Review of “What Blues?” by Adam O. Davis

As I mentioned in my past blog post, issue three of Grist just came out—and with that issue release, I am saying goodbye to a great three years with the journal. Joshua Robbins will be taking over as editor, and I know that this new journal will continue to flourish under his guidance. To celebrate the new issue, I wanted to highlight one of the poems in it.

What Blues?
By: Adam O. Davis


Horseflies hunt in the hockshop, heel
like hinges and rest like rust when dead.

They sting despite antidote, despite
aspirin, and give themselves so gladly

to every inevitable end. At this hour dust
is called for. Call it quick. The horseflies

have stung their last. In back, the blind
man’s saxophone is a sorry mess of brass

surrounded by a horoscope of household
appliances. Accordions resigned to the conspiracy

of cobwebs. Wedding rings and handguns,
comic books and collectible plates.

Dead horseflies, lucky horseshoes, defanged
hand grenades. How lost are the least of us?

In time, a bottle brings the blizzard. Ask after
an infirmary for the frostbitten. Ask another

three bars of brass, barely played in a place
where every mouth is a purse of smoke.

Someone asks for a kiss. The night
is a cash register that doesn’t know when to quit.


One of the many aspects I love about this poem is the deft use of accentual alliteration. English is an accentually structured language, so poems that make use of this sonic feature call out to us. I know many folks believe that English is “naturally” iambic, but iambic itself is from Latin and based on qualitative measures—which sonically is not a feature of English. This idea of iambic pentameter as being the most natural to English (I often hear the comparison to a heart beat) is a compromise of French syllabics and Old English accentual poetry. Our dear Chaucer is the one who popularized accentual-syllabic poetry.

The following is an excerpt I did with Adam about his work. This question in particular addresses the accentual form of this poem. You can find the full interview of Grist's Web site:

Charlotte Pence: One element to your work that caught my attention was the rhythm. Your poems use strong, stressed beats that add momentum to the poem. And the lines aren’t simply rhythmic but coupled with vivid images. “What Blues?” is a great example of this. The opening lines are: “Horseflies hunt in the hockshop, heel / like hinges and rest like rust when dead.” As I reread the poem, I realized it was in accentual alliterative form, which made me wonder; how often do you use received form? What is your poetry’s relationship with received form and open form?

Adam Davis: I’d say it’s a mixture of both. There are a series of separate narratives running through my manuscript belonging to several different characters, but one thing they share is an adherence to sound. I love the heightened musicality that poetry can offer, particularly when it’s unexpected. Most, if not all, of my work is in free verse, but there are moments of unexpected rhyme and a predominantly musical drive to the poems. I know the lines are working when I can recall them as soon as they’ve been written.

Review of “Helen of Troy” by Charlotte Pence

Each year our graduate department gives awards for fiction and poetry, and this year I placed first in poetry for this poem “Helen of Troy.” All the award winners are reading this Monday night at 7:00 in the University of Tennessee auditorium. These readings are always stellar, and this year should be no different judging from my compatriots who will also be reading. The reading includes: Josh Robbins (second place--poetry), Darren Jackson (third place--poetry), and in fiction we have my fiancé Adam Prince placing first, with Turning Bowling (second place) and Matthew Duffus (third place).

This is an older poem of mine that serves as the sphragis to my chapbook Last Night. Sphragis is from ancient Greek and literally means a seal placed on books. I view the contemporary sphragis as that opening poem that conveys the book’s subject and tone; the poem is also placed before the sections such as with “Temper” from Beth Bachmann’s book Temper.

This poem is one that I wrote, published, “finished,” and then two years later as I was driving a new ending came to me. Subsequently, the new ending required a whole new re-working of the poem such as changing the point of view. (I first wrote it from the point of view of Helen.) I was not working on any conscious level on this poem, but a part of me knew it was not right. Now, let me be clear. I don’t believe in easy poofs to write a poem, but for this one in particular it was an odd mix of editing, editing, editing—and letting go.

Also, the reading on Monday night will be the release of issue three of Grist (the journal I edit). We’ll have copies on sale and unveil the new look of the journal. And the writers in this issue are excellent—more on all of this in the next blog. For now, here is my poem.

HELEN OF TROY

By Charlotte Pence (Published in New Millennium Writings)

The Trojans kept Helen for twelve years,

winning at least a little while.

So often we focus on the loss

rather than the years of attainment.

But any love that matters will one day

be taken for granted. Last night,

lying down to sleep next to you

on wrinkled sheets, warm where

the dog curled, cold by our feet,

I realized as your hand grazed my thigh

you hadn’t touched me all day.

Each morning when I wake I understand

you’re like an eagle scanning the next ridge.

The bed heaves as you rise first,

your steps hard, stiff, while the erupting

sky behind you eases from gravel gray

to blue. You don’t glance back

at the soft curve of my body,

not yet rigid with the day’s to-dos.

What you do is place cereal and fruit

in a bowl, then call my name.

The milk cold. The peach sliced.

Without motive or need

we sleep, eat, read, breathe together,

you running a hand under my shirt

whenever you want. But I was talking

about Helen, about how she loved

as she wished at least once, willing

to witness the loss of a world for it.

Review of ''Survival Tips for a Parallel Universe, Part One" by Tim Lockridge

Survival Tips for a Parallel Universe, Part One

By: Tim Lockridge

(From the Latest Issue of Mid-American Review, Vol. XXIX, No. 2)

You wake in a field and you know

the feel of this field, the soft glance

of grass against your cheek

like a wineglass or sweater saying

yes, we’ve met, remember, it was

years ago and there were arms

and arms not yours and in them you

slept and woke to an empty blue

where the moon was and the smell

of apples hung between the blades.

And above you a single crow lights

the morning and you wonder: Is that

my soul? Is that the wind-struck

part of me? But then you see

your hands are not hands, just

gears and pulleys bound in some

intricate mess of metal. And you

lift your new arms and say, “This

is not my century, this is not the sky

I slept to.” But there is nothing near,

save the air humming wild through

the long grass and the field quiet,

just the earth waiting for a whir,

a tiny gasp that means nothing at all.

This poem just came out in the latest issue of Mid-American Review. When I first read it, I was struck by the vision of this parallel universe. It’s an imaginative poem—a break from the talk-show-tell-all type of poems. Lockridge’s poem not only presents us with something outside the conventional, but it’s done so well. We have this “you” in the poem who is constantly straddling two worlds: the one known and the one not known: “You wake in a field and you know / the feel of this field, the soft glance / of a grass….” But ultimately the “you” does not know this field because this is a new world. The “you” attempts to learn the new world through association and metaphor, which is how much of learning takes place.

One aspect to this poem that I also appreciate is how effectively the stanza breaks are used. They hold a syntactical and semantical logic to their breaks. In total, we have eight stanzas. Most of these stanza breaks occur right as the speaker dares to suggest an answer, but what follows is another statement that negates such a dare into certainty. The two clearest examples of this are between stanzas two and three and between stanzas five and six. For example, “There were arms // and arms not yours….” As soon as the “you” can claim there are arms, another thought negates the confidence of such a claim: those “arms are not yours.”

One choice about this poem, however, that does give me pause is how poet-pretty the language is. I mean, we have fields where a “single crow lights the morning” and all of this is coupled with air that smells of apples and is an “empty blue.” Don’t get me wrong: I love this type of language. But I have grown suspicious of this type of language because I see it used so often. It is bordering on the over-used which will soon become the next sentimental (if it hasn’t already). Give me some grit, some urine, something other than poets describing nature in the prettiest of terms. In other words, give me something I haven’t seen before in a poem. For the most part, this poem does do that with its other choices of subject, strong rhythms, and tight structure. I look forward to reading more from Lockridge.

Review of “Like Having a Light at Your Back You Can’t See But You Can Still Feel"--1 and 2.

In C.D. Wright’s latest book that I’ve blogged about before, she does something quite interesting. She repeats large portions of her poems. In the second occurrence of the poem “Like Having a Light at Your Back You Can’t See but You Can Still Feel (1),” most of the lines are exact replicas. When my friend and fellow poet Darren Jackson pointed this out to me, I was surprised. I had already read the book a few times and didn’t notice the repetition. I heard echoes, but it wasn’t until I took his advice and tracked the changes that I saw what she was doing. I’m providing both poems here—and I do consider these two poems. I marked the changes in bold.

Like Having a Light at Your Back You Can’t See but You Can Still Feel (1)
By C.D. Wright from Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)

*Note: Many of these stanzas are one-line stanzas. The stanzas with two lines have a space and a half between them, giving the lines a sense of isolation that echoes the tonal isolation.


As if it were streaming into your ear.

The edges of a room long vanished.

She is not really hearing what he’s really saying.

The shine is going out of the ground
but they are sure of their footing.

It’s not that they have been here before, but
they are young and they have water.

There are masses of rose hips and they are noisy.

The forward direction requires almost no effort.

Consonant with this feeling of harmony
comes another, less comfortable.

Not of being lost but of not belonging.

Yet they were not covering the air
with false words.

They moved along without talking,
not touching.

They wore their own smell.

She tastes salt and they must be getting closer.

Others are out there who are drifting.

If this took place anywhere near the presidential palace

It would be nonstop terrifying.

And this could be the reason she has started to scream.




Like Having a Light at Your Back You Can’t See but You can Still Feel (2)
By C.D. Wright from Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)

As if it were streaming into your ear.

The edges of a room long vanished.

She is not really hearing what he’s really saying.

The shine is going out of the ground
but they are sure of their footing.

They have been here a thousand and one times.

It’s not that they have been here before, but
they are young and they have water.

There are masses of rose hips and they are noisy.

The forward direction requires almost no effort.

Consonant with this feeling of harmony
comes another, less comfortable.

Not of being lost but of not belonging.

Yet they were not covering the space
with false words.

They moved along without talking,
not touching.

They wore their own smell. The air was salty.

[She tastes salt and they must be getting closer.] *Deleted line.

Others were out there who are drifting.

[If this took place anywhere near the presidential palace

It would be nonstop terrifying.

And this could be the reason she has started to scream.] *Deleted lines. ***All new material begins here.

It is a bay in New England
closed to a shellfishing after heavy rains.

The house is not far from here. Next to the old
burial ground.

Most nights aren’t dark enough to see stars.

If a bad movie, a bad movie. If a bad meal,
a bad meal. If bad wine, bad wine.

They read. And go to bed early. He puts on an eyemask.

She wants a light on. She wants to read.

No, he says. Turn it off.

Let me finish the chapter.

Turn it off, C.

The page then, she says. You have your mask on.

I can still feel it, he says. I can feel it

streaming in my ear. Besides,

he is adamant,

you just go to sleep at night

I go on a journey.

What is a reader to make of repeating portions of a poem? In “(2),” Wright provides nineteen entirely new lines, repeats eighteen lines with slight modifications in three of those lines, and deletes one line entirely, leaving us with a 50/50 split of new to old. This reflects how much of this book functions in terms of these interlocking cycles. One, each character is somehow linked to the other either through global trade, war, cause and effect, and/or relationships. That is one cycle. But also the events cycle, too, such as the repeated lies from the government. To compound and emphasize these cycles, phrases are repeated throughout the book, one being el otro lado. And clearly, portions of poems are repeated, too.

My first thought when I realized she succeeded in repeating not one, but two poems was, “She got away with it. Well done.” I can rattle off hundreds of collections where this repetition would be dull at best, lazy at worst. But here, it works. It works partly because with the additions I feel like I have moved to a new place. In “(1),” I’m not entirely sure where I am. Perhaps the reader is a witness to a couple crossing the border illegally? Maybe not. In “(2),” Wright directs us to New England, specifically a couple’s bedroom. (The presidential Palace line has been cut, which references Mexico in the first poem.) This change refreshes the poem and emphasizes the simultaneous sense of connectivity and isolation that occurs throughout the book.

The repetition also works because Wright emphasizes that time has passed between these two poems. One, they are placed far apart in the book, one on page 4, the other on page 71. And the slightly modified lines cue us in to this. For example, “She tastes salt” has been changed to “the air was salty,” which not only designates past tense, but also obscures the person. And “are” in line nineteen changes to “were”. These two subtle tense changes allow the poem to expand and take on more cargo.

As in the first version of the poem, Wright is consistent with how she forms her stanzas and line breaks—even down to the exception. In both poems, except for the final lines, if the line is end-stopped, a new stanza begins. If enjambed, (which here is parsed at a natural break in speech), the line becomes a two-line stanza. But in both poems, the final lines break this pattern ending with all one-line stanzas no matter if they are end-stopped lines or not. The effect of this is a pounding home of this sense of isolation coupled with unity. People in these poems are together, yet the feeling is one of distance and isolation which the white space on the page alludes to. All of that is to say the reason why this repetition works for me is that it emphasizes the thematic concerns of the book.

Review of '“… White of Forgetfulness, White of Safety”' by Robert Hass

I’m preparing for my final doctoral exam (big yippee-yay there) which is this week, and I have been looking for poems that not only feature free-associating narrators, but passionate ones as well. (In what I read at least, I find more speakers who embrace confusion than who embrace outright joy.) Here’s a Robert Hass poem that some don’t like because they feel the associations flit by too quickly, but I find that all the images are connected to an impassioned speaker.

“… White of Forgetfulness, White of Safety”

by Robert Hass from Time and Materials

My mother was burning in a closet.

Creek water wrinkling over stones.

Sister Damien, in fifth grade, loved teaching mathematics.

Her full white sleeve, when she wrote on the board,

Swayed like the slow movement of a hunting bird,

Egret in the tidal flats,

Swam paddling in a pond.

Let A equal the distance between x and y.

The doves in the desert,

Their cinnamon coverts when they flew.

People made arguments. They had reasons for their appetites.

A child could see it wasn’t true.

In the picture of the Last Supper on the classroom wall,

All the apostles had beautiful pastel robes,

Each one the color of a flavor of sherbet.

A line is the distance between two points.

A point is indivisible.

Not a statement of fact; a definition.

It took you a second to understand the difference,

And then you loved it, loved reason,

Moving as a swan moves in a mill stream.

I would not have betrayed the Lord

Before the cock crowed thrice,

But I was a child, what could I do

When they came for him?

Ticking heat, the scent of sage,

Of pennyroyal. The structure of every living thing

Was praying for rain.

The first three stanzas can appear disconnected on first read. Why are we moving from a mother burning in a closet, to creek water, and then to Sister Damien teaching mathematics? It all comes together when the speaker says that he had an epiphany in math class about how a point is not divisible. “Not a statement of fact; a definition. // It look you a second to understand the difference, / and then you loved it, loved reason…”

Here is the passion; Hass is explicitly saying that he loved something. No confusion, no evasion, outright: “And then you loved it.”

Fine, you might say. The speaker loves learning. But what are these first two stanzas doing? What’s the connection? Hass has taken away explicit transitions and simply makes the leaps without transitioning for us. For example, the speaker never delineates who is speaking or where we are; we simply move to a memory and then to image such as the line “Let A equal” where we have Sister Damien teaching math and the speaker then imagining “the doves in the desert.” All of this is free association, but also relates to how Hass considers image.

He writes that image for him is the “sensation of clarity and sensation of perceiving it.” In other words, an image is not only showing us a moment of clarity, but the moment when we receive that clarity. And I would add that when you first understand something, there is a sense of absence. Think of an impressionistic painting and the lines that distinguish water lily from water. If you try to pinpoint that place where the two separate, you will touch nothing—not the water nor the lily. Simply color. And I suppose that is what I mean by absence here. This sense of absence informs the stanzas as they move from one to the next without explicit transitions made for us.

This is a poem about “sensation of clarity and sensation of perceiving it,” and around those moments, we have an absence designated by the white space on the page. Well, now I fear I just offered a very overwrought reading. Let me simply say that clearly what we do have is an impassioned speaker who shares with us moments of insight. What precedes and follows are images associated with these moments of quiet epiphany presented without transitions—which is often the way epiphanies arrive.

Review of "Cloud" by Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan, current U.S. Poet Laureate, is reading at my university next week. Known for her short lines (rarely no more than four words), slant and perfect rhymes that startle in a similar manner to an unexpected image, and avoidance of first-person, she is a poet who sets trends instead of following them. Here’s a new poem just published in this month’s issue of Poetry. (When doesn’t Kay Ryan have a poem in Poetry though?)

Cloud by Kay Ryan

A blue stain

creeps across

the deep pile

of the evergreens.

From inside the

forest it seems

like an interior

matter, something

wholly to do

with trees, a color

passed from one

to another, a

requirement

to which they

submit unflinchingly

like soldiers or

brave people

getting older.

Then the sun

comes back and

it’s totally over.

What we see here is fairly typical of Ryan’s work: compression, lasered focus, and an impressive ability to take on cargo in such a small amount of space. (This idea of cargo—what some might call a deepening—is something I think Jack Gilbert does better than anyone, but that will be another blog). In this poem, the deepening for me occurs with the lines “brave people / getting older.” Once I read that simile about aging, the description of the cloud takes on greater depth. In fact, this simile informs the entire poem as I re-read and associate the idea of aging to many other lines: “passed from one / to another;” “a requirement / to which they / submit unflinchingly;” “it seems like an interior matter;” and of course the ending line of “it’s totally over.” I think I just quoted the entire poem—which is my point. Nothing is wasted here. Nothing is ever wasted with her. Here is another example of a poem that takes on cargo.

The Niagara River

(from Kay Ryan’s collection The Niagara River)

As though

the river were

a floor, we position

our table and chairs

upon it, eat, and

have conversation.

As it moves along,

we notice—as

calmly as though

dining room paintings

were being replaced—

the changing scenes

along the shore. We

do know, we do

know this is the

Niagara River but

it is hard to remember

what that means.

This is one of my favorite poems by Kay Ryan. Sometimes short poems are like the quiet kid reading in the corner of your classroom. You are aware of the kid’s presence, but you can’t say exactly what he’s doing. With all the other loud demands, the quiet ones can get overlooked. “The Niagara River,” however, does not allow this. It’s eerie from the beginning with its factual set-up of a group dining on a boat but delivered in a way that makes this everyday experience sound surreal. And then we have the repetition of “we do know,” and the longing of the “o” sounds that surround like an incantation. But the repentant incantation does not end with a clear epiphany—which is part of this poem’s power. What does the group know? Well, that’s not explicitly stated which becomes part of the poem’s tension. What we are left with is a sense of struggle.

I would like to make a second (and third) link between Kay Ryan and Jack Gilbert’s work. One link is tone—which is not devoid of emotion, but distanced to allow for clarity and insight. And this is important because often what Gilbert and Ryan discuss are emotions, yet these emotions are latched onto a specific object, moment, place, or image.

Also, Kay Ryan’s poems often move in a similar way to Jack Gilbert’s poems. These two poets will often use the rhetorical movements of a sonnet. We will have the introduction of the problem/issue, followed by the complication, sometimes another complication, and a turn that happens off the page that then allows for the conclusion. Let me divide up “The Niagara River” to show this:

{As though

the river were

a floor, we position

our table and chairs

upon it, eat, and

have conversation.} .......INTRODUCTION OF ISSUE

{As it moves along,

we notice—as

calmly as though

dining room paintings

were being replaced—

the changing scenes

along the shore.} {We ......COMPLICATION

do know, we do

know this is the

Niagara River} {but} ......MORE COMPLICATION followed by TURN

{it is hard to remember

what that means.} .............CONCLUSION

Two other great links that describe her background and her craft include:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=80608

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate_current.html

Review of Frank Stanford's title poem "You"

“When a writer dies, he or she dies two deaths and leaves two bodies behind, their physical body and their body of written work,” Greg Bacher writes on his blog dedicated to Frank Stanford, a poet who too few readers know. In 1978 at age twenty-nine, Stanford shot himself three times in the heart, leaving behind seven volumes of poetry. Within a year, two more volumes were published posthumously. In the past few years, a small group of poets have started to aggressively promote his work as can be seen with the 2008 Frank Stanford Festival, the University of Arkansas Press keeping in print his selected works The Light the Dead See, and Lost Roads (a small press started by Stanford with C.D. Wright) reissuing Stanford's epic poem The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You (2000) and two earlier collections, You and The Singing Knives (2009).

I’m going to post a short poem here, one from his book You listed as one of the best books from the last decade. When I last checked, Amazon only had one copy—used and selling for $998.00.

You by Frank Stanford

Sometimes in our sleep we touch

The body of another woman

And we wake up

And we know the first nights

With summer visitors

In the three storied house of our childhood.

Whatever we remember,

The darkest hair being brushed

In front of the darkest mirror

In the darkest room.

First, I have to say how that ending continues to kick me in the gut, even now when I’m expecting it. And to render any effect on the reader in such a short poem is tough. So, what’s Stanford doing here?

This poem works in “3s” for me in a few different ways. First, rhetorically I can divide the poem in three sections—or what some might call movements or leaps. (And by “rhetorically” I mean the argumentative structure of the poem such as how a Shakespearean sonnet has five moves: introduction of issue, complication, more complication, the turn, and conclusion.) Each section in “You” surprises because it refuses a clear, direct, and expected link to the previous section. Here is how I see the movements:

First:

Sometimes in our sleep we touch

The body of another woman

And we wake up

Second:

And we know the first nights

With summer visitors

In the three storied house of our childhood.

Third:

Whatever we remember,

The darkest hair being brushed

In front of the darkest mirror

In the darkest room.

The first movement is the speaker dreaming of touching another woman and then waking up. Fine. Got it. Now, after this section, the common movement in a contemporary lyric would be to push the poem to the present. So, for example, if someone is thinking about another woman, the question will be “Why? What is happening now that makes one recall this?” I love how this poem refuses such a linearity. Instead, once “we wake up” we move into another memory, another dream-world. Nighttime links us to this second movement of the poem that describes the three-storied house of our childhood.

The last movement of this poem is unresolved, operating on a tonal, emotional level. This sense of irresolution occurs in a few different ways, but the more obvious way is that Stanford refuses to give us a complete sentence at the end of this poem. Instead, we have a fragment—and I love this fragment. Stanford writes, “Whatever we remember” and then does not bring this sentence back to the “we” coupled with an action verb. “Whatever we remember” and the fragment that follows damns whatever specific memory one may have to silliness. For whatever one remembers, the sense of darkness remains. Therefore, specific memory or a resolution is beside the point. The darkness is inescapable and all-encompassing.

Also, we end with a three-lined descent into darkness, recalling the tradition of Dante’s descent into hell with the triadic line. Stanford repeats “Darkest” three times which most poets would claim is unwise to do within a span of fifteen words. But his repetition lends a quality of fate to it all—a dark fate.

In this short poem, we can see what Stanford is often praised for: his use of diction, image, unique voice, idiom, wit, metaphor, and imaginative leaps. It is his leaps that I appreciate the most given to us straight-on in a conversational manner even though what follows is anything but straight-on. In a review of Stanford’s epic poem, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, reviewer Philip Jenks describes the poem in a way I find fitting to all of Stanford’s works: “Stanford provides a wild ride on this sailorless ship.”