» 2009 » April Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century

April 25th, 2009

Review by Casey Thayer

LAWRENCE BOOTH’S BOOK OF VISIONS
by Maurice Manning

Yale University Press
P.O. Box 209040
New Haven, CT 06520-9040
ISBN 9-780300-089981
2001, 80 pp., $16.00
http://yalepress.yale.edu

The Yale Series of Younger Poets has a long history of highlighting the most promising new talents in American poetry, among them John Ashbery, Jack Gilbert, James Tate, and Robert Hass. However, perhaps due to a need to find “the next big thing” or the difficulty in predicting what kind of poetry will survive the test of time, recent Yale Series judge, W.S. Merwin, has given preference to experimental over solidly-constructed, formal, or traditional poetry (witnessed by his choice of Sean Singer’s Discography as the 2002 winner or his pick of Loren Goodman’s Famous Americans a year later). In one case, however, Merwin’s taste for the strange, poetry that he describes as “not commonplace, familiar, or of an expected kind,” paid off, leading him to choose Maurice Manning’s collection Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions as the 2000 winner. Despite the pitfalls that often plague “experimental poetry,” Manning’s first book builds an engrossing narrative and commands enough authority in voice to excuse his wilder forays into formal experimentation.

The book begins, after an opening lyric, with “Dramatis Personae,” hinting that Manning’s goal is not to craft separate, standalone poems, but instead to create a dramatic narrative surrounding a recurring cast of characters, among them “The Missionary Woman,” whom Booth eventually falls in love and starts a family with, “Black Damon,” Booth’s “pastoral comrade,” “Mad Daddy,” Booth’s father and the narrative’s villain, as well as a supporting cast of other family and community members. Though we begin mostly with Booth’s adolescence, Manning does not follow a chronological narrative. Instead, he slowly builds up his images (most notably, the flaming horse and the Great Field) and shifts forward and backward in Booth’s life in order to end on the two moments of highest drama, the death of Black Damon and the exit of Mad Daddy.

By giving it this structure, Manning reinforces the “vision” aspect of the book, encapsulated in its title. « Read the rest of this entry »

April 24th, 2009

Link • Audio, Poems, Tributes • 3 Comments

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Thadra Sheridan

AFTER THE BOWLING STOPPED

Last night,
this guy played guitar on stage,
and it made me think of you, because
you play guitar on stage.
So I spent the next fifteen minutes
running a mental slide show.

LOS ANGLES:
You gave me half of your egg salad sandwich.
INDIANAPOLIS:
You grab me, because
the smell of gasoline on my fingers
turns you on.
CHICAGO:
We play Ferris Bueller and
follow a kids’ tour group
at the Institute of Arts.
ASHLAND:
You bowl five strikes in a row.

Etcetera, etcetera…
I find this still happens a lot.
Someone’s wearing shoes, so
I think of you, because
you wear shoes.
You drink beverages.
YOU BREATHE AIR!
You can see how this might be a problem.
Sometimes I just
blurt your name out loud in my apartment
for no reason
like a Tourettes outburst,
and I’m supposed to write this
poem about you,
because I keep saying I’m a poet.
And I’ve been trying
for the three years since you stopped
bowling in my presence, but it keeps coming out like,

I hate you, I hate you
I wish I’d never agreed to
date you.
or
The day you left,
the sun set for the last time,
the trees wilted,
and happy little creatures ceased to scurry.
or
My heart
is a block of frozen, solid, petrified, cold, really hard ice
without you.
or
I don’t need you.
Never did.
I CAN OPEN MY OWN PICKLE JARS
MOTHERFUCKER!!!

Oh, I can write volumes
about every little
one-night-stand-pointless-encounter-waste-of-saliva
I’ve tried to replace you, but
you?
You’re drying up the ink in
all my favorite pens.
You’re hiding all my journals and
shorting out my keyboard.
You are the quintessential cock block,
if I had a cock.
You are the ultimate writer’s block, if…
No, wait, that one works.
The point is,
I know you can eat a whole egg salad sandwich,
but I appreciate the gesture.
And that stretch of 90/94
from Chicago to Rockford has
never been the same
since I drove it home from the end of time.
And when you stayed over this past spring,
you slept on the couch,
took a shower,
and left.
But it took me three days
to take your towel out of the bathroom
and five more to wash it.
I find I can’t really write about something
until I have a little
distance perspective, but you’re still
mashed up against me like a Siamese twin.
And the kicker is
I can’t even say I want you back.
You were all shades of fiasco.
I was only on your mind if I was
waving my arms in front of you.
And having sex with you?!?
I suspect you wouldn’t have known the difference
if I had been inflatable.
And you only gave me the sandwich because you were
BEING SUCH AN ASSHOLE
So if you asked,
would I take you back?
Yeah I totally would.
And that pisses me off.
But if I was with you right now, I’d be
sitting in some hotel in New York,
getting my ass kicked at Scrabble, or
pitching a makeshift baseball game in
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
And my debt would be twice as ridiculous.
And I’d weigh a hundred pounds, because
you supplement eating and sleeping and
not in any good way.
But I wouldn’t be here.
I wouldn’t be
running my stupid life.
You are the rockstar me I’m
too impatient to wait for.
And you’ve got nothing to do with anything.
Most of my friends don’t even know what you look like.
So you’re all mine.
And a terrible kisser
and a really sore loser.
And I suspect you’ll
litter my life with
unfinished pages about the
empty spaces you
left in my apartment
for years to come.
And tonight,
when someone asks to borrow a guitar pick,
or uses the words,
and
or
the
I’ll think of you;
snapshot something somewhere
away from here and today.
Not much I can really do about that, just
thought I’d mention it, because
it was on my mind.

–from Rattle #27, Summer 2007
Tribute to Slam Poetry

April 23rd, 2009

Link • Poems • 2 Comments

György Faludy

AURORA BOREALIS

Between clouds I looked up at the sky and down on the ground:
snow clouds, snow cover, the same above as below.
The freeze was sitting everywhere, busy at work:
its huge green needle had the whole Bering Sea to sew.

After landing we hunted Japanese soldiers for seven days.
I shared my army ration with seals at the watering hole.
I didn’t question the wisdom of it. I only saw Eskimos
and a painted top hat on the top of a totem pole.

In the hammock of fog, I was bundled up in fur coats
that swallowed up the body like the snow a heavy gun:
that’s how I lived from day to day. I hadn’t even thought
of you till yesterday evening when the patrol was done.

The light! The light! I heard the cook from the kitchen,
and when I stepped outside, there it was above the ice:
like a fluffy muslin curtain it billowed, swayed, and swung,
swimming closer and away, reminding me of something nice,

but what? I stood there pondering. Ruffled shadows were
rocking the light. With my hand on the doorknob behind,
I stared entranced. A hard voice from inside woke me up:
The door! Suddenly you spread your skirt over my mind.

(Kodiak, Alaska, March 1944)

—tr. from the Hungarian by Paul Sohar

–from Rattle #27, Summer 2007

April 22nd, 2009

Link • Poems, Tributes • Leave a Comment

Jeremy Richards

T.S. ELIOT’S LOST HIP HOP POEM

Let us roll then, you and I,
the evening stretched out against the sky
like a punk ass I laid out with my phat rhymes.

The eternal footman is no one to fuck with.
Alas, he shall bring the ruckus.

You think that you can step
to this, and Lo, I hear your steps like Lazarus
echoing through my soul.

Bring the bass.

Straight out of Missouri,
Harvard University in your face.
I’ve got ladies in waiting all over
the place, singing each to each;
do I dare eat a peach?

You are damn right I’ll each a peach.
Who shall stop me, with my Prufrock hip hop
non-stop, clippity clop, clippity clop
I hear the horses carrying the wassailers,
I’m ready to impale their ears with my rhymes
rolling off of my parched tongue
the way trousers roll off my ankles.

I get it done better than John Donne.
Pound for pound, like Ezra Pound,
no other literati around can confound
the post-Victorian quickness I bring
to the microphone, though I shall die alone.

But not before I rock the house.
Watch me douse you in my eternal flames
of a freaky-ass style, my crew has the flow
with European tangent, Kto vahsh otsiets saychoss—
the Russian for Who’s your daddy now.

For I will tell you.
That I have scuttled across the floors of ancient clubs,
and yea, knowing that you may never return,
I will tell you this:
That I have been over to a friend’s house
for dinner, and lo, the food was not any good.

The macaroni, soggy. The peas, mushy.
And the chicken tasted of wood,
like the wooden coffin I’ve created for myself;
if this is going to be that kind of party
I will stuff my desire in the mashed potatoes.
But I tell no lie, I will show you fear
in a handful of hip hop,

making your body rock, your soul shudder,
your utter disbelief when the old school,
the ancient school, returns
from dusty book covers and scorned lovers
to reign again on the open poetry mic.
Bring the pathos! Bring the pathos!
You wannabe MCs just can’t stop…

…’till human voices wake us,
and we back the fuck up

into eternity.