Top 40 : To Keep Love Blurry

The Craig Morgan Teicher that is portrayed in To Keep Love Blurry is filled with doubt, remorse, and worry. He has lost his job. His son is disabled, Teicher worries endlessly for his future.

who will take care of him when Brenda and I are dead?

He discusses his arguments with his wife Brenda Shaughnessy.

...How

do I learn to love Brenda right, and learn

to get her to love me how I want to be loved?

He writes in his parent's voices only to have them talk about his flaws and how they are his own psyche. It is confession without the histrionics.

This is you talking to you - I'm dead.

He brings in other poets to quote them then discuss how is not like them. He worries over his fame. What his writing will be after it is over.

A very minor Robert Lowell, with a dash of James Tate

When he isn't ruminating on these things he's talking about death. The book ends with these two stanzas:

Is there truly time for so many tragedies?

Death has earned the key to every city. For who else

tends to all of the sick? Who else takes

in the old? Who else wants us all?

Not even our mothers. In fact,

only death always keeps its promise.

What rises from this book is a more honest confession. An actual look in the mirror, warts and all. At times it gets repetitive, the self-doubt borders on self-obsession. And the continued self-deprecating tone begins to get tiring in longer poems. I've always been suspicious of self-deprecation. It serves only as fishing for compliments. For someone to come back with a 'no, that isn't true' statement.

Teicher's book is great. Coldfront put it at 6 on their year-end list. I agree that this book is great. Teicher is alone inside a book that he created but I think he wants to be even though he says he doesn't.

Top 40 : Bewilderment

Continuing with a look at the Coldfront Top 40. At number 7 is David Ferry's Bewiderment, which won the National Book Award. I wrote about it in December. Below is a revised version of that post.

* * *

A friend of mine had recently read David Ferry's Bewilderment. She recommended it, with a caveat:


Take it as a whole work.

At the time I wasn't sure what to make of this. The book is long, is full of translations of classical poets; Virgil, Rilke, Cavafy, and Horace all make appearances. The connecting theme is one of passing time, old age. The arcs within the sections feel like meditations. The translation acting as bookend and informative guide.

Ferry is 88. He is clearly making a last go round with this world. An attempt to connect the final dots. To find the grand theme in the narrative, etc...

Aunt Nellie's picture was in the paper once,
Triumphantly posing with a large bottle,

Black widow spiders inside looking out,
As conscious as fireflies of their situation.

Are we conscious of our situation? I write about decay in my own poetry. My MFA dissertation was based around the idea of entropy in art. I am keenly aware of death, but am I conscious of being in the jar?

The fact is that from the moment we are born we begin to fall apart. Cell walls start to break down, chemicals begin their depletion, etc. etc. etc.

Like A. R. Ammons, Ferry has a keen ability to make us OK with death. To be almost friendly with it. Ammons did this in Garbage, his book length mediation on the end of his life. Here, Ferry does the same. Ammons chose to use the metaphor of a garbage dump for the detritus of life. Ferry gives us Horace.

Think of the pile of language across time. It is massive, unforgiving. Ferry is pointing out that his words are merely newer versions of older ones. The translations bleed into his poems and his poems inform the depth of the old. And they all speak with the same voice, his. As do we all.

Eventually.

Top 40 : Meme

The meme is hardly a 21st century phenomena, though the word originates with Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. At its core, a meme is an idea that spreads until it is ubiquitous. They are useful in their carrying of cultural knowledge, norms, even news.

Meme is a shortening of the Greek mimeme - 'something imitated'. Good examples of old memes are teaching games for learning to tie your shoes, or Ring Around the Rosie. Dawkins intended the word to describe evolutionary principles in the spreading of ideas. Today we use it to talk about the weird repetitive jokes on the internet.

Like Rickrolling or Texts From Hillary.

And while they are frivolous and silly, they still connect and convey information across great distances. They are still sort of doing their original job. It's just that they are now doing it through the many ways Michelle Williams has been dissed over the years. Are we teaching each other how to survive the plague? No. But we are disseminating cultural baggage.

Into this discussion steps Susan Wheeler's book, Meme. Published by University of Iowa Press in 2012, Coldfront placed it at 16 on their year end Top 40.

The book takes stock phrases, sayings, jokes, and places them along bits of conversations taken out of context. Wheeler uses these selections of dialogue to craft strange elegies. To her failed marriage, to her recently dead mother, to herself.

The poems read like the leftovers from these relationships. The strange magnetic echoes. Like remembering a smell. Or touching the surface of something and having a flash of memory. It is broken, and haunting.

The poems are named Canasta, Turkey in the Straw, Jeehosaphat. Here is Ten Conniptions:

           Hold your horses.

          If you don't knock it off now there will be no cake for you. You're

skating on thin ice.

          That's it. That's the last straw. You get down off your high horse,

young lady, and shape up or ship out.

          Can I pack your bags?

                    Yes, divided blessings: banishment, ruin.

                    Dragging its lines, the trawler

                    buckles under.

At times the language gets difficult to take in. The endless barrage of 'momisms' and pat phrases begins to make your brain glaze over. The effect is something akin to a scolding from a parent. But a strange one; one that you wanted to happen.

I liked the book, but mostly found the poems to be forgettable. This is the problem with memes in general. The ephemera quality of them. We remember things like 'pot calling the kettle black' but they sit idly in the back of our mind until we are reminded of them.

Wheeler's book is interesting. Her use of these well known phrases forces us to reconsider them. To rethink the language of them. In the context of a poem like Ten Conniptions these phrases begin to sound like a collective childhood. I'm not sure they become more than remembrances though.

Wheeler was a finalist for a National Book Award. I agree with Coldfront's John Deming, 'its sub-current of autobiography–the poet’s and everybody’s–alongside a barrage of sometimes-recognizable phrases will leave you with a ghost in the room.' I just don't know that the ghost wasn't already present.

Top 40 : The Glimmering Room

Coldfront put Cynthia Cruz' The Glimmering Room at number 21 on their Top 40 of 2012. In the write-up Melinda Wilson wrote that:

'Images of destruction, death and illness dominate the pages of Cruz’s collection. Some poems also hint at sexual abuses...Cruz’s is a world of abuse, drugs, sex, poverty and desperation. Somehow, though, the poems yield beauty...'

Wilson then quotes Notes on the Disaster in full:

Tore the plastic tubes from my arms.
I still have the scars and I walked
Right out of that place. I say
If I’m going down, then I’ll do
The killing -

To say Cruz' book is brutal is the worst kind of understatement. Language fails at describing the experience of Cruz' world. There is implied sexual harassment. Drug use. Death. The people talked about seem to be teenagers. Young. They live in a strange crack house like world. You are never sure where it is, but it is everywhere.

Last week I posted her poem Breaking Glass. I did this mainly for the last three and a half lines:

...And memory

That warm slop of honey,
Seeping. No way to stop it
and its gorgeous hurricane of bees.

That sound of bees. I can hear it throughout Cruz' book. This constant menacing hum. One that probably will not yield honey, though it is implied it may.

The structure of Glimmering Room is one of repeated Strange Gospels. The gospels tell the story of a narrator and her friend Billy. There are 11-year old prostitutes. Billy eventually dies, though she comes back a few poems later.

Wilson calls the poems a sort of waste land. She isn't talking the T.S. kind. She's talking the Detroit kind. The vacant falling apart America kind. The not taking care of our shit kind.

The book opens with this quote from The Gospel of Thomas:

If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.

It is clear that Cruz is clearing her plate. Metaphorically bringing what is within her. Purging of these tales, mentioning these things, makes them less poisonous. Begins the moment of discussion on them, thinking on them.

It is horrifying and it is gorgeous. One of the most vicious books of poetry I have ever read.

I would have put Cruz much higher up on the list.

Other People's Poems

from Fable of the Last Untouched Town

4.

A storm raged for a week and our town was erased

by hills of snow.

Afar, our one story chambered apartments

look like concrete harmonicas. It's easy for snow to swallow us.

But after the storm, a gigantic glacier appeared inside

the king's most cherished open-air stadium.

It took up the whole arena.

Our leader launched a campaign.

Defunct factories suddenly produced heat lamps

and they strung a ceiling of scalding tubed bulbs over the stadium,

but the glacier only glistened.

So he demanded legions of laborers to come

chip away at this offensive glacier.

I was drafted to help.

When I arrived, I was awed, I was so awed, I began to cry

but when someone questioned my tears,

I said I was crying for our king and cursed

the imperialist-plotted ice.

The sheer sapphire cliffstone towered so high,

the whole ocean seemed frozen inside it.

Under its shellacked panes of ice were marblings of color

I'd long forgotten: tangerine, topaz,

canary and rose.

Like fluorescing cuttlefish,

the colors pulsed, swirled and bloomed

into contracting rings. The ice breathed.

We slowly chipped away with our picks.

As soon as we gathered a pile,

the wind burst in and scattered the powdery snow far

into the air like spores.

One laborer accidentally swallowed ice

and it caused him to hallucinate, blither in another language.

He was immediately exterminated.

We were forced to wear masks.

One day, I decided to steal some.

I pocketed one grain.

The snow glowed bluely in my hovel.

My little lamp.

Then one night I don't know why I swallowed it.

And this is what I saw.

- Cathy Park Hong

Poem-A-Day Reprint : Rom-com

I need a day off. So here's an old poem.

Rom-com 2/13/10

See -
I need you to be perfect
But also broken - I'm
broken

I need a little
rose-colored light
on this balcony

Some flowers
come cuddle with me
watch some Hart To Hart

I'm - broken
but the bruises are
flowering

Top 40 : Engine Empire

'Also, the new observatory's been ransacked for its myths,
the telescope shattered to a million bifocals,'

Year end lists are an odd sort of summation. A way to mark off the end of a cycle. A start of a new one.  They are a lens to judge the past.

Coldfront has put together a list of their Top 40 books of poetry for 2012. I've read 5 of them. At number one is Engine Empire by Cathy Park Hong.

Hong's book is a new Waste Land. A sort of attempt to explain the present with the past. Specifically the past of humanities need for overextending.

The book is divided into three sections, each detailing a part of 'boomtown' culture. The first seemingly set in the American west. The second in a fictional town in China. The final section is set in the future, in a land ruled by interconnectedness.

I cannot hep but think about the American Dust Bowl. I have just come off of reading two books on the subject. The idea that man could change the world to fit his ideals, that the world would then turn on man. It seems to be having a bit of a moment.

'...we
don't need our heirloom
mouths.'

Is it because the last of that generation, the one that saw two world wars, a depression, a Dust Bowl, a Holocaust, is dying off? That this moment of time is passing from immediacy into history into a thing in a book?

We are afraid of our future. I am. I am sure you are too.

We are at an impasse on nuclear arms, religion, science, economy, labor. We cannot see the next thing beyond the current one.

Holocaust Memorial, Berlin

We have killed the future so we don't have to face our past.

'The voice of Gregory Peck booms: Honey Suckle.'

Recently there has been a string of people posting photos of themselves posing seductively at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Marc Adelman has been collecting them and showing them.

His work centers around photos gay men have been posting on the dating/sex finding app Grindr.

'Xiao, bring me my napkin,
my thumb is smudged with the horizon.'

Many questions arise. Why take photos there? Why use that photo on what is essentially a sex finding app?

Is this disrespectful? Even anti-Semitic?

I think this is an example of the 'tourist effect'. When people snap narcissistic photos of themselves seeing things of 'import'. In front of the World Trade Center work site. At the side of the Grand Canyon. These are the same impulse. To say 'I was there. I saw this thing.'

In seeing it I have proven myself to be a part of a larger collection of humanity. Or. 'This photo of me looks good, don't you want to fuck me?'

We forget everything easily.

At one point in her book, Hong reveals an outdoor amphitheatre that has filled with a glacier. The king has hired her and others to chip away at it. To reclaim his building.

Once something has been lost to time, can it be reclaimed?

I don't think the Holocaust has been lost to time, yet. But there is that question of when. At what point does something pass. Whether it turns to myth, legend, or just vanishes. At what point does it become a thing in a book waiting to turn to dust?

At what point do we?

These are the questions Hong raises. She is concerned not with where we are going, but what we did to get there. What we forgot along the way. And who we lost.

'Then one night I don't know why I swallowed it.

And this is what I saw.'