. River's mouth."

I also want to share something from the beginning of the volume, a note Lorca wrote to a friend describing his own passport photo: "

"It borders on the light of murder; borders on the nocturnal street corner where the delicate pick-pocket stashes his wad of money. The whimsical lens has captured, over my shoulder, a sort of harp, soft as a jellyfish, and the whole atmosphere has a certain finite tic, like the ash of a cigarette..."

Black Mirror

I had a little trouble with Black Mirror: The Selected Poems of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. The writing is beautiful, but I was never fully drawn in. Somehow I didn't fully enter these poems. I enjoyed much of the lyricism and rich language. Many, many lines stood out for me. But few entire poems grabbed me.

"The pallor/of one's foibles."

"To the forever unfinished and ever agonized/Human face"

"Become the secret of blind change"

"To loathe myself and drink through my thin skin"

"The prodigious appearance of the lovely monsters it creates"

My favorite: "To me alone a lovely scandal"

The Year of Yellow Butterflies

What a marvelous feeling: The Year of Yellow Butterflies, a poetry collection by Joanna Fuhrman, left me breathless; it is a literally breathtaking book. I say this because I could not put it down, and there is a light dreamsicle quality to some of the language that reading these poems gave me a wonderful floaty feeling. I had to force myself to slow down, to digest a poem before going on to the next.

One of the things that made this reading experience so extraordinary is the way delight operates here. The author delighting in language, delighting in writing, delighting in observing, in participating -- in starting and finishing delightful poems. BUT - at the same time there is something haunting at work: what world have we entered?

The Year of Yellow Butterflies is rich in images, rich in characters and animals and sensations. The richness is controlled, though, and the poems are beautifully crafted. There are so many little surprises -- from phrase to line, these poems move in unexpected directions and shift in sentiment and perspective in a dazzling way.

I loved the book as a whole, but some that stood out for me: the entire section "The Year of Yellow Butterflies"; "Goodbye to the Double Bells"; "Notes on the End of Thought" (both); "Summer" -- (with its stunning ending); "The Letter"; "Trigger Guard";  and "New Eyes for the New Year".  I want to quote so many lovely lines and sections, and entire poems, but I am choosing one section from the long center poem ("The Year of Yellow Butterflies"):

"It was the year everyone decorated the outside of their houses to look like the inside, and the inside to look like the outside.

You liked to wear a jumpsuit with an X-ray of a skeleton silk-screened on it. I liked to wear an earring shaped like a decaying liver.

Once I crashed into a friend's wall because I thought it was the sky.

We placed our teacups on a tree trunk ottoman and rested our heads on waterfall pillows.

You were wearing an ocean on your mouth, and I was dressed like the sun."

Cinema of the Present

When I was in college my creative writing professor told me that "poetry is not to be 'understood' -- it's to be experienced." Lisa Robertson's Cinema of the Present is a mesmerizingly excellent and unique experience. Reading the second person lines that make this long poem, it feels like something is happening.

The "you" of the poem had me feeling like I was being directly addressed, like the speaker was intensely focused on me in this way no one else has been or can be. It was like being a locked chamber of narrative but also like a house of narrative mirrors. I mean all this in the best way, of course.

Cinema of the Present is made entirely of interspersed lines, one in regular text, one in italics. It is not clear if this is meant to represent different speakers in dialogue. That is how I first experienced the poem, but within ten or so pages if felt like one speaker in slightly different voices. A sort of echo-self.

Every single line of the poem is amazing and can stand on its own. What makes Cinema of the Present is the way these lines stand on the page as stark statements at the same time that they interweave and form a complex fabric of language. The poem to me did not have any sort of narrative arch, but there was a building internal momentum that increased in intensity, particularly as some lines were repeated. My take on this is that the poem is its own present, with no beginning middle or end. Just a pure happening.

I'm going to quote a section, but do remember I found just about every line extremely good and very quotable. So much of my book is underlined:

"Thus your data shimmers.

Then sleepiness came link an incision.

You wore the dress as payment for entrance to the symbolic order.

There will be a period of exuding, celebrating and cheering.

How does it look?

Then there will be the unknown period, the one you do not wish to represent.

You're in a life-facing position,

Then you are occupied by a question.

You're fierce, then you're tired."

Tim Dlugos, Powerless

I just finished Tim Dlugos' Powerless: Selected Poems 1973-1990. These are so lovely, sad, and masterful. His writing throughout is clear as a bell -- precise and gentle. His style is conversational for the most part, a bit meandering at times, but in a wonderfully delightful and sweet way. These poems convey so much. They are filled with nuanced emotions, longings, regrets, insights, and joys.

Most moving are the final series, which chronicles his AIDS years. They are written with great clarity, it seemed to me, and with heartfelt patience and gratitude. These are truly spectacular. They had me in tears.

I couldn't find lines to quote in and of themselves, because the beauty of his writing is more in the totality of each poem.  Here I will share the last stanza from an earlier work, "Day for Paul"

"...it's me
five years ago. I am on the verge of a big breakthrough
accompanied by pain. I have not read anything by Proust,
Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, or Frank O'Hara. I have not had sex
with the people I love and need most. I have not yet learned
to identify the people I love and need most. But I have
dreams about people who move like you, who make me feel so
full that waking up becomes a major letdown, and I want to
sleep all day and all night if it will make me feel that good
again, take me to the place inside my body where I can feel
you  living all the time."

sherwood forest

I love Camille Roy's sherwood forest. I read it in one long, pensive sitting, taking in the marvelous and biting phrases, enjoying the ride from poem to poem. She is one of my favorite writers.

sherwood forest is rich and dark. Lines snap at each other. Characters reappear and reemerge, themes of disturbance and crime echo throughout. The books reads wonderfully as a whole. Some standouts for me though are "Diary of 3 Words", "Red Hood", "Crime Story", "Embarrassed Tract", "Lucy in the Sky", "Sing Song" and "My Play".

Erosion's Pull

Maureen Owen's poems are truly special. She breathes intelligence into all her lines. I just finished Erosion's Pull, the first time I've read a whole collection of hers. There is wry humor, smart observation, and linguistic beauty.

Her titles and breaks within lines are unmistakably hers. These disrupted fragments create a kind of jolting loveliness that I appreciated throughout. I would like to quote some of her work, but I don't think this blog platform will honor the spacing, so I'll just note: "I think I shall become formidable".

Language Arts

I spent a marvelous morning with Cedar Sigo's stunning and shimmering recent collection of poems, Language Arts.

Through musical phrasing, and surprising images, Sigo creates a landscape in which the poet is thinking and feeling through modes of creation. The person IS the poem. And a quiet beauty pervades the language.

So many lines echoed for me ("I love strangers in an ailing mansion", from the poem "Language Arts"). A favorite of mine is "Sea Breeze" ("The flesh is bruised it hurts and I've burned through all my books").

Another favorite, which I'll quote in full, is "Dream":

A curtain dragging gold rises on The Big Heat
Two words are fused to a bloodletting chain
How beautifully the brakemen allow the blood through
I rest on the slip of the black coral sea
Steel quilted in lines wider than the streets
Pinned as a wing or thin cord, that he summons
In order to drive us away, that glamour is an investment
Involving desire and unreality. The poem are perfect
Laid back time machines, ground-blooming flowers
Their endless pastel grime in streaks
A blocking of my own in-expertise, a tunnel
Blown down past the marble to brass
And first to charge the shore, waving our shields
A castle left cooling to ruin
And the islands will flower in and out

Snowflake/different streets

Last night I read Eileen Myles' Snowflake/different streets. Two wonderful collections of poetry! Her work just shimmers and lingers. Always a pleasure to read.

I'm going to copy a poem here, but I just know that blogger will fuck up the line breaks. Sorry, world.

the birds

I sort of like
myself each day
as you express
your longing looking
out the window
I witness your back
I groaning and
waiting for the
grains to soak their
minutes
reading some stray
thing eight years old
you pounce: oh.
Everything does its
work. Bold or hidden?
I enthuse to under
lining     moving you
again. Bigger more
insistent desires
remind me of the
friend I must call
and what remains
of last night
accompanies
me to a
surprising wet
street. Returned
the formula & some
of the work's
done in my absence.
I will call you.
Like the book
your gift has arrived
inside me daily
now the underlining
to hold onto and be
heard now in the
wake of the new
knowledge. Just before
finishing I interupt
to say. Confident
in my relationship
to some sentence
some thing. And when I
thought your sweetness
would be left
you are gone.


I also want to share the last lines from her poem, "Like":

the night's a little devil
I hold in my hand
petting holding
his head
learning his
loves. Liking
him. Digging his heat.

John Wieners Selected Poems 1958-1984

Over the last week I've been reading John Wieners Selected Poems 1958-1984. These are beautiful, lyrical poems about loss, longing, and loneliness. They are wonderfully crafted, sad and haunting. And graceful. I was most drawn to the earlier books; the first half of the collection spoke to me more than the second half. But all is marvelous.

from "A  Series"

5.8

There is dirt under my nails
and my hands are hard and caked
with the abuses of lust,
     despair and drugs.

The night is a foreign place
without sound or shadow
as we lie abed waiting for the pills to take effect.

There are no poems or romance
left int he soul, only a churning
     in the belly.

Without image
we are bereft.

The soft syllable is denied us

and we reach, grasp for the word
as a life-preserver
     that sinks and bobs in the churning waves.

The walls are alive with pictures.
Faces haunt the dark.

There is nothing I can do
but go on led by the flickering of a flame
I cannot name.

Auguries of Innocence

"I felt the lantern of your arm
the pageantry of your breath
the source of an exquisite wound."

Patti Smith's 2005 book of poems, Auguries of Innocence is a beautiful, incantatory, and elegiac offering. Her voice is powerful and earnest, lamenting and invoking. This small contains exquisite moments and lyrical lines.

Here is an excerpt from the poem "Mummer Love":

"Once I awoke and heard your voice. I caught bits of nature in truth, our whole natural world. I heard the dead. They were calling to me. I felt my powers. Yet I did not go out into the night. I did not go out into the world. I did not use my powers but I wrote what I wrote. My heart cries but my eyes are dry as a salt bed."