May 20, 2013

Review by Anita SullivanPlaying Bach in th DC Metro by David Lee Garrison

PLAYING BACH IN THE D.C. METRO
by David Lee Garrison

Browser Books Publishing
2195 Fillmore St.
San Francisco , CA 94115
ISBN: 9780982850169
2012, 63 pp., $16.00
www.browserpublishingsf.com

“Having an instrument does not make a panhandler a busker. The simple difference is being able to play competently”
Oregon Vagabond Motivator News, the street newspaper of Eugene, OR, February 2013, p. 2

What if busking on the streets included poets! They would join jugglers, actors, acrobats, and a whole variety of musicians in that age-old line of work. Perhaps if they wiggled suggestively and jumped around while they called out their words—as they do in poetry slams—and if their articulation, cadence and dramatic pauses were smoothly executed, they might be able to hold down regular performing spots around the cities of the world, to ply their art.

This collection—whose title poem is about a famous violinist briefly agreeing to do a stint as a street musician—might be regarded as a set of potential busking poems: they are brisk, fluid, and conversational. They are full of vivid sensual images and short dramatic incidents of the kind that might stop a commuter as she emerges from the top of the escalator stairs in, say, the Bethesda, Maryland Metro Station, where the low-ceilinged, semi-outdoor parking lot is a mass of concrete that turns even the brightest day into a kind of grayish purgatory.

Here, in the Fall of 2002, I stopped to listen to three teenage violinists quite competently play a Bach double violin concerto, their battered cases open in front of them. So glorious and penetrating was this music that we could all hear it very faintly from the bottom of what seemed to me at the time to be one of the steepest and longest stairways into any underground train system in the world. The music drew us up like gold from hell, numbed and bound as we all were by the deep poison of the city’s endless machine voice. And there, as our heads slowly appeared above the horizon, were the performers contorting on the pavement, and as David Lee Garrison says in his title poem, the music …

sang to the commuters in the station
why we must live.

From this opening salvo Garrison’s poems move deftly through all the senses, including humor. We are offered bits of fruit to lick and crunch as we are treated to a dialogue between God and Dog, in which Dog asks for a companion:

So God made Man

with hardly any sense
of smell and just two legs.

And God said to Dog.
“He has only a few words

like ‘come’ and ‘fetch,’
and he knows little of the earth

and its redolence, but let him
totter along behind you and learn.

After this he (Garrison, not God) offers us two quick and delicate sketches of birds among tree branches, suffused like Japanese paintings, with hints of season. Here is “November”:

Like black notes
on gray staves

of oak and ash,
grackles gather.

Measure by measure,
they lade the branches,

then swirl away
in speckled clouds.

It’s churlish, of course, to hold an author too closely to any theme that might be implied by the title of his book. And yet, although a kind of transition from sense perception and image, into incident and personal anecdote takes place long about the middle of this book, I feel the collection remains quite  true—even down to the food fight on page 43 – to the title’s metaphorical strength. Bach, after all, is a force not to be trifled with, and truthfully, every single piece he ever wrote had a poem in its heart and a story misting out from that poem. If, like the photo on the cover, the heart of this collection remains touched by a violin, it’s most definitely one with gut strings.

____________

Anita Sullivan is an essayist and poet who writes about early keyboard temperaments, translation, gardening, religious philosophy and Greek islands. She has published two essay collections, a poetry chapbook and a full-length collection of poems. She is a member of the poetry-publishing collective Airlie Press, and lives in Eugene, Oregon.

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October 25, 2012

Review by Anita SullivanStorm Crop by Stacie Leatherman

STORM CROP
by Stacie Leatherman

BlazeVOX [books]
76 Inwood Place
Buffalo, NY 14209
ISBN: 978-1-60964-051-4
2011, 120 pp., $16.00
www.blazevox.org

I admit it. I have a fixed idea of what a poem should do and be. It’s not the same fixed idea still held by many members of the largely non-poetry-reading public, who after 100 years of evidence to the contrary, will persist with the bewildered question, “Isn’t poetry supposed to rhyme?” It’s certainly not the same idea I held five years ago, much less six months. Nonetheless, over many years of relishing what I believe to be an enormous variety of poetic material, I–like many other poets and readers of poetry–have naturally developed a set of limits beyond which a thing simply doesn’t do what I expect poetry to do.

This is reasonable, of course–to have borders around your reading preferences, provided you water them now and then so they won’t petrify or ossify, and you can still chop your way through to the jungle outside. But to be a good reader, when and how am I allowed to be annoyed, puzzled, and just plain bored by a published grouping of words presented to me as “poems,” that, in the end, I am unable to muster any sustained attention for, even if I know the work represents a skilled and passionately realized version of a category of poetry fully robust in our time?

This is the dilemma that I face when I am confronted with what I understand to be “language poetry”–that is, poetry that offers words and word-groupings for their own sake, not so much for what they mean, but simply to let them have a go as beings at large in their own world. I am at a loss to know how to read this stuff.

In my own bewilderment, I hereby offer a brief chronicle of a recent journey through a collection of such poems by Stacie Leatherman, called Storm Crop.

* * *

The collection is arranged as an abecedarium, which means in this case that each poem’s title is simply a letter of the alphabet, in alphabetical order–27 poems including an extra at the end. This would tend to suggest to the reader that the subject matter will be pretty wide open.

Sometimes “abecedarium” is called a poetic form, but I don’t think it is, because letters of the alphabet alone do not invite or cause a repeatable pattern complex enough to wrap itself around an entire poem. Leatherman herself, in an interview with Emprise Review, responds to the matter of the abecedarium by vacillating back and forth between how important form is to her work, and how much she feels the necessity to flout it. “Too much control can be death to a poem,” she says, and on the other hand, “Form has always been important to me.” She seems to regard the abecedarium as a “strict parameter” (i.e. poetic form) and thus chose it as a way to organize her poems. But she adds, “I didn’t do too much C is for that, L is for that, before it started to wander away.” I think she enjoyed keeping the letters as titles because they gave her freedom from form, and offered a lantern in the dark whenever poetic inspiration faltered. Not a bad way to operate at all.

And speaking of lanterns in the dark, the alphabet acted for me as a set of training wheels while I was floundering through the poems trying to figure out how they were meant to be read. In the end, I basically left the fickle alphabet behind, because it seemed to me that what emerged instead of a “form,” or even a coherent set of ideas, was a structure more like subatomic particles in a cloud chamber, tending to coalesce around certain areas or fields. In this case, the two main force fields that I eventually felt my way into were the brain and the body.

All language poetry, by my understanding, is fundamentally word-oriented, and brain-oriented. In using the word “brain” I am deliberately calling up the split between “mind” and “body,” and I would place “brain” firmly with the physical–that is, the bodily realm. This kind of category talk invokes the three-way physical (body), emotional (heart), spiritual (soul, mind, imagination) model that has been around for centuries in a variety of religious and cultural contexts.

I receive Leatherman’s as primarily brain/body poems rather than mind/body poems. And this may be, for me, the rub. Since I am very much a mind and heart poet (I say that clinically, as in a category, not arrogantly, as in “I am a warm vibrant person and you are a cold intellectual fish”), it has been difficult for me to find a way into these poems at all, much less a charitable one. The same holds true for other poems or collections that compute for me as “language poetry.” Here, then, is my–what shall we say–my incomplete gloss of Storm Crop.

* * *

A – The first poem opens with (what turns out to be) a declaration of the brain and body theme: “the body’s metric/not the end but the anarchic, semantic crust….” The reader feels the immediate excitement of a journey that might include tantalizing literary allusions as well as some viscerally satisfying realism.

There is also, in this first poem, the suggestion of a game, a kind of treasure hunt. What are the rules? See if you can find, buried among the wooly fragments, a discrete thread to hold onto. In this case, the thread keeps re-appearing as the letter A itself, standing alone as if it were a character: “A for birds of paradise”; “A is for order. Paradox”; “A for the before that was never before.”

The ascetic, martinet reader is somewhat mollified. Perhaps the seemingly interchangeable sentence fragments that signal this to be language poetry will have a cumulative purpose after all.

B – Here the poet continues the alphabet game with a new device. “Dear B,” the poem begins. How charming! A letter to a letter. Reading further in this lineated poem, I found references to letter-ish matters, such as Braille, “unabridged edition.” And the word “letter” itself is repeated often enough to satisfy the neophyte treasure hunter. In addition, the body is featured as a kind of counter to the brain, so that the reader might begin to think back to the opening of the A poem and suspect “Oh, this collection is going to be a neat game, in which the alphabet is utilized in a dazzling variety of ways, and there is a battlecock and shuttledore between physical and mental….”

Feeling cautiously excited, I moved ahead to C, D, and E.

C – But alas, already the poem seems to regret signing a contract with the abecedarium, and begins to wiggle out of any further obligations to continue that game. Granted, there are a lot of C words poked into this poem, but they lack whimsy, imagination, any suggestion of an attempt to resonate with one another or anything else. They seem to be there simply out of a vague, residual duty to C-ness, with no need for either music or meaning.

D – The alphabet weakens even further. “Eventually D knocks, we want nothing to do with it,” says the poem in the 2nd long paragraph of a four-paragraph prose poem. The poem seems to sputter, making spasmodic feints with the letter as if the poet is trying to work herself up to a subject.

E – This poem is built out of questions which seem to emerge from a despondent lover questioning her value as a physical being. The body theme asserts itself once more. But the questions feel empty, lacking the heft of true anguish. Perhaps if there were a context around them, they would have a chance to growl and crawl and start generating that strange miasma that always seems to rise above a good poem….

At this point (deprived of my miasma) I felt myself descending into a slough of despond, so I thought to change my attitude by changing my reading strategy. This kind of poetry seems to call for a “gang reading” approach–I mean, surely the devotees of the genre must have developed a skimming technique, a way of ingesting all the verbiage that only peripherally involves the expectation of clarity and new insight. I tried a kind of Scrooge McDuck approach–if you remember the Disney comic book character who used to enjoy his swimming pool full of money: “First I dive around in it like a porpoise; then I burrow through it like a gopher; then I toss it up and let it fall onto my head.”

“What’s the speech of sand?” says the F poem, and “Precision, my dear, isn’t everything,” admonishes G.

Bolstered by these insights, I just jumped into the pool, letting the words flow over me, hoping they would sink into nooks and crannies of brain, heart, and spirit they might not usually sink into. Above all, by this time, I wanted to feel something.

I found many wonderful lines, such as “I joyous,” unexpectedly in the middle of the letter J poem. In the L poem I got a sniff of surrealism, and wanted more. The R poem was musical in its religious imagery and repetitions, and probably would qualify as my favorite in the collection.

But. Nevertheless. “What is it, exactly, I missed,” says the Z poem (without a question mark), and I would say the same. For despite my efforts I came away from this collection feeling my insides all cluttered with words, as happens with the flash-flash images during the preview segment of the contemporary movie-theatre experience. I could not get away from my habitual need for some kind of moving-towards, a charging up, a clearing of paths; instead the whole thing felt static, confused, and in some way disingenuous. “What is essential is invisible to the eye,” said the Little Prince, and I agree this might well be so. But in a good poem what is essential is urgently present somewhere, or it is not. Both possibilities do exist. I simply could not, in this collection, read my way into a sufficient vitality to keep my imagination alive.

____________

Anita Sullivan is an essayist and poet who writes about early keyboard temperaments, translation, gardening, religious philosophy and Greek islands. She has published two essay collections, a poetry chapbook and a full-length collection of poems. She is a member of the poetry-publishing collective Airlie Press, and lives in Eugene, Oregon.

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October 1, 2012

Anita Sullivan

ON TRANSLATING NIKOS GATSOS’ AMORGOS

I want to tell you about a Greek poem I once spent an entire year translating, even though it’s only eight pages long if scrunched into the generic single-spaced, 11-point online screed that passes for elegant reading nowadays.

The booklet I translated from was 35 pages, double-spaced, in a lovely italic font, and thus would qualify as “free-range” by allowing enough pacing room for each of the many wild creatures enclosed therein.

Legend has it that Nikos Gatsos wrote “Amorgos” during a single night in 1943, when he was 33 and World War II was tearing his country apart. The poem is divided into six sections, each one composed in a totally different style, but each part achingly lyrical and stunning in the force and uncanny aptness of its images. I have no idea why this poem remains so little known outside of Greece.

It may find its way to a wider audience now, because of the recent popularity of “language poetry,” which it resembles but most certainly is not. “Amorgos” has been called “a surrealist epic,” and if you accept this (which I do), you are taking on the idea that the work must be downright nuclear in its fission capacities. That is, in order to fit the entire Story of Greece into a poem slightly shorter than Eliot’s Four Quartets without directly mentioning Odysseus, Helen, Troy, the Argonauts, or any of the Olympian gods, is an awesome feat. The poem imbricates–a word I learned recently–which means it is constructed like overlapping roof tiles. You can’t stop reading, not because there is a plot that keeps you hanging, but because you are always sliding down to the next little section of roof.

For me, “Amorgos” feels like a kind of cross between Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” I was driven to translate the entire poem because at a very vulnerable time in my life, someone in a dark coffee house passed me a fragment from the end of Part I:

And so she sleeps, my tender love, naked among cherry blossoms,
a girl unwithering as an almond branch,
with her head leaning on the crook of her arm, and her other hand
              resting upon her golden coin,
upon its comforting warmth, while slowly and quietly like a thief
from the window of spring, enters the Morning Star that shall waken her!

Notice! Notice! Notice! The exclamation point so unashamedly placed at the end. A quick glance through the rest of the poem shows how rare, how deliberate was this placement, like setting a stone into a mosaic. A poet earns trust by such delicate attention to the doorways through which love may pass unemcumbered.

The golden coin, the almond branch, the thief, the Morning Star–all these are essential poetic material in Greek tradition, but you don’t have to know that to feel yourself swimming in what could become “formula” if carelessly arranged. As soon as I learned enough Greek to read this fragment in the original, I sought out the rest. At the time I was unable to find an English translation of the entire poem*, so I sat with my dictionary and began to generate a picture puzzle by translating word, after word. This is a foolish and desperate way to go about such a task, but sometimes it’s the only way possible.

My original translation has disappeared, as if it were eaten by the wild and the holy. This is as it should be. But later, I found that several others had fallen in love with the poem and like me, had sought to transfer it into English with some of its original power intact.

In reverse, can you imagine translating Gerard Manley Hopkins into anything else? Or Ginsberg’s “Howl” for that matter? Such poems are part charm, part riddle–the meaning is so embedded in the language itself that your translating criterion becomes something totally insane, like: I want the readers of this poem in English to end up lying on the ground in the exact same position as the original Greek readers must have been flung after they read the poem for the first time in 1943.

Coming cold, from another culture, to a lyric poem that makes syntactic sense (that is, it’s mostly constructed in complete sentences), but whose vocabulary of icons is meant to set up an entire super-structure of ideas made from the stuff of shared myth–you have to be very methodical and beat back your tendency to “poeticize.” Only thus will the roof-tiles begin to overlap on your page, and then–even more miraculously–you will start to feel entire sub-sections coalescing into larger tiles, and the whole poem will reveal itself as an ancient Greek Chorus rising in enormous shadows from where it has been long flattened across the stones. The chorus has something to say that builds in increments. Here is one increment, from Part 2:

And may your heart not yield
May your tears not fall on this implacable earth
As once on the icy wastes rolled the tear of a penguin.

Two important images here, water and eyes, will keep returning. For example, in the third stanza of Part 3:

In the courtyard of the embittered the eye has run dry
The brain has turned to ice and the heart petrified

In the short Part 5 he again combines wet with dry: “…amid sighs, tears, hunger, lamentations, and the ashes of underground wells.”

Thus the poem builds, as does Nature herself, accreting material by way of a spiral motion.

With what might seem an almost draconian economy, almost every “thing” the poet mentions comes back around again, filtered, enriched and purified by intercourse with other “things” being similarly whirled. In the opening lines, which immediately evoke the voyage of Odysseus, and which I believe reflect the overcharged imagination of the young poet heading into his all-night writing binge, he quickly veers away from what might have turned into a deliberately crafted parody or extended metaphor on this theme. And by that veering, he is able to introduce a variety of images that ring out over and over throughout the rest of the poem:

With their country tangled up in their sails, and their oars hanging
              in the wind
The shipwrecked sailors slept like stunned dead beasts amid sheets
              of sponges
But the eyes of the seaweed are twisted towards the sea
Hoping the south wind will bring them back to life again
              with newly-dyed sails
For one lost elephant is always worth more than the trembling breasts
              of a girl
May the roofs of the deserted mountain chapels light up
              with desire for the evening star
May birds come in waves to the masts of the lemon trees
With a new way of walking, a steady white breathing
Only then shall come the small-winded bodies of swans
              who have been waiting immaculate, motionless and tender
Amid the steam-rollers of commerce and the cyclones of market-gardens
When the eyes of the women turned to coal and the hearts of the
              chestnut-sellers were broken
When the harvest was stopped and the hopes of crickets began.

Gatsos is dealing from a dear, cherished and largely traditional core-collection of images: the sea, tender young love, eyes, birds, fruit trees, winds and stars by name and location–all remnants of a centuries-old horticulturally-based, and seagoing village society. The images are both specific to Greece and universal (some of one, some of the other), and he doles them out with such finesse that there is always time to forget one before it comes around again. This is essential. In Part 4, for example, the water that has been locked up in ice and in dryness, suddenly begins to flow:

Wake, murmuring water, from the root of the pine tree to find the eyes of sparrows and to revive them by watering the earth with the fragrance of basil and the whistling of lizards.

If there is a central idea emerging from the poem, it would be “persist, do not give up in the face of this current misery and dreadfulness.” Why? Because…

Somewhere an immortal rock exists where a human angel once passing by, inscribed his name and a song as yet unknown by anyone…

When this stone is found again, and the song bursts out, then the world will change:

…the snows will melt on the mountains, the wind will sing like a bird, the swallows will come to life, the osiers will quiver, and men with cold eyes and pale faces, hearing the bells in the cracked belfries ringing by themselves, will find holiday caps to wear and gay-colored ribbons to tie on their shoes. For then no one will ever joke again, the blood of brooks will overflow…and the timid girls will come slowly and quietly to cast their last garments into the flames and to dance about them nakedly…

Gatsos might have neatly wrapped the poem up at the end of Part 4: “but I keep in my fingers the music for a better day.”

Or, with Part 5, a short rant on the quixotic nature of humans.

But instead, he closes with a love poem to Poetry whom he is, in real life, about to abandon. It is an extraordinarily tender and brave lament, from a gifted bridegroom who makes the choice to renounce the One he loves best. “Poems come easily to me. It is the making of a poetry that is difficult. The telling of the truths,” he said later, after this poem had become famous in Greece.

“Amorgos” was a rapid journey through a treacherous swamp by someone with an uncanny and totally flawless gift for stepping on the few solid stones hidden beneath the surface so as never to drown in the mud. What Gatsos feared, I believe, is not that he would start missing stones, but that the swamp would gradually turn into a shallow pool of pebbles and he wouldn’t even notice. This would be bad for him, but also bad for Poetry itself. So, to avoid the curse of his own potential glibness, this young man chose for the rest of his life to restrict his word skills to translating other poets, and writing song lyrics**. To me this seems a tragic act, fully worthy of his mythical heritage.

With Part 6, the final section of ‘Amorgos,’ he sings an achingly beautiful farewell to Poetry:

Year after year I wrestled with ink and mallet, my tormented heart
With gold and fire to make you an embroidery
The hyacinth of an orange tree
A flowering quince to console you
I who once touched you with the eyes of the Pleiades
And embraced you with the mane of the moon, and we danced together
In the summer meadows
On the stubble fields, and we ate together the cut clover
Dark, vast wild one with all those pebbles around your neck, all those
Tiny colored stones in your hair

__________

*The excerpts from “Amorgos” are my own translations, from the 1987 edition, published by Ikaros, Athens. I have been guided by the translations of Sally Purcell: from her 1980 version, posthumously published in 2004 as a 64-page book by Anvil Press Poetry, London; and of Diana Gilliland Wright, copyright October 2007, www.nauplion.net. Other translations are available, for example from Kimon Friar and Marjorie Chambers, and I have another one or two floating around as anonymous xeroxes. The more the better, is what I say.

** This is in no way meant to imply that song lyrics can never be “as good as real poetry,” although they usually are not. What I mean here is that Gatsos himself apparently saw a difference between being a words-only poet, and being a poet who wrote his words to be set to music, and he deliberately chose to maintain that distinction in his life work. An excellent book of his song lyrics in Greek comes from Ikaros, Athens, 1995 (third edition), and the title, which is lineated like a small poem, translates “blow breeze, blow me/ but don’t let up until. . .”

The final song in this posthumously-published collection is a segment of a cycle entitled “Mani Vespers,” that the publisher indicates in an epilogue was a large, many-part work the poet had been occupied with for years. The book was delayed in publication because Gatsos wished to have the cycle included in its entirety, but apparently died before he was able to finish it. Is it possible that he was working his way back into poetry through the medium of his beloved songs?

__________

Anita Sullivan is and essayist and poet who writes about early keyboard temperaments, translation, gardening, religious philosophy and Greek islands. She has published two essay collections, a poetry chapbook and a full-length collection of poems, and writes regularly for the Weekly Hubris. She is a member of the poetry-publishing collective Airlie Press, and lives in Eugene, Oregon.

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March 30, 2012

Review by Anita SullivanFire on Her Tongue

FIRE ON HER TONGUE: An eBook Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry
edited by Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy

Two Sylvias Press
P.O. Box 1524
Kingston, Washington 98346
ISBN: 978-1-937860-24-0
2012, 460 pp., $7.99
www.twosylviaspress.com

How many of us have been totally smitten by a single poem and bought an entire book just to possess it fully? Or a cookbook because of one recipe? Or a collection of short stories, a book of paintings, the complete sonatas of Beethoven for only one movement of one sonata?

And it’s totally worth it, isn’t it? Even after you discover that your sweetheart was (gulp) the best poem in the whole collection, and you probably could have downloaded it from the website where you first read it and saved the price of the book.

But it wouldn’t be the same at all, not at all.

Because in the best collections the poems play off one another like facets in a crystal. Some facets more powerful than others, but all of them need to be present to make the full mystery and magic. Ergo, you need to possess the full body of work (emphasis on “possess” and “full body”).

I can guarantee you, if you buy Fire On Her Tongue: An eBook Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry, you will be smitten by a much larger percentage of poems than most collections you have now on your shelf. Trust me, I’m a poetry-reading curmudgeon of the highest order.

This book is presented by the Seattle-based editors, Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy as “the first electronic collection of poems by women writing today.” That in itself it pretty cool, and one wonders “why not?” and “why did it take so long?” Yes, the formatting technology is definitely up to the task of at least normal free-verse poetry, with its limited variety of line breaks, and that’s a relief. Somebody else has done the pioneering. The book includes 73 poets, some very well known, quite a few not.

I confess, I approached this book with a little trepidation, being the curmudgeonly reader that I am (not jaded–no, no, not that–but seasoned). I confess to the following negative push-button-response categories: female “body parts” poems, poems that whine but don’t really grieve, poems that are built from details of the poet’s daily urban or suburban life, love poems in second person, clever poems, poems that are primarily language-driven at the expense of thought or imagination. That takes in a whole lot of territory; yet while there are some of these in the collection, they are fewer than I had anticipated. My “cringe factor” was blessedly inactive as I scrolled and scrolled, and eventually I just relaxed and enjoyed myself. Hugely.

Nonetheless, my own poetry-rating system was still ticking away as I read, and I kept track as I always do, of my favorites and unfavorites, for future reference. Normally (with books made of paper) as I’m reading I put a penciled check mark in the table of contents beside the poems that I really like, a dash beside the ones that are neutral, and an X beside the ones I don’t like at all. Generally the check marks and Xs balance one another out, and the dashes are by far the most numerous. I do this for a variety of reasons, and always bearing in mind every poem, no matter how many of your buttons it pushes, deserves to be read more than once.

But we also develop our critical skills by this kind of careful reading. And, probably, along the way, we strengthen the imagination, which by some counts is the same as the soul, immortal or otherwise.

Applying my special ad hoc poem-rating system, Fire On Her Tongue racked up a total of 44 check marks, and only two Xs which (for me) is off the charts. “Ergo,” I have to say loud and clear, “This is a fine book. I recommend it!” To call it “Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry” is of course far too ambitious for any book on the planet. Even if it were simply called “Anthology of Women Poets of the Pacific Northwest” the editors would have been wallowing in an impossibility of richnesses (and, understandably enough, the collection does weigh quite heavily with poets from the editors’ home state). But this is merely an observation, not a criticism. Plenty of poets are included from exotic places like New York, Michigan, Vermont, Alaska, Greece, and even New Jersey! All of which goes to show—what? That where a poet lives doesn’t affect the poems she writes? Wrong! That where she lives doesn’t affect the quality of the poems she writes. Right!

In the end, it’s the poems I remember from a book, not the poet(s), and probably that’s a good thing. If you’re a regular reader of poems, you’re likely a secret bird-woman, like me. You have poem-feathers sticking to your body—after awhile, these many feathers become a cloak that follows behind you without exerting any weight or friction, and in fact, (pushing the metaphor way beyond its capacity) your poem-cloak billows and deflects Meaning as it comes galumphing towards you, so that you are more than average reinforced in your path through life.

These–(I thought you’d never ask)–are the poets from Fire On Her Tongue (the title, by the way, seems to have come from the middle of a prose poem by Debra Ager called “Fires on Highway 192”) whose poems got one or more checkmarks from me as outstanding: Kim Addonizio, Deborah Ager, Lana Hechtman Ayers, Dorothy Barresi, Elizabeth Bradfield, Ronda Broatch, Gloria Burgess, Madeline DeFrees, Patricia Fargnoli, Annie Finch, Kathleen Flenniken, Maya Ganesan, Kate Greenstreet, Lola Haskins, Jane Hirshfield, Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Luisa A. Igloria, Tina Kelley, Dorianne Laux, Jenifer Browne Lawrence, Erin Malone, Marjorie Manwaring, Frances McCue, Patricia Smith, A.E. Stallings, Molly Tenenbaum, Katrina Vandenberg, Sarah Vap, and Rachael Zucker.

Most of these poets I was totally unfamiliar with before reading this book. If my “top 44” favorites were to suddenly vanish from the collection, I would still like and admire the book for the variety and skill of the remaining poems. This is a book you can trust.

More books like this need to be published. Hooray for Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy for taking this on!

____________

Anita Sullivan is a poet from Eugene, OR. Her website is: www.seventhdragon.com.

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