Riffing on Bird and Other Sad Songs by Lisa Janssen

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
When I was a child, I used to quickly insert and slightly pull out my videogame cartridges, which would make the game go crazy—sometimes the game would play, but in a slightly off version, with bizarre blinking characters and anomalies going off all over the screen. My parents used to yell at me that I was going to break the machine, but I knew that it was only the brain of the thing that I was altering. This interest in malfunctions has continued into my adult life, insofar as some of my favorite writing concerns “malfunctions” of various kinds—obsessions, delusions, hallucinations, improbably beliefs, to name just a few. I like writing when the cartridge is pulled slightly out—this can be in terms of form or content or both. In the case of Lisa Janssen’s “Riffing on Bird and Other Sad Songs,” released way back in 2007 as part of the Dusie Kollectiv exchange, there is an obsessive quality that resonates with those same tendencies in myself (most of my projects arise out of one obsession or another).



The chapbook’s eponymous “Riffing on Bird, Unsung” is not about Charlie Parker but rather the actress and photographer Laurie Bird, of whom I knew nothing about prior to reading Janssen’s poem, but said poem collects a constellation of source materials and excerpts to give a seductively clear picture of the subject and the author’s interest in the subject. Indeed, the poem seems to be almost, if not entirely, assemblage, with very little authorial voice showing though save for in the authorial intent of assembling the various fragments. What results is not a disjointed montage, but rather a curiously complete-feeling narrative with considerable emotional resonance. The overall result is a hybrid akin to something that could be called “poetic journalism.” The one complaint I have is that I wish there could have been more of the same in the brief collection.



The other poems in the chapbook, a brief narrative concerning a character named Jenny with several extremely satisfying lines (“The sun beats down and bleaches white all of the bones of true romance. They are bones now. You can still live in them if you want.”) and the source of one of my own obsessions, the photographer Francesca Woodman (Janssen’s chapbook was, interestingly, part of the exchange in which I distributed my own, quite different, poems for Woodman), done in a somewhat familiar fashion with source texts from the photographer and a bit more authorial voicing. The net effect is a satisfying glimpse into a series of minds and stories just slightly out of synch with the rest of the world, but who indelibly leave their sometimes too brief mark on the minds of those who encounter them. “Someone who wished they were the shape of a breeze.”




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Metempsychose by Matina Stamatakis

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Another poet who plumbs the margin between visual art and poetry. Like Geof Huth, Stamatakis produces both "conventional" and "visual" poetry, as well as photography. Despite these similarities, though, Stamatakis is a very different sort of poet than Huth. Where Huth is systematic and precise, Stamatakis is amorphous and visceral. Like some of the images in this chapbook, which feature diagrams presumably from textbooks on plants and animals upon which she has superimposed words, playing on visual associations and rendering the diagrams themselves useless, Stamatakis is interested in the emotional resonance of the enigma that remains when meaning is partially eroded. "Studying Copernicus in the dark * orbs & debris."



Metempsychose is a good beginning point for those unfamiliar with Stamatakis' work. Unlike a lot of work that deals with the erosion of linguistic structures and the fertile margin produced by clashing associations and non-sequiturs, Stamatakis' poems do not want for emotional resonance--never feeling cold or sterile. Quite the opposite, Stamatakis is not afraid to get her hands dirty ("[we riddle jawbone / smells / of morning cum / raw opium seed lacerations") or to deal with the psycho-sexual underpinnings of surrealism, something that much contemporary surrealistic work seems to forget. Like a traditional surrealist, Stamatakis is also interested in the resonance of dreams and the byzantine rhizome of meaning found therein with a number of poems on the theme of "Coma: Nine Dreams" which feature numbered imagines which contrapuntally reference other images in the form of footnotes.



Despite its effervescence, Stamatakis remains in control of the torrent of information, twists and turns feel *almost* random as opposed to arbitrary--correlations can be made between sensory jumps in almost all instances "those half-composed ornithopters-- / wiry lyres play brash against the wind." The palette of Stamatakis' diction is diverse and sophisticated, numerous obscure and scientific terms bespangle the morass of her wunderkammer: "of spines or in fixed smiles--cicatrix & bones cauterized." Indeed it is the image of the cabinet of curiousities that best describes Stamatakis' work--sometimes tawdry, random, but possessed of its own internal order and aesthetic that keeps the reader returning to its shelves of dessicated specimens and debris.




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Longfellow Memoranda by Geof Huth

My review

In addition to being a ridiculously prolific visual poet, "regular" poet and copious blogger, Geof Huth is also an archivist. Since my partner Rachel is also an archivist, I have gotten to know Geof in both his "artistic" and "professional" contexts; on his blog Huth enjoys telling stories about those rare instances when the two aspects of his life meet. Indeed, one would not necessarily expect them too, and Geof's work overall doesn't necessarily belie "archivism," however, his book Longfellow Memoranda, published in 2008 by Otioliths, is definitely the work of an archivist, and fascinating in its organic unison of these two paradigms.



Additionally, while Longfellow Memoranda is, for the most part, a book of "conventional" (I use this term as though it has any real meaning), "poems," it is also tied explicitly to an actual object, The Longfellow Birthday Book With Diary for Memoranda, in which Huth has composed a poem a day in 2007 in said "Diary for Memoranda." Pages of the original text are reproduced next to Huth's poems, and it is clear that each of his is an erasure culled from the Longfellow snippet of that given day. In context, these fleeting deconstructions point towards the degradation of time ("O twilight / betwixt / now & / them"), the "disintegration" of the source text both literally and figuratively. "We must all / die/ to guide us / from." In transcribing and reproducing the original text Huth is filling both the role of entropy (destruction) and the archivist (preservation)--two forces ordinarily at odds. This is also accentuated by Huth's bizarre enumeration system, counting the poems up from 1 and down from 365 (1/365, 2/364, etc.)--departing from the beginning and moving inexorably to the end.



It is this preservation instinct that makes Longfellow Memoranda more than a satisfying erasure project in the vein of Jen Bervin's Nets or Ronald Johnson's Radi Os. At the back of the text, Huth records the provenance of the original Longfellow Birthday Book, as well as the original transcriptions in the book indicating the birthdays of numerous (clearly presently deceased) individuals as well as newspaper clippings indicating births, what appear to be quotations, and an annotation indicating the date one Private Harold L. Freeman was killed in action in World War I. These transcriptions provide an interesting counterpoint to the erasure poems, pointing to the notion that both books and the people who make them and write in them are inevitably erased by time, but that skeleton of meaning, the record, remains.



As an aside, I should note also that the colophon of the book is a visual piece by Huth composed of Monotype Sorts, thus fully incorporating Huth's various vocations. Appropriate, also, insofar as after the words have ended, their embellishments remain.


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Metaphors for Miscarriage by Mackenzie Carignan

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
At the current moment, our avant-garde appears obsessed with whimsy. Even the AG's traditional role of social criqtique has of late taken the form of arch ennui, the Howl being replaced by the Smirk. Which is why it is courageous, in this climate, to field writing on subjects which, by their very weight, belie any kind of irony or the sort of "play" that has become part and parcel to our notions of "experimentation." To do with a body of poems as transparently titled as "Metaphors for Miscarriage" likewise jars the foundations of willful obscurity upon which we have built so many recent headquarters.



The subject of the loss of an unborn child is not one, however, easily understood by those not personally touched by it in some way. Therefore complete transparency does not seem to be the most accurate way to get at the subject, and the "transparency" of the book ends at the title. The form the writing does take is a stanza structure, presumably invented by Carrigan, in which a single word followed by a longer line of at least five syllables. These stanzas are sometimes serve as contained units; sparsely punctuated, Carrigan leaves it to the reader to determine the ways, if any, each unit is linked to the next. The end result is a kind of djembe-rhythm call-and response, reminiscent of ritual, which supports the book's seeming intent as both dirge and a kind of memento mori.



The emotional palette of the collection is complex--at times clinical ("polyp / looking like an eyeball and focussing"), at others starkly beautiful ("hill / stimulate the seedlings, starlings, sterling dress"), and sometimes brutal as one would expect ("carnage / who knew it could be so minute?"). Carrigan's proficiency with the form never feels forced, which is admirable with a structure which could easily become artificial.



The physical form of the book is likewise paradoxical, printed on pastel purple paper and with a diaphonous cover on which is printed a watercolor reminiscent of bruise or smashed wing (done by the author's 4 year-old-son and perhaps the sole evidence that the assessment of abstract art "my 4-year-old could paint that" could ever be accurate); upon initial examination the color scheme seems almost incongruous, but in context with the bruise-like image and the imagery of the poems quickly becomes the purple of a healing bruise of blood-in-veins.



Carrigan succeeds with difficult material (both literally and figuratively) and admirably proves that linguistic experimentation need not shy away from gravitas and that things remain in this world that transcend mere description and cannot be in any way ironic.


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Eohippus Greeting Card Series 1 and 2

I have to confess that when I am presented with justified blocks of text in poetry anthologies, I usually turn the page. I find that some of the sloppiest and most derivative writing often occurs in prose poems, for reasons not entirely clear to me. Not so with the work in the Eohippus Greeting Card Series (1 &2) published by Eohippus Labs in California.

The press's website promises "36 Pages of Real Emotion," and these poems deliver just that. Apparently capitalizing on what I thought was a singular phenomenon in my own life--namely the fact that my grandparents (RIP) used to recommend that I "make some money" with my poetry by writing greeting cards. These anthologies pair black and white images with (mostly) prose poems which are conveniently "categorized" on the title page (for example, Allison Carter's "For the Love of Love" promises "BREATHTAKING LUNG-CLEAVE, TRUTH, GRUMPY RETORT, and COLD REQUEST). The poems themselves subsequently categorically adumbrate said emotions in compelling, sometimes whimsical, always engaging way.

The range of tone in the tomes is diverse and satisfying. What could easily devolve into an orgy of Flarfy self-congratulatory irony instead runs the gamut from ironic (Joseph Mosconi's "Untitled" telelgraphic blocks of epithets: "Oh. Fuck. Fuck. Okay. Maybe, no.") to intense earnestness (Carribean Fragoza's sublime "Portraits, Underwarter: Chuy": "Underwater, the crumbs soak in the pockets of the apron you are wearing. If I put them in my mouth they are still sweet.") What all of the works have in common is their agenda of fulfilling the epithet in the anthologies' colophons: "Everything we feel is real!"

So, in order to appease the spirits of my dead grandparents, go and order both sets of these greeting cards so Eohippus Labs can "make some money."

From Here by Zoe Skoulding

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This gem of a chapbook is the result of a collaboration between poet Zoë Skoulding and visual artist Simonetta Moro. Like many of the images, the poems offer an account of urbanity viewed through a telescope--giving that feeling of random specificity and disjointedness ("everything side by side in static / histories that never happen here.") Like all good ekprastic work, the poems do not stray far from the images sense of confinement, but are not fettered by the physicality or physical information of the artwork.



Other images resemble aerial views of landscapes, and the poems appropriately expand upon the urban narrative with a rural one, exploring the dialectic between the two. The formal consistency between the images and words, each image being roughly circular and more or less figurative, and poems, about page length, left-justified, spaces between lines, works well. This is an excellent example of a successful collaborative project between visual artist and poet.



(As an aside, Skoulding is from the UK, so her British spellings are not an affect...)


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Super Undone Blue by Sarah Anne Cox

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Despite being printed with some kind of coverstock that gave me fingernails-on-a-chalkboard cringes to touch, this is a great little book. Seemingly written on a family trip to Greece, and punctuated with drawings by her children, a format which could easily become cloying but does not, Cox intersperses Classical with contemporary imagery in a way that seems organic and genuine. ("the furies have chased you down the close / arteries of Plaka / with the memories of a flower/ necklace and double axe.") In a satisfying ekphrastic turn, Cox bridges the mimetic distance and directly addresses, poignantly, her illustrator: "This being the only place where you / might meet another girl named Phaedra."




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Lost Work Book w/ Letters to Deer by Catherine Meng

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book exemplifies everything we love about Meng. Gregarious, obsessive and funny. Reoccurring images are absurdly funny (God as a walrus, a million permutations of Dana Gioia) without being self-consciously so. Meng is master of virtuouso improvisation that never appears forced, even when she's seemingly allowing her cat to type for her ("The cat wanted me to tell you: / 9iooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. . .\hqwaaaaaa")--something only Meng can get away with.



Meng can turn on a dime from whimsical to dead serious "those hairs inside her ears sweating/ always a need to lick & come away / more walrus than the man before the losses / one feels after kneeling" & is full of folksy but profound insights ("we who confuse / mermaids with jellyfish"). By turns fierce and vulnerable; the most arresting poems in the book are the eponymous "Letters to Deer," seemingly written from within Plato's cave to the symbolic animal, alternately fierce and vulnerable and full of genuine identification with the creatures "We had no choice but to eat / the ornamental cabbage.")



Susana Gardner's rough-hewn presentation wrapped in dress patterns suits the work well.


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Secret Donut by Aaron Tieger

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
It is good to see Tieger reaching beyond the phenomenal here--particularly in the "title section." The "Secret Donut" is the answer to life's fundamental questions: What will happen to me? What is this all for? The earthy, objectivist sculptings that are Tieger's stock in trade here reaching for something noumenal--about material but also the molecules of material--structures and structuring, the human hands behind the arrangement of plinths. Good stuff.




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