The Modern Anglo-Japanese Troubadour

Jan Miklaszewicz, The Promise: A Narrative Poem

In a distant valley of a distant nation, the word comes down: our prince is going to war, and the knight of the village must report. The knight’s wife has a grim premonition, but it isn’t within the knight’s star to say no, so he girds on his sword and marches into battle. Every night she walks the village parapets, watching to see whether and when her beloved soldier returns.

English poet Jan Miklaszewicz dresses his narrative in Japanese vestments; his knight is a samurai, and his lord a daimyo. But the themes of Miklaszewicz’s verse novella are familiar from countless Childe ballads and French troubadour rhymes. The image of a knight with conflicting duties occurs in numerous folksongs and official poetry. We only wait to see whether the beloved’s fatal visions are doomed to come true.

Miklaszewicz writes his novella in tanka, a major Japanese verse structure. Usually written in a single line of kanji, the English-language tanka usually breaks into five lines, with strict syllable counts. Japanese tanka usually aren’t narrative themselves, but most often embedded in a larger prose narrative, like their more famous offshoot, the haiku. Miklaszewicz instead expands the form, using the syllable count to define the stanza counts of his chapters.

The feudal Japan Miklaszewicz describes is a dreamland, a no-place devoid of proper nouns. It’s dotted with waving grasses and ancient shrines, and village life is languid until the daimyo’s call arrives. Attentive readers will recognize the landscape from Chretien de Troyes’ mythical Arthurian Britain. This isn’t a knock against Miklaszewicz’s storytelling: as C.S. Lewis pointed out, true virtue is always in another time, in a distant land.

Thus freed from strict realism, Miklaszewicz lets his familiar troubadour themes play out. Nothing really new happens, if you’re familiar with the English folk ballad tradition, but that doesn’t mean there’s no suspense. The Childe ballads contain enough variations that their stories could go multiple directions, and we never know what comes next until it happens, then it seems downright inevitable. The same thing happens here.

And Miklaszewicz uses his medieval verse form artfully. His language is so rhythmical that readers can practically hear the plucked shamisen behind the stanzas. Miklaszewicz’s Japan evokes images from sumi-e paintings and Hokusai’s block prints: fragrant, melodious, and mythical.

In their village home
she senses a subtle shift,
a kindling of hope,
and in the eye of her mind
she glimpses his sweet return,

Jan Miklaszewicz

(Every stanza and chapter ends with a comma, emphasizing that we haven’t reached the end. Miklaszewicz doesn’t include a period until the final line.)

Let me interrupt myself to address an important concern that more attentive readers might’ve already anticipated. I recognize the risks inherent in a Western poet using Japanese verse forms and a Japanese mythical setting. Colonial-era European writers like Lord Byron or Rudyard Kipling exploited “inscrutable Orient” twaddle to romanticize imperial conquest. I’ve read enough Edward Said to know that Orientalist mythmaking has had adverse consequences.

Yet Japanese poets themselves wrote considerable volumes of similar dreamland exploration. Bashō, who popularized the haiku form, wrote travelogues so expansive and mythical that recent critics question whether he visited the described places. Travel, to medieval Japanese writers, wasn’t about accurately depicting the visited lands; it was about the subjective experience of abandoning one’s comfort zone and wandering off the map.

In that regard, Miklaszewicz does what most modern Anglophone poets aspire to accomplish: making the familiar unfamiliar, the distant near, and the real world subjective. He uses comfortable themes his likely readers will recognize from folk ballads and traditional poetry, but filters them through his imagination. The product is cozy, without being sleepy. And it rewards multiple levels of reading, from the casual to the scholarly.

I mentioned French troubadours previously. These traveling poets, and their Irish colleagues the bards, made their names by composing and singing verses about distant lands, mythical battles, and noble warriors. Miklaszewicz joins that tradition, updating it for a more cosmopolitan and literate age. His versifying is both familiar and new, using pre-Renaissance storytelling conventions for an audience more familiar with a diverse world. His product is surprising and comfy.

This poem is melodious, sweeping, and short: committed readers could savvy it in one sitting. Miklaszewicz’s storytelling carries readers along without resistance. Yet like the best poetry—including the Childe ballads I keep mentioning—the verse rewards a slow savoring and lingering contemplation. Reading it, we feel transported outside ourselves, and upon returning, we feel we’ve truly traveled somewhere magical.

The Teenage Slam-Master of Manhattan Street Life

Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

Fifteen-year-old Xiomara Batista doesn’t share her words with anybody. Not her highly religious mother, who wouldn’t understand that she thinks in questions and doubts. Not her brother, who keeps some poorly concealed secrets of her own. Certainly not with the eager hop-heads around her Harlem neighborhood, who’ve noticed how attractive she’s become. No, she keeps her words locked inside a leather-bound journal. But even she is beginning to realize she needs to share with somebody.

It’s tempting to comb through Elizabeth Acevedo’s first novel for clues about exactly how autobiographical this story is. Much certainly jibes with Acevedo’s story: an Afro-Latina teen, raised by Dominican immigrant parents, who moves away from her childhood religion and embraces performance poetry at New York’s legendary Nuyorican Café. But as with most autobiographical fiction, that misses the point. It matters because it’s ultimately about us, and the struggles we and the author face together.

Xiomara collects her thoughts about Harlem life and adolescence in the journal her brother bought her. She never intended to create literature; her thoughts just coalesce into poetry. She desperately wants to live peacefully and be normal. But such desires don’t gel when she’s pulled between two poles: the working-class Manhattan which measures success in outcomes, even for teens, and her mother’s devout Catholicism, which manifests in an urgent desire to see Xiomara finish confirmation.

An English teacher at Xiomara’s high school is organizing a performance poetry club. Xiomara feels vaguely tempted. But meetings happen on Tuesday afternoons, directly opposite Confirmation Class, which Mamí explains is not optional. Poetry gives Xiomara some level of control which her working-class home life doesn’t allow. Still, throughout the fall semester of her sophomore year, she prefers to avoid conflict, and attends Confirmation with her BFF, even as she feels tension building up inside.

Acevedo, in creating Xiomara’s poetic voice, avoids the most common mistakes teenage poets make: the deliberate obscurantism of Shakespeareanism, or way-cool fake Beatnik patter. Xiomara instead has a natural, easy voice, one clearly designed for stage performance. Some of the poems which comprise this novel-in-verse have a hip-hop rhythm, and others resemble more a free-verse tide. But we never feel, as with some apprentice poets, like we’re reading a crossword puzzle clue that needs decoded.

Elizabeth Acevedo

Instead, as slam poets do, Xiomara simply invites audiences into her experience, which she’s heightened through poetry. Slam, if you’ve never participated, tends to reward personal confession and the tentative investigation of personal struggle. It also discourages pat answers, which this novel does too, never reaching for the simple moral often favored in schoolbook poetry. Like slam poets everywhere, Xiomara exposes personal struggles, baring her heart. She wouldn’t dare shut that book after opening it.

Her struggles will seem familiar to Acevedo’s teenage audience, or adults who’ve been teenagers. Xiomara’s parents have visions for her: her aggressive Mamí has scripted a religious homemaker life, while her more passive Papí wants… something, nobody knows what, since he never speaks up. Xiomara herself has the first glimmerings of interest in boys, an interest piqued when her biology lab partner, Aman (the symbolism is unsubtle), becomes the first non-relative to encourage her poetry.

So Xiomara performs her first and second acts of teenage rebellion: she starts seeing Aman on the sly, while ditching Confirmation Class to attend poetry club. That’s two activities which violate her mother’s tightly written script. We know trouble is brewing, but Xiomara starts discovering some components of her own identity. As anybody who’s ever passed through teenage rebellion already knows, Mamí will eventually discover Xiomara’s hastily organized ruses. It’s only a matter of time.

By writing in poetry, Acevedo permits Xiomara to speak from the heart. No time spent describing physical environment or other characters’ facial expressions, unless she wants to; instead, Xiomara cuts directly to the emotional freight of each moment and each encounter. That’s what poetry does, or anyway should do: it strips off everything except what matters, here and now, turning every experience into the purest form of language to convey what’s happening, inside, right now.

Sadly, this verse novel probably deals too directly with controversial topics for actual classroom use: public schools are notoriously conflict-averse. It also has some intermittent PG-13-rated language and mild adolescent sexuality. But for home study and for ambitious readers, Acevedo has created a story that teenagers, and their parents, will find wholly relatable. I’d recommend pairing it with Walter Dean Myers’ Monster, which deals with similar themes and settings. Strongly recommended for bold, independent-minded teens.

The Verses of War and Fatherhood

Martin Ott, Lessons in Camouflage: Poetry

Themes of “who I am” regularly permeate Martin Ott’s poetry and fiction. As a writer, a father, and a former soldier, he has alternated among identities with the urgency of an actor trying roles. So, like many of us, he sits down quietly with himself, as poets have to, and he doesn't know exactly who he’s sat down with. This struggle becomes the driving force behind his quiet, introspective verse.

The tapestry of identities Ott draws upon to create this collection may seem familiar, especially to anyone who’s read his previous books. The rural Michigander living in the city; the working-class boy in a creative-class job; the quiet introvert with an energetic family. As in previous collections, though, Ott’s history as an Army interrogator looms large: the man assigned to extract truth, like a tumor, in situations of hostility and violence.

A retired interrogator walks
into a bar with himself,and asks for bold spirits,
untraceable in the lineage
of fevered fermentation.
Who is greater than gods,
creator of zealots and fools,
apocalypse of every shade,
architecture of storm and awe,
maker of mountainous tombs?
(“Riddle”)

Saying a poetry collection turns on themes of “identity” has become almost cliché anymore, since poets write for self-selecting audiences rather than mass publics. Everybody writes about identity, because they write about themselves. But Ott takes this a step further. The question-and-answer tone of the poem above permeates this book. Many of his verses stride forth boldly, then interrupt themselves with questions that reverse everything that came before them.

This probably reflects his own rapid transitions in life. At various times he’s needed to nurture and to kill, to discern truth and to obfuscate, to create and to destroy. Who hasn’t, of course, even Solomon wrote something similar; but having served in the military, at a time when the moral certitudes of the World Wars have fled us, this conflict between Ott’s present and his past forces him to constantly re-evaluate himself. The past isn’t gone, but the present changes it:

Martin Ott

The older I get, the less well I do at hide
and seek, my kids able to see the bulges
poking out, fewer places for me to disappear,
the essence of fatherhood to be in plain view.
(“33 Lessons in Camouflage”)

Most of this collection’s early poems deal explicitly with Ott’s military experience, littered with references to basic training, maneuvers and orders, the disciplines necessary in war. After the first twenty or so pages, this theme recedes, becoming not a driving force, but an implicit piece of background radiation. Like a musical theme in a symphony, it becomes a necessary part of a larger composition, no longer demanding attention, but fundamentally part of the structure.

This happens with several concepts throughout this collection. Themes introduced in one poem achieve maturity in another. Hide and seek, mentioned in the stanza quoted above near the end of the collection, refers to another poem near the beginning. In that one, he writes about being so good at the game, in childhood, that even police tracking dogs couldn’t find him. This seems a momentary blip, until Ott unexpectedly completes the arc, over thirty pages and twenty poems later.

Readers weaned on the way poetry is taught in high school, with each poem essentially a separate specimen considered in complete isolation, may require some time to get accustomed to this. (Hell, I have a graduate degree, and it threw me at first.) For Ott, poetry collections like this aren’t anthologies of individual verses, written separately and brought together for publishing purposes. He constructs his poetry collections as consciously as any novelist.

When I was a boy, my family and I took
long forays into the woods for berries,
Dachshund in tow, pinging our haul
into pails, sometimes searching for morels.
Mom’s body is pale, tumors nestled between
windpipe and heart, five days since she collapsed.
(“Morels”)

Motifs of gravel, and fire, and morals/morels crop up throughout the collection. They seem to have the randomness of everyday life. Yet suddenly they’ll come together in an explosion of clarity, sometimes in a poem’s closing lines, sometimes later. Like Beethoven’s Ninth, this collection progresses toward its final movement, in this case the mini-epic that provides the title for the collection.

Like us, Ott’s identity isn’t monolithic. It comes together in a sudden explosion of insight, not always looked for, but forever impending. We wait for clarity, and aren’t disappointed. And we’re grateful Ott invited us along on his personal journey.

Just Another Beatnik Teacher Comedian

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 10
Taylor Mali, Conviction

You’ve probably already read Taylor Mali’s poetry without realizing it. His centerpiece poem, “What Teachers Make,” has circulated online since the heyday of e-mail trees and webrings, frequently bowdlerized. But Mali, who paid his dues on New York’s poetry slam circuit, never wrote his poetry for book readers; he’s always been a performer first. Perhaps that’s why he’s released more audio recordings than books. Or maybe it’s because he’s a top-range performer.

Chicago poet Marc Smith invented Poetry Slam, but if you attend any modern slam and listen to the sarcastic humor and rapid-fire patter that tends to win, most slammers clearly want to be Taylor Mali. This album, compiling live presentations of his most significant work, reveals why. Several poems on this recording also appear in his book What Learning Leaves, but Mali has a compelling presence as a performer that you can only savvy when you hear his voice.

Audiences listening to performance poets ask two important questions: Is the poetry any good? And does the performer carry the work effectively? As a poet, Taylor Mali writes in an easygoing vernacular style. He doesn’t use the inscrutable metaphors and weird juxtapositions favored by MFA programs and awards panels. Though he certainly uses heightened language, his verse nevertheless has a plain-English conversational quality that doesn’t require a postgraduate degree to follow.

His poetic structure comes across in titles like “Falling In Love Is Like Owning a Dog,” or “Silver-Lined Heart.” Like Mali’s verse itself, these titles involve metaphors which have depth, but don’t require unpacking. We understand what they mean, though as Mali investigates them further, we increasingly understand what he means by them. As poetry, they aren’t difficult, but they reward the audience’s willingness to follow Mali on a nuanced inner journey.

In performance poetry circles, Mali sometimes gets stereotyped as a poet who writes about his teaching career. Considering the widespread influence of “What Teachers Make” (included on this collection), this isn’t unfair. But only five out of twenty-three poems on this album, including one hidden track, are about teaching. Four are about being a poet, four are about his father, and four are by other poets, featuring Mali as a member of the performance ensemble.

Taylor Mali

Mali has a distinctive baritone voice, accentuated by his performance style, which we could generously describe as “in on the joke.” He avoids common poetry slam affectations of offbeat pauses and strange, syncopated emphases. He doesn’t fear to laugh, just slightly, at his own jokes, especially on willfully humorous poems like “I Could Be a Poet” or “Totally Like Whatever.” His performance feels like a friend, inviting you to share the passionate hobby he’s spent years perfecting.

Many people encountering Taylor Mali for the first time comment upon his humor. If your high school English was anything like mine, the emphasis on somber tone and portentous themes left you feeling glum. Poetry slam, by its structure, discourages this attitude: because audiences have liberty to boo performers off the stage, performance poets learn to engage the audience’s humor and curiosity. Mali has taken this tendency further than most poets, and become a role model for others.

I'm less keen on Mali’s group pieces, especially two written by Celena Glenn. As the ensemble basically sings acapella behind the poet, Glenn’s voice doesn't carry, and the poetry disappears in a distracting soundscape. This recording also features two poems written by Mali but performed by other poets. They suffer from some lack of direction: one has flat affect, while the other weirdly over-accentuates the poetic foot. I could really have done without these tracks.

But when Mali performs his own work, he shows himself truly a rich artist. His poems run the gamut between  joy, confusion, laughter, grief, and more. Poems like "Labeling Keys," "Voice of America V/O," and "The Sole Bass" put the lie to the slander that slam poetry is shallow and ephemeral: they aren’t Walt Whitman, but they exist on many layers at once and demand just as much contemplation as the poetry you studied in school.

As a reviewer, I’ve grown weary of saying a particular item I’m reviewing isn't for everyone. That certainly isn't the case here. This CD will appeal to a diverse audience whose only criterion is open-mindedness. Like most poetry slams, this album has uneven moments, especially toward the middle of the evening, but overall this may be one of the few poetry collections in many houses that doesn't just sit on a shelf gathering dust.

Indiana Jones in the Temple of Rhyme

Aaron Poochigian, Mr. Either/Or: a Novel in Verse

One sunny weekday, when you’d rather be gallivanting around Manhattan’s privileged haunts, a call comes from your other life. Your Federal Agent handlers require your unique services to recover an ancient artifact. So you pause your daytime undergraduate identity and pursue a mysterious Chinese chest into Gotham’s rankest sewers, literally and metaphorically. But just as you think you’ve escaped this relic’s curse, an even more malevolent fossil threatens to destroy everything New Yorkers hold dear.

Aaron Poochigian is a noted classicist, famed mostly for translating Sappho’s fragments. He’s also published two volumes of his own poetry. So it’s difficult to qualify whether this is his third book, under his own byline, or his sixth. But calling it “a novel in verse” makes it sound more solemn and sententious than it really is. It’s more an Indiana Jones-like pastiche of mid-20th Century pulp potboilers, handled with a poet’s level of care.

Pressed into service, you dive into conflicts that involve alien conspiracies, ancient curses, lingering scars of Western colonialism, and more. In one early scene, you (the narrator insists on the “you” address, though you have multiple aliases) must defend a Chinese jade reliquary from a battle between Maoist insurgents and Latino gangsters, because Manhattan. But you don’t dwell on implications. You aren’t the ruminative type; you’re constantly busy plunging from one high-tension encounter to another.

Poochigian writes with the practiced confidence of a classicist, of someone intimately familiar with time-honored poetic forms because he’s maneuvered them across languages. But poetry, for him, isn’t a dead letter. He uses form because it heightens his story, which, like his shorter verse, is salted with short, punchy vernacular English. It simultaneously does and doesn’t read like conventional poetry:

Business cuts, taupe ties, and muted suits
are shrieking G-men—two more barbered brutes
churned from assembly lines of matching brothers,
each a tool as blunt as all the others.
You’ve always snobbed their brand, detested dashing
douchiness, cursed the smug conspiracy
to fix the markets of what man should be.
Lord look at them, all puff and polish, flashing
badges and sizing up your robot brain….

Most lines rhyme this way, though some parts are written in Saxon-style short, alliterative lines. The shift gives Poochigian’s action scenes real punch.

Aaron Poochigian

Other verse novels I’ve read use poetic language for long, discursive cogitation on important philosophical points; long-form poets think their outsized form gives them permission to write like Homer. Not Poochigian. Calling his storytelling “fast-paced” undersells his turbo-charged cadence. Not only does his story unspool faster than most poets would permit, even most paperback novelists would say “Hey, slow down, dude.” Yet somehow his story always feels quick, never hasty. You decide whether that’s good.

The second-person protagonist of this novel (more like a sequence of linked novellas), has the vocabulary and thought processes of a “C” student at NYU. That is, an average student at a top-flight university. He, you, whatever, has fantasies about chucking everything and becoming a real student, and he romances scholarly types who assist his investigations, in the best James Bond tradition. But time doesn’t permit him to think deeply; he’s a man of action.

This collision between the stately conventions of rhyming verse, and the frenetic exigencies of Poochigian’s story, really sell the tension. Like Indiana Jones, this story isn’t for everyone. I admit, I didn’t initially appreciate Indiana Jones, because I didn’t understand the narrative intent. Like those movies, I struggled to adapt my thinking to Poochigian’s unusual structure. I needed to get several chapters in before I appreciated his form. Some readers won’t give him that chance.

Maybe that’s the message of his title. In opening pages, Poochigian identifies Mr. Either/Or as the hero straddling two worlds, either a student or a secret agent, never quite both. But simultaneously, this book is either an contemporary adventure comedy or a traditional verse epic. And we, the audience, are either willing to follow Poochigian’s journey, or too strung up on formal interpretation. This duality dogs the entire book, forcing us readers to take sides.

So, Poochigian requires readers willing to suspend judgment. That’s not easy for everyone (certainly not me). But, like most of the best poetry, it rewards readers who adjust their rhythms to the verse. It’s just that, where most verse adjusts our rhythms to languid timelessness, Poochigian prefers craggy whirlwind modernity. I don’t think I could do that very often. But I’m glad Poochigian brought me along on his strange, Lovecraftian journey, just this one time.

John Sibley Williams in the Wilderness of Home

John Sibley Williams, disinheritance: poems

Veteran Portland, Oregon, poet John Sibley Williams writes like somebody carrying the weight of his ancestry in a backpack. You know, the big frame backpacks that excessively manful men wear while spending a long weekend getting lost up Mount Hood. The sprawling metaphor makes sense when reading his poetry, because Williams mixes liberal doses of nature imagery with deep feelings to coax meanings across the breadth of his book.

And what meanings they are. Williams explores themes of bone, ash, ghost: whatever traces the dead leave among the living. This may involve dark autumns along “Bone River,” a single poem Williams disarticulates into four segments throughout his book. This may involve a Dead Boy, a mysterious figure Williams has perform various enigmatic tasks, like Martyr His Mother or Fashion the Grand Canyon From His Body.

Like the best poets, Williams doesn’t permit simplistic, literal-minded interpretations of his verse. Overworked English teachers cannot (or shouldn’t) simply ask, what is the poet trying to tell us here. But as his themes develop across the range of his book, we realize there is nevertheless a current running, riparian, through his verse. Consider this representative passage from “The Cultural Narrative of Clouds”:

The sky is a girl abandoned naked by the river,
clouds swollen and purple
by light’s unthinkable angle.
Too young to spell moon
or her mother’s name.
Born ghosted. An offered fig
at the foot of the temple.

In early poems, readers could be forgiven for thinking Williams places emphasis on river, clouds, light. His use of wilderness imagery looms so large, I initially believed Williams had written a love song for the Cascadian forests. But it doesn’t take long to realize a parallel river permeates Williams’ forest. The forlorn child, lost, abandoned, or dead, leads these verses from behind. Clearly something personal, something not obvious, dominates Williams’ thinking.

John Sibley Williams

One should resist the desire to impute too much signifigance to individual titles. Especially in today’s narrow poetry-reading world, the ironic contradiction between title and content is a beloved device. Yet besides Dead Boy and Bone River, which between them constitute nearly a quarter of Williams’ titles, we have exemplars like “Miscarriage,” “Mother’s Day,” “Teething,” and one particular favorite, “Postpartum”:

He doesn’t know the consonants of our waste.
He can’t yet speak the vowels of ruin.
Perhaps it would be better if he never broke
from the frail bars of the cradle
into this vaguer cage.

I fear his sudden humanity.

So he won’t dream too far from things
I tear north from every map,
then I tear off the center. I take
down the photographs, sew shut the curtains,
go about eyes closed so he cannot see himself
in my mirror.

According to Facebook, Williams has young ’uns at home. This morbid taste of ash is paradoxical, but not wholly contradictory. It is, of course, dangerous to apply strict, one-to-one interpretations to poetry, especially non-objective poetry like Williams’. Poetry isn’t about a thing so much as the language experience. But Williams’ leitmotifs of Dead Boy, Miscarriage, and Mother surely bear consideration.

As a technical poet, Williams uses many popular motifs that readers have grown to expect. His expressionistic metaphors (“the consonants of our waste”) seem obvious once somebody voices them, but nobody did until Williams. Like many recent poets, he considers the left margin optional, and salts his poems with lacunae, which become more prominent as the book progresses, suggesting a mind caught in the frenzy of creative grief.

By the end, Williams’ themes have altered completely. Rather than getting lost in nature, the natural world becomes something he visits, a tourist destination with family on vacation (Grand Canyon). Rather than getting lost in the forest, trees become resources he consumes to shelter and protect his family. But sometimes, the resources he consumes in turn consume him, as in this passage from “Fertility”:

Can I say that a child died inside us
when all we have conceived is a name
for what could be?

We’ve built a cradle of nails and wood
to house a body too busy dying
to rest, a trophy of grief
we polish in case of tomorrow.

Williams basically invites us on a rugged journey into the heart of his pervasive melancholy. As George Bernard Shaw wrote, only the completely personal is truly universal, so as we venture into Williams’ struggles, we recognize ourselves, even we without children. His grief is ours, his glimpses of optimism between thunderheads our own. It isn’t easy. But it’s profoundly worth it.

Working-Class Poet Laureate

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 77
Jim Daniels, Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems

Poet Jim Daniels worked at a Detroit auto plant to pay his way through graduate school. Now an English professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he has a dual-lens perspective on cultural issues and the conflict between classes. In an America where “white working class” has become a powerful, inflammatory demographic group, tapping that perspective has possibilities for freeing the discussion about where we, as a people, move forward.

This perspective also makes for great art. This book collects from eight of Daniels’ previous poetry collections, with eleven poems not available elsewhere. He writes in a plain-English style which many university poets espouse verbally, but which few actually practice. One gets the feeling he hopes to attract an audience of his fellow Detroit workers, without the patronizing academic practice of explaining blue-collar citizens back to themselves:

Bush idles over from his broken press
big pot sticking out tight
under a white t-shirt
gray hair slicked back, perfect.
He bends toward me and stares
at my greasy coveralls. I sweat
behind the washer, tossing
Axle housings onto pallets.

Hey, look at me. Am I dirty?
Am I sweating?
You gotta learn how to survive
around here, kid. If you don’t know
how to break your machine
then you shouldn’t be running it.
He spits on the floor, wanders away.

“Where I’m At: Factory Education”

The brief patter, reflecting the kind of language workers can slip in between outbursts from noisy machines, will sound familiar to anybody who has struggled under the weight of industrialized labor. Strictly noun-verb, with no words over two syllables, it has a structural hurry completely at odds with an obese man “idling over” from a stopped machine. It reflects the almost-liturgical language rites of working long shifts in an enclosed, windowless factory.

Jim Daniels

Speaking from experience, I attest, factory workers have their own group identity (as most employment demographics do). They don’t just do factory work, they are factory workers. They find ways to express this shared identity through the rituals they practice surrounding their equipment, their co-workers, their daily routines. Maybe that’s why they repeat familiar social and political patterns, because their identity requires community integrity:

Machine, I come to you over 800 times a day
like a crazy monkey lover:
in and out, in and out, in and out.

And you, you hardly ever break down,
such clean welds, such sturdy parts.
Oh how I love to oil your tips.

Machine, come home with me tonight.
I’ll scrub off all the stains on your name,
grease and graffiti.

I’m tired of being your part-time lover.
Let me carry you off
into the night on a hi-lo.

That guy on midnights,
I know he drinks,
and beats you.

“Factory Love”

Until you’ve worked an overnight shift operating a single machine, melding your body to its requirements, you must trust the authenticity of Jim Daniels’ depiction.

Daniels’ first several books excerpted here translate blue-collar experience into the language of university poets. Subsequently, as his life moves into education, his focus shifts. Many later poems translate arts and educated culture into the language of working-class citizens. The best examples come from his Blue Jesus poems, inspired by the painter Francis Bacon, whose electric, gestural canvases combine abstract and realistic themes in ways that take some getting used to. Here, Daniels responds to Bacon’s “Yellow Jesus”:

Can you keep a secret? I have seen halos around the heads
of beautiful women. Okay, shoot me
with a well-intentioned folk song—
I’m telling the truth
till it hurts: I love the body.
I love the sonic boom boom
of the heart after skin touches skin.

Rather than merely describe the painting, that lazy fallback of inexperienced MFA students, Daniels describes the experience of witnessing the painting. Anybody could Google a well-known artist’s paintings and say what they look like; Daniels shares how they feel, how a viewer unversed in the ways of “fine art” could learn to appreciate an artist whose most iconic works are often inscrutable. His focus has shifted from his early verse, but he’s still a cultural translator.

Having done factory work, and having taught university English, I can attest the two cultures are often deaf to one another, and need a translator. There are only so many people like Jim Daniels and me; we can’t be everywhere. But a book like this, shared by people across the cultural divide, could help bridge the two groups. If we had shared language, we could speak in poetry, without fearing one another.

Trapped Inside an Altered Body

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 69
Elisabeth Kuhn, Average C-Cup: Poems

It's a shame nobody reads poetry anymore. Because when readers dismiss poetry as something inscrutable out of the past, they are losing the chance to introduce themselves to forward-thinking word crafters like Elisabeth Kuhn.

German-born and Berkely-educated, Kuhn takes the same world-wise travelling mentality in her verse that she takes in her life. She is also wise enough to recognize something that many academic poets these days have forgotten: that formal verse exists because people like to read it. Kuhn crafts verse in accessible forms like villanelles and sonnets, forms that a poetry audience will read for pleasure, and uses these forms to address difficult issues.

The issues Kuhn wants to address emerge from her own life. Foremost is her battle with breast cancer, culminating in a partial mastectomy which leaves her with two very different breasts—thus the title. In a world that values women according to their appearance, she struggles to decide where that puts her. Different poems show her in different places, but she remains generally optimistic, strong enough not to be broken by anybody looking at her body strangely.

Some poets are primarily storytellers, like T.S. Eliot, and some bare their sins in the Sylvia Plath style. Kuhn approaches poetry with the aplomb of a creative memoirist. The most important element in her poetry is herself, but she is not just flatly telling her story, she is telling us why her story should matter to us. And for the most part, she is telling us her story well.

I admit flinching when I began reading. The very first poem, "Palpitations," is a sestina, a form where key words repeat according to a geometric schedule across thirty-nine lines. It's a very difficult form, and Kuhn judders markedly on this one as well. Occasional pieces like this, which suggest they were written for an MFA poetry class, don't jibe well. When one such piece opened the collection I got a little queasy and thought I was in for a bad ride.

But I'm glad I stuck with the book. There are real treasures in this book, insights into being human as well as insights into being Elisabeth Kuhn. Consider these lines, from "The Pleasure Is Mine," discussing breast reconstruction:

...I'd feel as if he fondled
molded jello, glued
to my chest.

Elisabeth Kuhn

This deceptively simple analogy contains within it such nuance about human relationships, sexuality, sensuality, individual identity, and the human body. The author feels partly adrift inside her altered body, but she refuses to be prettified just to satisfy an abstract individual she might never meet. These lines are very direct, yet freighted with all the depth and complexity that human language can bring to bear upon them. And these are just three lines in a much longer book.

Kuhn’s struggles dwell in the present, but also unfold into the past. Her conservative German Catholic upbringing, one she addresses directly rather than hiply walking away, presages her adult difficulties with relationship and identity. Church and family should be the first place young girls learn trust, yet that frequently isn’t what she learns, as in “Sin”:

My sister had been good.
She was allowed
to pick a woolen thread
for Jesus’ crib so he would be
warm and comfortable.
I had done something to anger Mother.
I had to pick a needle.
Jesus would have to suffer
for my sins.

The poem gets only darker from there, not only from its actions, but from Kuhn’s innocent incomprehension. Her base poetic voice is the eternal, bewildered Even being born German carries weight. As a bilingual, bi-cultural woman, Kuhn brings outsider perspectives to nearly every situation, including this from “Original Guilt”:

When we were teens, we’d sometimes
flash the Heil Hitler sign
as a joke. It always upset the adults,
like questions about sex, and that forbidden
stanza of our National Anthem
we’d sometimes roar at parties, drunk:
Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles!

Some poems ring hollow in this volume. Kuhn is a journeyman poet, and even great masters don't succeed every time. But on balance, this readable book offers rewards for experienced poetry readers and casual bookworms alike. I would go out of my way to recommend a book like this to other readers.

These poems let us glimpse a woman’s heart, and together they give us a banner insight into the complexity of one person's life experience. She promises much in the future, and on the evidence of this first book, we have much to look forward to.



To hear Garrison Keillor read Elisabeth Kuhn's poem "Bathrooms," click here.

This Is How Poetry Pierces Our Bounds

Martin Ott, Underdays: Poems

I immediately liked Martin Ott’s latest, deeply autobiographical poetry collection when the first poem, “The Interrogator In Retirement,” began with these lines:

He’s waiting for the reverse
metamorphosis, for the extra
feelers to fold in or fall off,
to wake one morning a man.

Ott’s unsubtle but well-placed literary reference pings off his own military career, which clearly still troubles him. But if I found these lines smart and engaging, I knew I’d love Ott’s verse just pages later, with the opening of “Survivor’s Manual to Love and War”:

Death is a loving dog
with no children or chew toys
to occupy its attention.
It will lick you into submission,
this inevitable pack instinct,
to join the vast departed.

I first noticed Martin Ott nearly one year ago as co-author, with John F. Buckley, of the collection Yankee Broadcast Network. That collection’s hilarious, gimlet-eyed angle on American celebrity culture had crafty ways of making me think it’d pander to my anti-mass-media prejudices, then upsetting my expectations in ways both shocking and illuminating. Ott, working solo, extends that tendency, but along lines more personal and melancholy than that collection permitted.

Like the best poets, Ott feels simultaneously familiar and jarring. Reading lines like “Death is a loving dog,” the contradiction between mental frames will, and should, dislodge our expectations.  Yet we inevitably recall other poets with similar approaches, like T.S. Eliot or John Ashbery, who have done similarly. If Ott plants surprising crops, he nevertheless farms well-tilled ground.

Martin Ott

Ott’s best poems have a narrative quality, a cogent through-line, once common with poets like Browning or Tennyson. But Ott combines this almost retro storytelling ability with very contemporary sensibilities about language. I appreciate this dualism, because it gives readers firm grounding to anchor their attention, while immersing us in his surprising insights. Most poets either guide us, or defamiliarize us; Ott, notably, does both:

Ten days of rain a year in Los Angeles
invokes the legend of sheathed umbrellas.
My mother once told me a story
about a boy who lost an eye
on an umbrella’s undercarriage.
Mary Poppins has proven that you can
get swept away by unbridled passion.
Is an umbrella actually an umbrella?

—”Why I Don’t Carry an Umbrella”

I once believed that poets, like Ott, whose metaphoric language and unexpected leaps reveal surprising truths, just see life differently than us readers. Perhaps, like Van Gogh, light hits their eyes in personal ways that we consumers cannot share. But reading Ott, I realized: he doesn’t see differently than me, not prospectively. He uses language to help himself see anew. He’s just invited me along for the journey.

No, Ott doesn’t contribute some unique viewpoint, so much as construct one through language. His contribution is less some pre-existing attitude, more a willingness to test his personal experiences by milling them with words, a stone-bladed metaphor excising everything ordinary from his ordeals until their truth shines through. Sometimes, as with his military career, Ott explains what truths he’s revealing. Other times, facts fall away as unnecessary trappings:

She is a whisper filtering through shadowy
office ducts, a wind chime for coworkers,
a snare drum to delivery men, a Stradivarius
to the woman in the corner office. She is
the guttural chant that drove a thousand times
a thousand workers to erect a pyramid of gossip,
a stairwell that groans a symphony of sex.

—”What is Left”

One feels, reading the specificity of images that continue accumulating, that “she” is a real person, not some agglomeration of personal stereotypes. But Ott cleaves off identifying characteristics as mere, needless facts. The truth lies beneath anything concrete we’d describe in a police report or dating profile.

That, perhaps, represents Ott’s greatest contribution. His language sometimes includes specific details—Los Angeles, Fort Leonard Wood, Naked Lunch, J.D. Salinger. Yet his language mills away accidents of form, the history of accumulated expectations. Ott invites us to join him removing everything unnecessary from experience, like Michelangelo removing everything from the marble that isn’t David. The result is both collaborative and unpredictable:

The white page is an eyeball
rolled back on the verge, glowing
with knowledge of the depths.
It is a blizzard beyond snow-
caps or celestial freeze, blinding
nothingness, numb fingers to be
cut. The white sheet fills our bed
with unwritten tomes of exploration,
fear stained into it, a serif font.

—”Ink Quake”

I love poetry that invites me on a journey. Reading Ott, I feel I’ve journeyed beyond myself, and returned refreshed, restored, new.

Undeath is Even Scarier In Rhyme

Poems Dead and Undead (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

Long before Lovecraft developed a secular cult by describing a world where nature’s gear-wheels fell off, or Stephen King got rich translating Jungian fears into supernatural terrors, humans looked into the darkness and knew fear. That which we cannot predict or control has always terrified us, and somehow, that terror has always been… well… fun. So versifiers, from ancient bards to modern professor-poets, have long buttered their bread telling spooky stories with the lights off.

With the highly commercialized veneer surrounding horror literature today, themes of terror and unlife seem far removed from schoolbook poetry. But death, the ultimate unpredictable force, has always lingered in poetry, often as an active force—even more so before humans discovered penicillin. Compilers Barnstone and Mitchell-Foust find examples of blood-chilling dread throughout poetic history, including Egyptian funerary texts, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and this bleak prize-winner from Fitzgerald’s translation of Homer’s “Odyssey”:

Thus to assuage the nations of the dead
I pledged these rites, then slashed the lamb and ewe,
letting their black blood stream into the well pit.
Now the souls gathered, stirring out of Erebus,
brides and young men, and men grown old in pain,
and tender girls whose hearts were new to grief;
many were there, too, torn by brazen lanceheads,
battle-slain, bearing still their bloody gear.
From every side they came and sought the pit
with rustling cries; and I grew sick with fear.

Hans Baldburg Grien, "Death and the Maiden"

Horror in these poems generally arises when death’s sudden implacability collides with human illusions of control. Whether that means literal death, as in Homer, or more metaphorical death, horror inevitably arises because we hoard power reserved exclusively for God, Nature, or whatever. Many poems herein have religious meaning; Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot call for God, one piously, another desperately. But other poets, like Goethe and Baudelaire, invert religious meaning, creating mindscapes where despair becomes downright transcendent.

Some classic poets included herein are renowned for utilizing horrifying themes. French Décadents like Baudelaire and Rimbaud frequently described death, monsters, and shambling unlife in their works, while Poe and Christina Rossetti are known for little else (unfair though that is). That undergraduate staple, Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” deservedly gets included here. But some poets, often sanitized and squeaky-clean for high school textbooks, demonstrate surprising horror traits when de-bowdlerized, like this, from Lord Byron’s “Manfred”:

From thy false tears I did distil
An essence which hath strength to kill;
From thy own heart I then did wring
The black blood in its blackest spring;
From thy own smile I snatch’d the snake,
For there it coil’d as in a brake;
From thy own lip I drew the charm
which gave all these their chiefest harm;
In proving every poison known,
I found the strongest was thine own.

Somehow, despite having studied poetry myself, I didn’t anticipate these themes extending into living times. Besides a few dedicated genre poets like Bruce Boston, I didn’t know anybody still wrote that way, not when most poets teach college courses and winsomely court the tenure committee. Therefore, most surprising of all, nearly half this collection derives from poets currently, or recently, living. One doesn’t think “horror” when teachers and other eminences name Rita Dove, Billy Collins, or Ciarán Carson. Maybe we should.

These contemporary poets, however, simply feel different from their classical precursors. Modern horror poetry, like modern poetry generally, deals less in universal truths and broad archetypes; it favors greater intimacy. That is, it would rather bare the poet’s soul than describe humanity generally. Yet despite this intimacy, these poems are surprisingly humane and inclusive. George Bernard Shaw said only the deeply personal is ever truly universal. That certainly conveys in poems like Bryan Dietrich’s “Zombies”:

                                                 Beside a tombstone
you make your final stand. Stealing the arm, shoulder
and all, from one who may have been your father, you fend
them off for a while, waving his limb before you
the way you would a dowsing rod, a hand of glory.
Living, you tire. Fighting, you fall. Past lovers
get to you first, their mouths glorious, their bums hot.
What teeth they have to rip rivulets down your shins.

With our medicine, science, and technology, we today delude ourselves that we’ve established control. We exclude chance and mortality from our decisions, screaming YOLO while simultaneously stockpiling our retirement accounts, believing we’re eternal. But poetry, itself innately anti-modern, obstinately reminds us our illusions fool only ourselves. This collection, a mere sampling of poems designed to cause fear, channels a world our spirits cannot forget.

Restoring Danger to Classic Verse

Henry Walters, Field Guide A Tempo: Poems

Susan Sontag, in her 1966 article “Against Interpretation,” inveighed against the tendency, common in schoolroom reading and high-minded academic criticism, of using interpretive heuristics to reduce art to comprehensibility, de-fanging the wolf. Art, she said, should be dangerous; interpretation simply buttresses existing power structures. Or, as Billy Collins writes, “Would anyone care to join me/ in flicking a few pebbles in the direction/ of teachers who are fond of asking the question/ ‘What is the poet trying to say?’”

New Hampshire poet Henry Walters writes poems that resist interpretation. Not that engaged readers can’t recognize more literal meaning in his enigmatic lines. However, there isn’t that essayistic timbre beloved by critics. Walters doesn’t write crossword puzzle clues to solve; he writes Zen koans readers must contemplate. His verses occupy that liminal space just outside knowledge, where we know something has happened, but we must think about it. Poems like “Black Swan Pas de Deux” invite us, not to know, but to contemplate:

Both yes & no,
   I play me & you
play you. A little
  dance-duet. Strange:
wherever you move
  the sound is broken
glass—where I follow
  it’s the running
of blood. To someone
  else I’d say, Keep that
heart shut! Don’t lend that
  song a body! No
chance of staging whole-
  ness without a
whole house of gore
  to answer it.

Not that we couldn’t interpret this poem. Like Bob Dylan lyrics and Hans Holbein paintings, given enough time and motivation we could reduce them to positivist statements of one-to-one absolutes. Yet reading them, we don’t want to neuter Walters’ verses this way. Walters uses quirky phrases, sudden reversals, and metaphors so subtle, you almost miss they’ve happened, to guide readers outside themselves. He invites readers on journeys, where positivist poets (and the critics who love them) expound points.

Henry Walters: poet, classicist, falconer

Throughout, Walters arranges poems into triplets. A brief prose poem leads into a sonnet, usually structured somehow unconventionally—long lines, or visually specific line breaks, or the rhyme only oblique. The third may be free verse, a nonce form, or something different. But Walters never lets readers rest comfy on his patterns. He’ll suddenly flip sequences, or replace the sonnet with quatrains, or drop something. Structure, even self-imposed structure, is for Walters a leaping-off point, never a justification.

A trained classicist, naturalist, and schoolteacher, Walters’ poetry spotlights a perpetual outsider’s feel, a spectator observing humanity from outside its highly constructed boundaries. Perhaps that’s why Walters’ language, even when consistent enough to be controlled, never loses its spontaneity. He watches us watching him watching us. Nowhere does this scrutiny come across more plainly than his centerpiece, the protean long-form “Field Guide”, which combines three voices, a sociological observer, an observed struggling with self-awareness, and “the wind”:

Born of a straightedge & a grafted braid,
I come loping, limping, hungry, humble, looking
For origin & answer. My pied tongue licking
Bootsole, shoeblack, long since hybridized.

Dumpster-eyed, one of the half-breed scavenger brood
With fingered wings & no call, flocking
To a dying animal, I on Pelican
Earth arrive to find, expiring, breeze…

Walters utilizes traditional forms like sonnet, quatrain, and blank verse, situating himself within long-established poetic stanzas. His forms aren’t always obvious, and it’s fun, eight or nine lines in, to realize we’re reading a sonnet. Like fellow classicists A.E. Stallings and Aaron Poochigian, Walters knows ancient forms with intimacy which modern MFA workshops cannot convey. Yet like them, because he knows forms closely, he feels free to disregard imposed rules. He doesn’t serve traditional forms, they serve his vision, as in “Lookout”:

You think of those Roman soldiers standing guard
Somewhere at the edge of their language, a sentry-post
With commanding views of the valley north and west
Out past the nearest hills, horizonward.

No longer colonizing with the sword,
A lighter touch now, running the eyes across
Toothed ridges, muffled in the manifold blues of distance,
Named in the tangled tongues of uncivilized hordes.

And then, September, hawks lift off from those hills,
All aimed in one direction, passing through
Without password, without permission, their fanned tails
Flying colors you’ve never paid attention to
Till now, beautiful, barbarian syllables,
A whole sky, unopposed, invading you.

That’s what Walters does, invade your preconceptions. He includes allusions to Shakespear, the blues, Christian saints; but always, he subverts his allusions’ comfy premises, making the familiar dangerous. As good poetry should, and MFA workshops seldom do, Walters’ verses challenge readers. You emerge from reading somehow changed, often in ways not obvious. He’s still working on me.

The Hilarious Verse and the Terrible Truth About TV

John F. Buckley & Martin Ott, Yankee Broadcast Network

Poetry has always dwelt in strange neverlands, caught between today’s commonplaces and an idealized, probably allegorical past. Poets address today’s needs using bygone methods. From Homer to the medieval troubadours to modern MFA workshops, poets have always somehow not belonged to the present. Therefore, despite repeated pronouncements of poesy’s long-overdue demise, poetry today, if anything, matters more. Barraged by media messages and ever-shifting issues too fast to comprehend, we’re all somehow outside our time anymore.

Welcome to the Yankee Broadcast Network, home of such undying television classics as “Lusts of Midgard,” “Real Housewives of Wayne County,” and “The B-Team.” This network’s gelatinous onslaught of reality TV, plaintive melodrama, and pandering blockbusters keeps audiences hypnotized, while advertisers strategically market dissatisfaction and ennui. This dystopian hangover of television’s reptile-brain impulses blurs boundaries between life and semi-scripted potboilers, reducing viewers to a dreamlike fugue where fever visions increasingly resemble MTV montages, or vice versa.

Casual readers might easily mistake Buckley and Ott’s satirical poetry for mere light verse, interesting but forgettable like Edward Lear. But as poems mount up, as verse styles both traditional and experimental tease readers’ expectations, and as pop culture references meld with ancient poetic tropes to create new hybrids, easy judgments vanish. Eighteen years ago, Ani DiFranco sang “Art imitates life, but life imitates TV.” Buckley and Ott assert those are outmoded distinctions in terrifyingly half-joking poems like “Commercials of the Apocalypse”:

When even the walls began to turn on each other
and kids kicked around skulls in the wreckage for fun,
from skin to sin they sought to sell us things, and so
advertising was born again. Who can forget Zom-B-Gone

with its blend of seventy-three special herbs and
pesticides, able to repel hordes of undead salesmen
and make scorched lawns lush once more? Doesn’t
everyone still hum the jingle from Crazy Ed’s Eyeglass

Emporium and the double-eye-patched pirate’s ayayays?

Poets seldom collaborate today; we’ve come to expect solemn navel gazing interspersed with outbursts of Billy Collins-style try wit. It’s tempting to parse these poems seeking which lines Ott wrote, which Buckley. But that misses the point of their extroverted, non-gloomy experiments, reminiscent of that stalwart theatre class game, “Yes And.” Try to miss the improvisational implications veritably streaming, jazz hands aloft, from poems like “Coming Soon to the Disaster Channel!”:

\

Martin Ott (right) and John F. Buckley

Tornado week features The Traveling Travails
of Tracy, a ragdoll that flew from Tulsa to Tallahassee,
her left arm torn when it toppled a telephone pole
in Mobile, Alabama, the snapping of the pretty hem

on her tiny gingham dress sawing Baton Rouge oaks
into splinters. Will she and eight-year-old Stacy,
her newly homeless owner, ever be reunited?
Tune in Tuesday at 9PM for a whirlwind adventure!

It’s easy to recognize the time-delayed rubbernecking popular from cable TV, the hackneyed “History” Channel train wrecks too real for parody. Yet these poets capture not only the voyeuristic excess and shameless hucksterism behind the shows themselves, but also our childlike will to permit such content into our homes and minds. This perversely symbiotic relationship between producers and audience informs poems like “Better Living Through Television” and “Television Through the Ages: a Smithsonian Walkthrough.”

Buckley and Ott experiment with forms. Besides formless free verse, traditional techniques like sestina, ghazal, and terza rima appear periodically. Many of their best poems have lines too long to excerpt for review. Images which originate in one poem reappear elsewhere, giving the collection a Sherwood Anderson-like internal consistency. For example, Hayden Smunchner, evolves from promising talent, to vulgar, fawning huckster, before appearing one final time, in the painfully topical “Fireside Chat”:

The fireplace has been replaced by a TV
cracked open like a dinosaur egg, a blue
flame flickering inside the screen. President

Smunchner, half-ruined face still swoon-worthy
from the right, patiently waits for the drums
to subside, for children to trust they won’t be

eaten. The purple mountains proudly wear
their scars, the length of battlefields smoking
onscreen like Tinseltown toughs. His voice

is low, clear, reasonable—there’ll be extra
rations for rebuilders. His words are not
important; they rarely are. He has taken

the country as a bride, the smoldering
dream of courtship denied...

Reading this surprisingly funny condemnation, we progress from cognizant laughter, to squirming amusement, to undeniable realization: if TV does this to us, we’re willing participants. We’ve chosen the passive path, while producers like YBN merely sell what we’ve already purposed to buy. Like all good, timelost poets, Buckley and Ott ultimately don’t write about TV; they write about us.

Sing To Me, O Muse!

Homer (Barry B. Powell, translator), The Odyssey

The biggest lesson I draw from Barry Powell’s new translation of Homer’s Odyssey, is how decorous and moralistic it isn’t. I haven’t read the Odyssey since the Norton Critical Edition in 9th Grade, and like most schoolbook translations of Greek myth, that used indirection and euphemism to insert starchy Victorian morality into ancient texts. But Greece didn’t have binary, good-vs-evil ethics like Israel or Rome. Judeo-Christian principles need not apply.

Powell, an American classicist and demythifying philologist, depicts Odysseus as a truly Greek hero. His moral code rests on one quintessentially Greek precept: winners win. Period. Odysseus lies to serve his advantage. He uses physical violence against the weak and powerless. While Penelope remains chaste, awaiting her husband’s return, Odysseus sleeps with Kalypso for eight years. Sure, Homer says it’s forced, but it serves his ends, so why stop now?

Nietzsche meant this when he extolled “the will to power.” Unencumbered by Platonic philosophy or Christian humility, knowing that Hades erases all human distinctions, Odysseus has one opportunity for immortality. Only by winning, by making himself mythic, will mortals remember him hereafter. This eliminates false pretenses of meekness, politesse, or charity. Odysseus wins, by Zeus, which is why you’re reading this review 2,800 years later.

This new translation eschews the self-conscious poetry of translators from Chapman to Fagles, focusing instead on capturing the stirring emotion this text originally inflamed in Greek audiences. This reflects a thesis that pervades Powell’s career: he believes ancient Greeks loved Homer so much, they invented alphabetic writing just to preserve his poetry. Powell’s idea remains controversial, yet reading this muscular, tenacious translation, one could believe that’s true.

Powell situates Homer in his time, when mysterious ancient ruins made living humans feel small. Singing myths of bygone eras gave Homeric civilization meaning. Powell uses linguistic clues to posit a very thin biography for Homer; through process of elimination, he places Homer at Euboea in the Ninth Century BCE. Though acknowledging the ongoing controversies surrounding Homer’s identity, and even existence, Powell nevertheless hangs a persuasive biography on plausible premises.

Set in the waning days of mythological Mycenaean civilization, the Odyssey reflects ancient belief in even ancienter greatness. Odysseus embodies values that seem strange to us, yet tweak our primordial tendons. Kings rule because innate greatness gives them moral authority over the weak. Gods dispense good and evil by turns, for reasons beyond human ken. Heroes are not born; divine blessing and human effort conspire to turn mere mortals heroic.

Corollary to mythological greatness, all change equals decline. While Odysseus performs heroic feats to return home, an indolent cadre of “suitors” occupy his house, putatively wooing his wife. But the spend their days drinking wine, eating roasted meats, and apparently playing bocce ball. In Powell’s translation, these scenes have a “you kids get off my lawn” cantankerousness, verified when Odysseus rewards their sensuous mooching with swift, violent death.

Homer’s Odysseus isn’t removed from us only in time. He’s fundamentally different from ourselves, occupying a culture, a moral space, that doesn’t resemble ours. You don’t read the Odyssey; you vanish into it. As another famous time traveler said: “You can't just read the guide book. You've got to throw yourself in, eat the food, use the wrong verbs, get charged double and end up kissing complete strangers—or is that just me?”

Modern audiences often have trouble with Homeric stylings, particularly repetitive epithets: “So-and-so of the nodding plumed helmet.” Powell asserts that these repeated tropes are essential to Homer’s verse. Homer didn’t memorize 12,000 lines of dactylic hexameter; he composed the epic afresh with each telling. Thus, invoking “shrewd Telemachos” or “flashing-eyed Athena,” as Powell’s translation does, reflects gut-level narrative techniques that most modern translators simply lose.

By contrast, Powell translates neither Homer’s literal meaning nor his form. He focuses on the experience of encountering Homer brand new, a visceral experience lost in most renditions. He imbues repeated tropes, like “When early-born Dawn spread out her fingers of rose,” with an unforced freshness reminiscent of 1970s pop songs. This feels spontaneous and new, rather than (like schoolbook translations) official, bloodless, and inert. Powell’s translation moves, by damn.

If, like me, school put you off Homer, maybe it’s time to try again. Barry Powell’s visceral, risk-taking translation restores Homer’s original, heroic, somewhat dangerous immediacy. And if Powell’s theories about language are correct, all literature begins here, with the invention of the tool that makes Western Civilization possible: the alphabet. Time has come to try discovering Homer’s majesty with fresh eyes.

Krazy Kat's Eternal and Absurd Songs of Love

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 31
Monica Youn, Ignatz: Poems

For over thirty years, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip featured the gender-ambiguous title cat singing strangely poetic love lyrics to Ignatz Mouse. Ignatz would respond by flinging bricks at Krazy Kat’s head, and Offissa Pupp, who absolutely adored Krazy Kat, would arrest Ignatz, which apparently made no difference. Through two world wars and the Depression, the same arc replayed thousands of times against a strange Arizona dreamscape.

Monica Youn, a Constitutional law attorney who moonlights as a poet, explodes the mind of such self-destructive love. The way Krazy Kat channels various high-minded poetic stylesgets translated into an ambitious poetic expedition that crisscrosses diverse mental landscapes, but tantalizingly never quite resolves. Appropriating the Krazy Kat persona, Youn courts Ignatz with grace and beauty, in a remarkably bleak demonstration of utter romantic futility.

Youn’s poetry is consistently image-driven, but varies in its linguistic approach. Some poems run straight and plain-spoken, all ragged ends and modern free verse. Others resemble Shakespeare, Chaucer, the great anonymous French troubadours. But even when her language runs very high-flown and consciously constructed, she retains a sly will to subvert herself, as in “Ignatz Invoked”:

A gauze bandage wraps the land
and is unwound, stained orange with sulfites.

A series of slaps molds a mountain,
a fear uncoils itself, testing its long

cool limbs. A passing cloud
seizes up like a carburetor

and falls to earth, lies broken-
backed and lidless in the scree.

This fairly accurate invocation, less of Ignatz than the characters’ shared Arizona landscape, embodies Youn’s approach to poetic structure. Her tone may run lofty and exalted, but she recalls the images of the hardpan desert and its equally sun-baked citizenry, just like Krazy Kat does. The juxtaposition runs both ways, though, as her free verse implies untapped wells of philosophical potential, a mind deep but unschooled, as in “Ersatz Ignatz”:

The clockwork saguaros sprout extra faces like planaria stroked by a razor. Chug

say the sparrows, emitting fluffs of steam. Chug chug say the piston-powered ground squirrels.

The tumbleweeds circle in retrofitted tracks, but the blue pasteboard welkin is much dented by little winds.

Though poems like these lack some objective center as such, they nevertheless encapsulate concisely the grim landscapes, and even grimmer characters, populating Ignatz’s world. The “piston-powered ground squirrels” and other steampunk images derive directly from Herriman’s surreal setting, but they also capture the mixed naturalism and technology of Southwestern culture. The clockwork images of circling tumbleweeds and steaming sparrows both warm and chill the soul.

Youn’s (and Herriman’s) austere landscape reflects the characters’ bone-dry, blasted spirits. Krazy Kat and Offissa Pupp both love in vain, pouring their dedication down a well. Ignatz hates with equally futile intensity, repelling others’ pledges of devotion with uncloaked violence. Youn seldom directly says “love” in these poems, but the sentiment percolates through her words, alongside the characters’ useless sincerity, in verses like “The Subject Ignatz”:

Even as a lawn
or tree

is more attractive
when configured

as individual
leaves

than as
a seamless

green
integument.

Individual poems defy concise synopsis; Youn frequently rejects overtly the strictures of MFA workshops (for good or ill). But together, her verses create a strange heartbreaking gestalt where the deeper one feels, the more certain one’s disappointment becomes. Love and loathing are equally futile. Though her tone only becomes clear over time, outbreaks of undisguised emotion perforate poems like “Ignatz Pursuer”:

her nostrils straining to the limits
of their stretch and her lips glued shut

and her fingers clamped over her mouth
for good measure she is running

running from Ignatz and the night
like a drumskin and her heart like someone

locked in the trunk of a car and if there were
only time god she would spit it out

An insistent, almost Pink Floyd-ish rhythm underlies this and other poems, though it frequently isn’t obvious until second or third reading. One could imagine Krazy sitting roadside, as he (she?) often did, strumming his guitar and singing these bleak, unforgiving blues to ears that will not hear. Youn’s rhythms often run so subtle that you won’t notice they’re even there until you realize your heartbeat has adjusted to match her.

Long before Samuel Beckett spotlighted life’s intrinsic futility, George Herriman showed comedic characters trapped in eternal loops of feeling and desperation. Youn borrows Herriman’s century-old imagery to tell a story both insistently modern and somehow timeless. Krazy’s feelings remain forever unrequited (each part ends with “The Death of Ignatz”), yet we share in his strange, doomed romance.

Today's Best Future Poets

Brenda Shaughnessy (editor), Best New Poets 2013: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers

They say (“they” who?) that more people write poetry today than read it, creating a bottleneck for aspiring poets. Unless you’re Mary Oliver or Yusef Komunyakaa, getting published in reputable magazines requires years-long dedication and career planning that makes software engineers look like slackers. That’s why books like this offer hope. Not only do new poets emerge, but systems exist to ensure the transition from “new” to “seasoned” poets.”

Editor Brenda Shaughnessy compiles fifty poets whose sole criterion for inclusion is that they haven’t published a full-length book yet. Thus her collection includes everyone from sturdy journeyman poets whose first book is impending, to promising students whose scanty résumés don’t matter to their dedicated backers. These are poets who cannot trade on their names and reputations. They have to stand out, because readers judge each poem on its merits.

Shaughnessy has no unifying theme. Her poets represent a diversity of styles, themes, backgrounds, and aesthetic judgments. Though we see a heavy representation of deeply personal verse in this collection, that only reflects trends in the larger poetry community. Even “personal” has personal meaning here: unlike the maudlin shoegazing sometimes prevalent in poetry classrooms, we get truly unique experiences, like Jennifer Givhan’s “Karaoke Night at the Asylum”:

When I was eleven, my mother sang karaoke
at the asylum. For family night, she’d chosen

Billie Holliday, & while she sang
my brother, a fretted possum, clung

to me near the punch bowl. I remember
Mother then, already coffin-legged—

mustard grease on her plain dress,
the cattails of her hair thwapping along

with the beat…

Several poets follow Givhan’s lead, pushing themselves beyond repeating formulae learned from other poets, until they tell stories only they could tell, in ways only they could tell them. This means blunt honesty, but it also means closely held truths: the best poetry, in this collection and elsewhere, is profoundly intimate. Poets take audiences into their confidence, often at great risk. Consider Michelle Bonczek’s “Entering the Body”:

All I could think of at first
was cooking. Of that skinned

rabbit in my freezer, fur torn, gaze
jammed between a package of phyllo

and a carton of ice cream.
Of all that succulent meat

dripping from its own skeleton,
sweet marrow, and a bottle of merlot, but

even here
I end up in the palace of longing...

Don’t let the couplets confuse you. Though both these examples share that form, nobody’s beholden to any moddish custom; even within that poem, Bonczek becomes increasingly diffuse, her stanzas growing and changing like some radio signal fighting the static. Many poems experiment with form; others eschew it altogether. And for readers still persistent in believing poetry should rhyme, there’s verses like Amy Woolard’s “A Girl Gets Sick of a Rose”:

When I asked for a pencil, they gave me a rattle.
When I asked for a hammer, they gave me a kiss.
All mongrel, no matter, I’ll stay out past dinner;
I’ve practiced the answers to all of their tests.

I’ve given up sweets, their ridiculous shapes,
Their instructions on which ones have cherries.
Everything under the sun is lukewarm;
The poppies are blooming with worry.

(I know, that’s a pretty broad use of “rhyme.” Other poems, like Claudia Burbank’s “TGIF,” featuring Greek Gods having a weekend cocktail, are more conventional. But I really, really like Woolard’s moxie.)

Each poem, each poet, is essentially self-contained. Nobody here has the cachet of Billy Collins or Natasha Trethewey, whose poems remain quite good, but whose names have indisputable brand recognition. We judge each poem on its unique merits. If one particular verse doesn’t move us, it’s like listening to the radio: wait three minutes, another song will begin. That song will be different, independent, and speak its own unique language.

Besides the poetry itself, this book includes two important appendices. “Participating Magazines” and “Participating Writing Programs” include contact information from publications and schools which submitted work for consideration from eligible writers. That is, they include means of contacting magazines that encourage submissions from journeyman writers, and schools (mostly graduate programs) that help students establish careers beyond the sheepskin. Huzzah!

Numerous best-of-year collections appear annually, and most are quite good. Whether they sample poetry broadly, or subdivide it by demographic or region or whatever, they give exciting overviews of artistry in their time. But this one’s different. It focuses on the future, not the past. 2013 is over, this collection says, but these fifty poets’ best work is still ahead. And so, by implication, is yours.