September 25th, 2009
Review by James Benton
SHE DANCES LIKE MUSSOLINI
by David James
March Street Press
3413 Wilshire
Greensboro, NC 27408
ISBN 1-59661-105-7
2009, 60 pp., $15.00
marchstreetpress.com
Imagine those famous paintings of dogs playing poker. Now imagine the kind of person who hangs those paintings on the wall of his man-cave, not because he thinks of them as art, but because they are so insipid they make him laugh like a fourth-grader at a fart joke. Meet David James in She Dances Like Mussolini. From the title forward, James reminds us in plain language that winking at the silly often gets us through the dire.
What of the title poem? Using crisp, finely seen details, the poem’s speaker lets us in on a blind date that goes not as badly as one might think. It opens with a few economical lines that capture the essence of the scene like a photograph:
Short & stout
her hair unable to fly loose
from her head
my blind date marches across the dance floor,
arms jerking
The dancer bashes around the room, fist-pumping at the ceiling, and generally flailing in a bizarre parody of dance. But after a while, the rest of the room has fallen in sync with her manic energy, “marching in rows, everyone ordering Chianti.” Past embarrassment or even wonder, the speaker too, finally, succumbs to this woman’s fierce abandon, confessing, “God knows I’m sick: / I dance back.”
This opening sets the tone for the remainder of the book. Check out these titles: “The Politics of an Idiot,” “Dear Feet,” “The Hangover of Love,” “The New Life Soup Game,” “Last Thing a Man Would Ever Say.” Don’t they portend the literary equivalent of a velvet Elvis? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, the simple diction of the poems, their clear and direct address toward their subjects at first make many of them sound underdeveloped. On the other hand, the humor and skewed vantage point of the poems reveals a writer in control of both content and craft, often producing surprisingly humane results.
A poem like “The Other Side of the Coin” is a good example. The poem, a strange, satirical look at gender politics, is best understood in the context of its epigraph from Andrea Dworkin: “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.” In response, the speaker of the poem throws himself at his wife with tenderness expressed in terms of contempt thereby exposing the Dworkin comment as blather.
As good as this volume is, it is also somewhat uneven. A poem like “The Romantic,” seeks to extol the virtues of plain women over the exotic. “I am looking for the dumpy one,” the speaker says, but as egalitarian as he wants to be, in the end he remains merely lecherous, concluding unconvincingly that
I can only imagine
what’s underneath
that dress
Some of the poems would be improved by the omission of their final prosaic commentaries. For example, “If Men Ran the World,” begins as though it is a satirical swipe at men for whom “Dogs Playing Poker” remains high art. Its tone is lighthearted, self-deprecating, and the male reader laughs with guilty self-recognition while the female reader nods knowingly with recognitions of her own.
“When your girlfriend needed to talk to you during the game, she’d appear in a little box in the corner of the TV screen during a time out,”
reads the unattributed epigraph, and the poem that follows is a witty realization of this man-cave fantasy. But in the final stanza, the tone turns a little mean:
The fact is if men really ran the world,
Virtually all interaction with women
would be like this—one click
& she’s in a little box in the corner of the TV,
another click, she brings in ribs & beer,
click, she’s naked,
click, click, she’s gone.
Ouch. This stinging rebuke undercuts the far more successful poem that precedes it. Without these final lines, the poem remains a kind-hearted jab at men’s more slovenly tendencies; because these tendencies are constrained by the conditional “if”of the title, they remain forgivable. With these lines, those tendencies assert themselves and become irredeemable.
Yet meanness in a poem, as Tony Hoagland points out, can be a virtue when handled properly. Take for example “For Open Mic Readers,” an apostrophe to poets-in-training in need of, well, more training. Anyone who has been to a poetry reading with an open mic will understand the withering snarl directed at “neophyte’ poets confident in work “where you rhyme ‘in-ya’ with ‘zinnia.’” We’ve all been there, we all know the feeling, but we have mostly been trained not to speak these thoughts out loud. James manages to break free of the social niceties of polite but false praise and say what we all would say…if only. The final lines sum it up nicely:
You have every right in the world
to be hereAnd we have every right
to leave.
Thank you David James for the courage to be snarky and intemperate on our behalf.
Below the humorous surface of these poems lies a serious engagement with serious matter. Poems that at first seem to be about the minor irritants of daily life turn out on deeper inspection to address weighty themes like the indignities of advancing age or the difficulties of sustaining one’s public persona while the private one gnashes at the seams to bust out. “Only So Much No” is not really about a poet whining over rejection slips so much as it is about maintaining one’s sense of dignity and self worth in general. “Dear Memory,” another apostrophe, this time to an aging man’s unfaithful recall, confronts the unavoidable sense of loss we experience as we contemplate our mortality. And there are many other fine examples in this collection that whistles past the graveyard for us.
Plain spoken and unambiguous, the volume reaches its peak in the touching final poem, “I’ll Take Your Face.” While the title suggests another lighthearted vignette, this expectation is pleasantly subverted, and instead of jokes, the reader is treated to a tender and uniquely conceived love song. The speaker here, at first, is so lost in the frenzy of his emotions that he fails to notice, or to care, about the dead metaphors sputtering from his lips. Following a stanza break, the speaker manages to collect his wits and in a wonderful moment of selflessness, offers his imperfect soul as fertile ground in which his lover’s virtues might
take root & blossom
over every inch of flesh,
petals blooming everywhere
until I’m beautiful enough
for you.
It is a beautiful turn, and a beautiful way to close a worthy collection.
September 24th, 2009
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Prartho Sereno
LOVE OF DISTANCE
He’s enchanted with the idea
of reaching through space,
wants me to wait by the window
while he climbs the far-off mountain,
sets up the light, flashes something back
in Morse code. He says we should begin
studying our dots and dashes, along with
smoke signals, the extravagantly long rolled r’s
of Spanish. Hand gestures of the deaf.
Or we could take the rim trail,
one of us staying on the southern lip
while the other heads north till our bodies
shrink to the size of tree-frogs. Then we can converse
across the canyon without effort, no need
to raise our voices. He is certain this will work,
that the atmosphere at these heights
will bear our words with a clarity
as yet unknown to us.
My faith in these things is weaker.
I dare not tell him the Far-Eastern stories—
the one where the poet builds two houses
on opposite shores of the lake. Gives one
to his sweetheart, who he tells to go in,
take up dulcimer or needlework, learn to love
the lonely ways. Think of the surprise,
he says. One of our faces suddenly shining
between the black birds and reeds.
–from Rattle #27, Summer 2007
September 23rd, 2009
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Susan Abraham
SO YOU SAID WHAT YOU HAD TO SAY
So you said what you had to say, so what
if your words are like a road
that finally got paved;
so what if the wheels
that were always spinning
now have a place to roll,
their own lane beside
the bicycles, and the cars
forever spilling smog.
So now you can say
that the road is yours, too;
that of the great roar
that wakes us each morning,
one tiny squeak is yours.
Now you are the lucky woman
in the supermarket starting
the new line at the new cashier.
Now the parties you dance at
will be above ground
and you will have traded in
your gills for lungs.
And your galoshes will be applauded
at the fashion show for frogs.
In the bleakest urban park,
the pigeons will mimic
your walk, and the tigers,
forgetting the amber sheen
of their own fur, will brush
against your skin saying
what your father said each time
he bought knew shoes:
Feel this, like butter.
All this and more because
of the cryptic company you keep;
all this because you were busted
for lecturing in a private museum
posted with anti-lecture guards,
because your skin overpowered
their fur; your nails, their claws;
your breath became the color of dahlias
reflected in your mother’s long car.
A few words strung on a line
like the whitest sheets
across an alley and everyone’s
muttering. Everyone’s too stunned
to pick up your dropped glove.
–from Rattle #23, Spring 2005
September 22nd, 2009
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Nick Carbo
WHY WOMEN’S KNEES ARE SO PRETTY
In the old days the Blaans believed
that a man could not be told apart
from a woman. The word for man
and woman was not yet known
and there was no father or mother
either, there was just one parent.
Each individual had a penis
and a vagina and these were placed
on each knee. The God Tasu Weh
was the inventor of this being
and he was very proud of his design.
One day the God Fiu Weh saw
that the individuals stopped working
in the fields, stopped cooking
for supper, stopped caring
for the chickens and the pigs.
Fiu Weh noticed that all of them
were too busy having sexual
intercourse with themselves.
They were so enthralled and throbbing
that they could hardly walk or run
away from a python about to devour
their legs. Fiu Weh went to Tasu Weh
and told him that an individual
should have one penis and another
just a vagina. Tasu Weh was
stubborn and said, “If that’s the kind
of people you want to make,
go ahead, I’ll keep mine.”
These days when you see
a man slipping his penis
between a woman’s legs
she tries to bring
her knees together behind
the man’s back because she is
trying to double her pleasure.
–from Rattle #24, Winter 2005
September 21st, 2009
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Erik Campbell
POET AND AUDIENCE
I
The Argument:
You Wondered Why You Weren‘t Published
It’s because the postman has opened
All your submissions and kept them
Tucked your words, as it were, under
His proverbial, federal wing.
And just so you know,
Your love poems work.
He reads them to his wife in bed
Before what has recently become
Most lyrical sex; he even adds
A few verbs here and there
For the sake of flow.
II
The Consolation
But you’ll be pleased to know
He generally leaves your
Enjambment alone
And understands the way irony
Goes; a fulcrum for your failure
And his formally elegiac evenings
Which he now has the diction
And courage to call epiphanic.
His only regret
Is that you aren’t
More prolific.
–from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
