Dark and Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine (Broiled Fish & Honeycomb Nanopress, 2011) by Nic Sebastian and edited by Beth Adams has been following me around in my bag and on my phone for several months now. There is a lot of weight in this short collection of 15 poems, and it may not be too much to say I love this book.
Sebastian traces a spiritual path that resonates with me for its recognition of the longing for what is often right in front of us, though unnoticed and forgotten in the action and busyness of life. We wind up seeking something that’s really never very far at all. Sebastian doesn’t attempt to directly define the divine and I like that too. There are more questions than answers here creating an openness and space for the reader to enter and follow along on a shared journey.
In her introduction, Sebastian writes of being sick for silence and stillness which is where I was when I picked the book up last year.
my days are flocks of starlings
wheeling dark waves
of loud chatter
—”my days are flocks of starlings”
A year ago, I found myself “sick for silence” and set out to get back into my habit of walking and writing small stones, a kind of active meditation or prayer, if you will. Those starlings (well, they’d be grackles down here) can get out of hand… loud and noisy nuisance birds, flying in all directions, crapping on everything. With all that going on, it’s easy to forget to be awed by nature, the trees dropping leaves, the birds on their great journeys, even those starlings. To lose this is to close off an important path toward the divine, to stick with the poet’s usage, which I rather like.
home
because my breath ends
in silver plainchant
and woven silence
in you
—”the names of my breath”
There are other journeys too of course, those not marked by miles. The one called parenthood that we’re on now spirals, at this point anyway, deeper into home. My son who has the past week discovered consonants and repeats them endlessly, delightedly, as if singing the most wonderful song seems to me a gift… something so undeserved and precious as to make us wonder how we didn’t know he was missing during the years before he came. He sings his babbling song, we sing back, he responds with laughter and raspberries.
your step is like a small flame
and a song unfurling
—”antiphony in the hills”
Sebastian’s language and imagery—landscapes that evoke the widest vistas and the narrowest paths—are vibrant. This is a book that takes the reader on 15 journeys, each longer and deeper than the relatively brief poems that contain them. The journeys, of course, are one journey leading back to wholeness.
when I have readied myself
I rise whole from the pool at sunrise
and step into you as onto a straight road
—”when you come to me in the dark of night”
Oddly, or maybe not, this book speaks to me most of the end of journeys in which we may have experienced something of what exists behind nature, community, communion, and silence that can’t really be described or explained. It’s not nothing. It’s not imaginary. And in opening ourselves to it, we can find the recognition, warmth, healing and mystery that fill us up with an awe and wonder the way a woodpecker’s rhythm in the trees, a scorpion’s path along the road, the touch of a loved one or a baby’s laughter do.
In this book I’m reminded of the importance of finally coming home. Whatever that might mean to any given reader.
I’ve been carrying mark Stratton’s Tender Mercies (The Pancake Truck Press, 2011) around in my bag for a few months. Mainly it was so I wouldn’t forget to write something about it, but it’s taken me this long. The old blog has fallen down the priority list somewhat these days, but periodically I get the book out, read a few random poems and then stick it back in my bag. Now it’s started to feel like a friend tagging along from place to place offering snapshots and images from dreams and nightmares. It’s a friend who doesn’t explain himself but the conversation is good and usually interesting.
The Cowboy rides
through lead guitar dynamics
a single stream of time
signature changes
–from “Tender Mercy #28D”
That’s the sense I get from Tender Mercies, a collection that began as a series mark posted to his blog about a year ago or so. Sense is a funny thing too, because it doesn’t always make sense to me. I don’t always get what mark’s getting at, but the ride, the language, is a pleasure, and sometimes a line or two finds a place in my mind, takes root and won’t leave me alone. So the book goes back in the bag and I carry it around some more, sometimes forgetting it’s there only to be happily surprised again.
I misplaced my words
I kept them in the lee
Of a tow sail
They went well with
Collard greens
Or a glass of milk.
–from “Tender Mercy #17b”
Earlier this year, mark asked me for feedback on the manuscript and a blurb. I offered those, but I kind of wish I’d had the year to do it. Maybe the blurb would have been better, at any rate. I say that simply because after nearly a year of hanging out with these poems at hospitals, the dentist’s offices, school, who knows where else one finds a few moments to read, I just like them more and more the better I get to know them. I still see a lot of poems about connection and disconnection, love and loss, though, but they get funnier or sharper or wiser with time and rereading. Sometimes more mysterious too. I think good poetry should be like that.
Toxic rains fall not
from only the heavens.
Domestic gods and
Dusting share the blame.
–from “Tender Mercy #14″
In addition to Tender Mercies, mark has just released a limited edition chapbook called Postmarks. There’s also an interesting interview with mark at Jessie Carty’s blog. mark blogs at AGGASPLETCH.
by James Brush on February 24th, 2011 | 3 Comments
There is want and there is need and the two are so easily confused, especially when we can’t appreciate what we have. In fact, our economic system depends on a seeming willful confusion of want and need. This is what Jessica Fox-Wilson explores in her debut collection, Blameless Mouth.
But wait there’s more. I have dresses
for jobs you don’t work, furniture for rooms you can’t
afford, cars for streets you don’t live on. Try this on
for size. Clothe yourself in the better things of life.”
–from “Magazine Says: You’ve Worked Hard”
Do I need that shiny new Thing or do I want it? The need and the want each create their own hunger, though fulfilling the hunger for our needs keeps us alive while fulfilling that insatiable hunger for our wants… well, that only feeds a growing emptiness that can never be satisfied just as a few fast food cheeseburgers can make us hungry for even more. And more and more and more. Maybe want isn’t a greasy burger; rather, it’s nicotine, and it can kill.
His eyes glowed, from want
of things”
–from “Snapshot of Our Father: Swap Meet”
I’ve been trying for years to want less, to be happy with what I have and want mostly what I need or what I will really use. I have learned not to need the latest greatest biggest best and fastest hunk of plastic that will only end up swirling around in the middle of the ocean one day anyway. This is a hard thing to learn, and it’s something I’m still working on. I can’t imagine how hard it must be for girls who at such a young age begin receiving cultural messages designed to create monstrous and unlikely-to-be-fulfilled wants that feel like such desperate needs.
I am a girl
but not a live nude girl
I study my body, a mass
of white, unformed dough,
hiding my future shape.
I want so much
to be like them, laughing
despite the cold bars.
I whisper to them, how do I start?
They giggle, Girl, it’s only a matter of time.”
–from “Live Nude Girl”
How many girls are growing up thinking they’ll be Disney princesses? Boys can grow up pretending to be cowboys, and it’s possible for them to do that (though Willie & Waylon advise against it) but aside from Grace Kelly, startlingly few American girls grow up to be princesses. (I know, a shock, right?). We are all taught from an early age to be consumers, to want and need and fulfill those needs for ourselves and others while learning that what we have is insignificant, unworthy, not enough, out of fashion or obsolete.
“I know nothing I can buy
will ever fill me.
I am satisfied
only with the possibility
of all the endless products
waiting
just beyond my reach.”
–from “Living Next to an All-Night Grocery Store”
What if no one wanted any Thing? Could our country even survive the implications of that? I don’t know what would happen. Are book stores closing because I can’t convince myself that I need more books, because I have more than enough? Need and want aren’t as entirely separable as I might like. By reducing our wants, do we make it harder for others and ultimately ourselves then to fulfill our needs? I don’t know that I like this train of thought, but good books pose tough questions, which Blameless Mouth does exceedingly well.
“The same small red fox darts across lawns, scavenges for
food. Her starved stomach tightens. Can she survive, unfilled,
staring into dark windows? Can the fox see her full
reflection, mirrored on concave skies, gray and unfilled?”
– from ”Ten Miles West From Here, 4:42 AM”
In an old episode of M*A*S*H, Hawkeye sits down at the bar and says he needs a drink after a long day in the O.R. Everyone looks at him and he pauses and then gets up to leave. He says that he’ll come back when he wants the drink. The beginning of overcoming his alcoholism is that awareness of the difference between need and want. I suspect it’s the beginning of healing for many people. Blameless Mouth provides a moment to think and a path for examining our needs and wants, perhaps outlining the way toward a healthy reconciliation of the two.
Separating need from want and having is not easy, but this is what Blameless Mouth does remarkably well. All the more impressive because Fox-Wilson self-published (which I really admire) this brave collection that allows reader and poet to “teeter together, on the knife’s edge of having and wanting.” Teetering… I like that. A good book should make the reader teeter a little, I think.
This book was really good, enlightening even, and yet it creates another paradox of sorts because you’ll need to ask yourself if you need this book. Or do you want it? Whatever your answer to that may be, I can say that I am very glad I have it, and I think you will be too. You can purchase it at LuLu.
—
You can read the full text of some of the Blameless Mouth poems at Jessica Fox-Wilson’s blog, Everything Feeds Process. Be sure to check out the videopoem for “Echolalia” while you’re there. Others have written more about the book, so please go visit them as well:
by James Brush on September 15th, 2010 | 4 Comments
Juliet Wilson’s chapbook Unthinkable Skies (Calder Wood Press, 2010) sat atop the to-read stack for a long time, but I regularly picked it up and flipped to a random poem whenever I passed or when I had a spare moment or two. I don’t know why I read it this way except that after a while, I started to like the slow process of reading one poem and then putting the book down, letting the poem settle into me as I watched the dogs eat their dinner.
When I finally decided to sit down and read Unthinkable Skies all the way through, the poems I’d already read were waiting like recent acquaintances alongside the ones I had missed and the whole thing just got better and better as I progressed back and forth between the new and the familiar. Maybe that’s an odd way to read a book, but I rather enjoyed it and somehow the individual poems resonated more since this helped prevent their getting lost in the whole of a collection.
And what poems these are. Wilson displays a deep love for the natural world tinged with mourning for what has passed (“Passenger Pigeon”) though she manages this without resorting to hopelessness. Throughout, she writes eloquently about her concern not just for the loss of wild places and creatures, but how that impacts us humans, an idea powerfully described in “Lost Dances of the Cranes” in which she imagines future city dwellers watching old video and marveling at “the wonders the world once held.” It was hard not to see the great construction cranes that have dominated Austin’s skyline the past few years.
These poems are full of birds too, but one bird has been with me since I first read “Domesticated” a few weeks ago: a pet goose, bound to earth by habit and domestication, wondering at the sound of wild geese flying overhead during migration:
Flightless and petted, you enjoy comforts
of home and hearth,
[…]
Winter air fills with honking
geese in joyful formation
high in unthinkable sky.
[…]
Later you puzzle over dreams
of endless blue and the steady beat of wings.
I feel for that goose. For my dogs that once were wolves. For all of us who every now and again might wish we could go back to swinging through the trees with our most distant ancestors. This isn’t to say that being civilized and having our modern human culture doesn’t have its perks (the internet, electric guitars), but with it we’ve disconnected from the natural world and Unthinkable Skies does a wonderful job exploring that disconnection and suggesting possibilities for reconnection.
Finally, these poems are full of space and silence. Space for a reader to enter into Wilson’s richly described world, to sit with her on a beach listening to shorebirds turn stones or reflect on the emptiness of a field after the birds have migrated. With that space, comes a reverent silence perfectly balanced between notes of mourning and wonder, a wonder that fills me as a reader with hope. Unthinkable Skies reminds us that this Earth and all its creatures—even us apes—is beautiful and holy and in trampling it, we lose some deep and important part of ourselves.
—
Juliet Wilson blogs at Crafty Green Poet and Over Forty Shades, and she edits the wonderful online journal Bolts of Silk (where a few of my poems have appeared). You can buy Unthinkable Skies from Calder Wood Press. It’s a lovely little book and to my great surprise and delight it arrived here from Scotland only three days after I ordered it.
Here’s a video by Alastair Cook of Juliet reading her poem “Adrift” (h/t Moving Poems where I found the video).
There’s something enchanting about old tools. Not power tools, but rather the ones that require maybe a little sweat, a little swearing and more than a little skill to use. They’re the ones that live in sheds or hang in garages like old mysteries gathering dust and perhaps a little dulled but still so useful to the hand that knows how to wield them.
These tools are relics of a time when people still made things and made them well. In some cases, these tools made things and kept the world running before I was born. Made things I’ll never see and yet when I look at them and sometimes play with them (because that’s all I really know how to do) I imagine a world in which we didn’t throw things out the moment they broke.
My first hammer
There’s solidity to those old tools hanging around and still ready despite the shiny power tools that can do a job faster but will themselves be recycled long before they’ll ever be passed on. These are the tools I was given as a kid and the ones I inherited from my grandfather and my dad who I’ve assisted (because that’s all I’m good for when it comes to carpentry) on a few projects.
Dave Bonta’s new chapbook Odes to Tools (Phoenicia, 2010) has gotten me looking at and appreciating these old tools in my garage all over again. The poems originally appeared on Dave’s blog Via Negativa (you can still read them there) but in book form they become like the tools themselves, somehow sturdier in their stately analog elegance.
My favorite in the collection is the ode to one of my favorite tools, the coping saw, a tool I’ve used, misused and loved longer than most others. (What a glorious day it was when I learned I could replace that rusty old blade!) In Dave’s writing, this most space-hogging and least dense of tools becomes a jumping off point for examining ideas bigger than the tool itself, and the coping saw’s sturdy flexibility becomes a near-Taoist metaphor for the strength found in yielding, a certain wisdom in emptiness. From “Ode to a Coping Saw”:
Perhaps because it is flexible
& maneuverable
[…]
or because it encompasses
so much empty space
somehow
it copes.
It’s a fine collection, well worth multiple readings, and like the tools it celebrates, I suspect it will never stop working no matter how long it may sit on the shelf between reads.
Moore chose an amazing manuscript and Adams and Bonta produced a lovely chapbook with cover art by Carrie Ann Baade. In addition to the paper copy, they created an online edition, which I really like since they eschewed the .pdf route and actually built a website, which is, in essence, an online book. You can also listen to Parker read her poems there, thus making the online edition something more than just a book posted online.
So, on to the book. I tend to start a book by thinking about its title and this one required a bit of research. A memory palace is a tool used for memorizing sequences and recalling memories. I did a quick walk through parts of the modern collective memory palace of the internet to come to an understanding of the term.
Based on reading at Wikipedia and a post on Litemind, it seems the basic idea is that in order to remember things, the memorist creates in her mind a visualization of a familiar place. By filling that map with objects and associating those objects with memories, she can walk through her memory palace and recall those memories. Sequences can be recalled by taking the same route through the memory palace that was taken when the memories were associated with the objects within the palace.
With this in mind, I found myself sitting back in my chair and allowing myself to walk through a house I lived it when I was growing up, trying to see things that were there. These objects led to stories and other associations from my memory and as I walked through this pre-constructed memory palace, I realized what a fascinating tool this could be for accessing the subconscious and developing a series of poems.
Perhaps this is how Parker began her project wherein she creates a beautifully wrought memory palace into which we are invited to enter. The poems are full of vivid images and the kind of precise and evocative diction that makes me want to reread. I think I’ve read most of these poems 3 times now over the past few months, but two stood out for me: “78 RPM” and “Some Yellow Tulips.” Both poems deal with the subject of memory and the way objects trigger those memories.
“78 RPM” masterfully captures a moment between two young lovers fooling around to the tune of a Billie Holiday record while the speaker’s aunt is outside. Parker captures the heat and intensity of this young lust moment with appropriate tension and sensual elegance:
Heart rising and
Falling like Billie’s
Song, cool water poured
To the top, brimming,
Then spilling silver
Notes, and his lips
On yours for —
The stylus bumps
Its paste-paper
Center; you hear
The screen door’s
Thump against its
Frame, hear Aunt’s
High heels tick
Across the porch.
I found it easy to lose myself in the moment and expected a different response from the aunt than the one Parker shows us. I felt as if the aunt knew what was going on, and understanding the futility of stopping the hormones from a-raging, simply offered iced tea “for this heat.”
If “78 RPM” is a poem about memories of heat, then “Some Yellow Tulips” is about memories of fire. In this powerful piece we find a holocaust survivor tending her garden with a kind of military precision. Parker uses words like ruthless and blitzkrieg to describe Mrs. Sonnenkratz at work in her garden, imposing order on her flowers and the world around her, but despite her best efforts it is only an illusion:
She smokes and shakes and smokes. Each flowerbed’s
As neat as graves. She stubs out ash. The heads
Of these tulips wore bright turbans, tight-wrapped
And now unwrapping. In Berlin, she was slapped:
Sie ist ein Jude… Dry-eyed in Dachau, how
She’s crying over bulbs bloomed too far now.
In a world of absence, presence leaves a scar.
Each tulip’s ravelled to a six-point star.
Despite what I imagine to be a beautiful garden, Parker’s use of words like smoke, graves, and ash suggests someone unable to escape the hellish memory palace that is the holocaust as each flower in her garden triggers these terrible memories despite her best efforts to control and retain them.
The whole poem is about control and our inability to truly control and put away that which we might wish to forget, and I wonder if that is one reason this poem alone is written in metered rhyme.
I suppose as a reviewer I’m supposed to offer some criticism or talk about something I didn’t like in the book, but it was hard to come up with anything. There were a few that didn’t speak to me immediately (“Archaic Fragments” and “Unreal Gardens Without Toads in Them”) but that’s more a matter of my tastes than Parker’s abilities as a poet.
Other highlights include “Breasts” a brilliant meditation on the way the past predicts the future in terms of the speaker’s family history with breast cancer, and “Reading Keats in a Japanese Garden” wherein we see beauty as transitory and almost more beautiful for that.
Good stuff, all around. Now go order yourself a copy because the print version is beautiful (and not transitory) or read it online. Either way, it will be time well spent and you’ll find yourself looking forward to the next time you walk through this particular memory palace.
I recently read Rafi Zabor’s 1998 debut novel The Bear Comes Home. Zabor’s tale of an up-and-coming NYC saxophone player and his quest to create a personal style that will build on, rather than imitate, his heroes Coltrane, Monk and Mingus, happens to be a walking, talking bear with opposable thumbs. His name’s The Bear, but friends call him Bear.
The Bear has the sensitive soul and single-minded obsessiveness of an artist struggling to find his voice. He’s also in love with a human woman, the law is after him for being an unlicensed bear, scientists want to study him and the record companies want to screw him. Through all that, The Bear just wants to find some transcendent truth inside his music.
The book is brilliant. Zabor’s prose sparkles like stage lights on a sax, moving effortlessly into and out of The Bear’s consciousness, which is fully human but also fully ursine. The Bear’s story is rendered with wit and a keen sense of the absurd, reminding the reader of the constant alienation The Bear feels in the human world. Little details had me laughing out loud such as The Bear’s nervousness before a recording session leading to a “light” breakfast of eight bagels and a salad bowl of coffee.
The real joy in Zabor’s novel, though, is the way he writes about music. Many of The Bear’s struggles and battles are fought out while improvising with other musicians (Charlie Hayden and other real life jazz legends make cameo appearances) and the pages-long descriptions of solos and jams allow the music to become a beautifully wrought metaphor for The Bear’s internal struggles.
If you love jazz and love bears, The Bear Comes Home is a must read.
Birds Nobody Loves: A Book of Vultures & Grackles is available in paperback on Amazon and at my e-store. E-books can be downloaded from the Kindle store, and the iBookstore.
A Place Without a Postcard is available on Amazon.
2010: LOST – Reflections on “The End” — Seeing Jack dying alone in the jungle in the same spot where he awakened in the pilot was heartbreaking, but [...]
Welcome to the first stop on 
