Bill Neumire

July 20, 2011

COME ON ALL YOU GHOSTS by Matthew ZapruderPosted by

Review by Bill Neumire

COME ON ALL YOU GHOSTS
by Matthew Zapruder

Copper Canyon Press
PO Box 271
Port Townsend WA 98368
IBSN 978-1-55659-322-2
2010, 96 pp., $16.00
www.coppercanyonpress.org

Matthew Zapruder’s third poetry collection, Come On All You Ghosts, recently available from Copper Canyon Press, has the same non-sequitir, dreamlike charm as American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002) and The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, 2006). As the philosophers would put it, these poems are constantly negotiating the question of other people, an issue that burgeoned in his debut and has been a motif ever since. In “The Pajamaist,” a poem that Zapruder claims came directly from a dream, the poet presented the sci-fi possibility of a discovery that would enable human beings to take on each other’s suffering. Now, in Come On All You Ghosts, the poet continues that thread and adds to it questions of the difficulty of understanding or reaching each other at all, especially in conveying accurate meaning from author to reader. As a matter of fact, the majority of poems in this collection contain the word “you” and some direct reference to the reader. The closing of “Schwinn” encapsulates this predicament:

                                                                                                     I will
                               never know a single thing anyone feels,
just how they say it, which is why I am standing
here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,
doing what I’m supposed to do.

How does Zapruder attempt to solve the problem of reaching others that he sets forth so painstakingly? Well, for starters, he reveals his own doubts and perceptions through an interior monologue that makes astounding associative leaps. While idiosyncratic and scattershot, the tone and handling of these discursive and excursive thoughts makes them gradually feel universal. Much of this book is homage to deceased poets and writers such as Grace Paley, Robert Creeley, David Foster Wallace, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Kenneth Koch. The book also makes regular reference to the speaker’s own deceased father. Through an effort toward a common pathos and ethos, a bridge can begin. After all, who hasn’t experienced the death of someone meaningful? And isn’t this the time when we are most forced to consider how difficult it can be to reach the ones we think we care so much about? Zapruder has said of his poetry, “I need my poems to be intimately connected with the everyday lives of other human beings.” This is exactly what the reader gets in this collection.

Stylistically, these poems often employ a New York Schoolish habit of journaling the day. They feel very non-sequitir and absurd at times, but tonally they blend mellifluously. In this, Zapruder’s voice has remained constant over his first three books. Additionally, his use of linebreaks to torque and complicate meaning is astounding. These poems move from childhood memories to encyclopedic factoids, to philosophical questions of whether or not we can ever know each other, to resonant assertions. Look, for instance, at these opening lines of “Schwinn”:

                               I hate the phrase ‘inner life.’ My attic hurts,
                               and I’d like to quit the committee
for naming tornadoes. Do you remember
how easy it was to be young
and defined by our bicycles?

The desultoriness, though, works in the way dreams work, and the unstoppable interior monologue creates a spinning merry-go-round you’re trying to keep hold of as you read. A morality emerges in the background of all this, a morality centered on being useful and thinking beyond oneself. This is sublimely evident in lines such as, “I hardly / think of anyone but myself” (“Paper Toys of the World”) or “All I know is I have tried / for a long time to be useful” (“Poem for Ferlinghetti”). Earlier in the book, the speaker declares:

                               I want to stop pretending.
I don’t feel like I’m pretending,

                               But I want to be free
Of this important feeling.

(“Burma”)

Zapruder has also compared his poems to conversations, contrasting them with lectures. This essayistic statement is reflected in the poems of this volume. Look at the way this excerpt from “Poem for Ferlinghetti” operates like a conversation:

                               Now it is later,
                               much, the absolute
worst pure center
of night, for an hour
in bed I resisted coming
here to my desk
to search for those terrible
destructive questions still
hiding from me.
                               Do you do that? Or
                               is there some other way?

The book ends with the longer (13 pages) title poem, “Come On All You Ghosts.” This poem acts in some ways like an envoi, bringing together all of the issues confronted by the text. It begins by addressing the reader, but it ends by directly addressing the many ghosts (of which memory itself is one) present throughout:

                               but ghosts if I must join you
                               you and I know
                               I have done my best to leave

                               behind this machine
anyone with a mind
who cares can enter.

Zapruder’s latest work is an extension of the conversation he’s been having with himself, memory, readers, and even with the dead ever since his debut. It is confident, smart, and hospitable, which is precisely what a poetry collection should be.

____________

Bill Neumire’s reviews have appeared in the Cortland Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, and Umbrella. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Sugar House Review, The Toucan, and Cloudbank. He writes and teaches in Syracuse, New York with his wife and dog. He can be contacted at: wjneumire@msn.com.

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June 20, 2011

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH EXPLETIVES by Kevin ClarkPosted by

Review by Bill Neumire

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH EXPLETIVES
by Kevin Clark

LSU Press
3990 West Lakeshore Drive
Baton Rouge, LA 70808
ISBN 978-0-8071-3645-4
2010, 80 pp., $16.95
http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress

When I was an undergraduate at SUNY Brockport I took a class called “The Writer’s Craft” that featured weekly readings by visiting poets. This was back in 2002 when Kevin Clark was reading from his first book, In the Evening of No Warning. I don’t remember many details, but I recall being duly impressed as a young writer. When I saw that Clark’s second full-length collection had just won the Pleiades book contest, I had to find out if my (hopefully) more experienced taste still received Clark’s work as well as it did back in 2002. I wasn’t disappointed. Clark, who teaches at Cal Poly and the Rainier Writing Workshop, has a winner with his latest collection, Self-Portrait with Expletives (LSU Press, 2009).

The book begins with a proem, “Six Miles Up,” shaped like a Shakespearean sonnet (sans the rhyme and regular iambic pentameter) that works something like a Greek chorus. It’s a catalogue of “As ifs” and sets the reader up for the altitude and distance of this collection’s memory, its hindsight sweep of a life of learning, teaching, writing, and escapades. It also acts as a species of last will and testament with lines like, “As if you, son, were reading this fifty years from now (…) As if you, daughter, bequeathed this poem to your daughter.”

There are only twenty poems in this four-section book, so many of them sprawl out and occupy more space than the factory-line contemporary lyric. In fact, while there is plenty of sound and rhythm throughout, these are heavily narrative poems that flow with a very smooth plot and detailed characters. Characterization is, I dare say, the core strength of Clark’s latest book. I don’t think I’ll ever forget Maurice, a Vietnam vet Clark recalls teaching, a man who “looked like burst flesh will back into a man”; a man who wrote an essay on Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” and was the only student to “scare the wise-ass right out of [Clark].”

It’s a book of a generation with titles like “Eight Hours in the Nixon Era,” “Sixties Noire,” and “James Dickey at Florida.” It’s also an ars poetica at times (aren’t all books?), some of Clark’s and some of Dickey’s, and even some of Auden’s and other characters. In “James Dickey at Florida” Clark recalls a class in which Dickey told everyone, “You don’t fuck around with poetry” (Clark wasn’t bluffing with the collection’s title). He offers, as counterpoint in the same poem, Auden’s question that he posed to winnow students: Why do you write poetry? The correct answer? I like to play with words. Not quite in the same ballpark as Dickey’s “When you’re masturbating (…) / there’s that feeling just before you come… / That’s poetry.”

The expletives in this collection are abundant. The title poem alone (a poem that calls to mind C.K. Williams’ terrific poem “The Gas Station”) employs “douche bag,” “Fuck,” “Goddamn,” “Dumbass,” “bad shit,” “life’s a shit sandwich,” and “skinny-assed pussy.” Does he need to use this language? Absolutely. First of all, it’s the language of the suburban sixties New Jersey characters that Clark so painstakingly creates. It makes them real. Secondly, it’s used in order to expose the youthful bravado and posturing of many of these characters, including the narrator. There’s a humbling self-deprecation evident in many of these poems. A message that says, yeah, we swore and dropped acid and got in some fights, but we were kids and we were trying to figure out the universe. It creates of the expletives a startlingly ironic innocence.

The opening poem, “Six Miles Up,” portends a cyclical strategy at work here. For instance, in “Self-Portrait with Expletives” the narrator says:

It was high school, the suburban sixties.
What did we know? Twelve years later,
when he and I got run off a wet road
in early morning Ohio by some yahoos
in a pickup rigged three stories high,
we were blitzing home to Jersey where
most natives stick for lack of options.

Later on in “Whipping Post” this is manifested in the speaker’s son as the narrator says, “Two minutes later my son will force a pickup halfway into the left shoulder.” Its four sections could be four seasons, everything beginning to repeat with the new generation.

The last section of this book is the poem “Accident Alert,” a poem centered and sound-tracked by tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon’s “I’m a Fool to Want You.” The opening of the poem instructs readers to let the Gordon song play until the 1:23 mark at which point the poem kicks in. For all the efforts poems have made at being music, they never exactly are. But this poem bridges the gap. It cleverly marries the two without claiming they are the same.

In the end, these poems are successful because they move so well together. The narrative carries surprise, grit, and poignancy. The characters assemble, perform, and engrave themselves in the reader’s mind. Self-Portrait with Expletives is, ultimately, Clark’s own moveable feast reflection on a life of teaching, writing, and being an American male over the past four decades.

____________

Bill Neumire’s reviews have appeared in the Cortland Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, and Umbrella. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Sugar House Review, The Toucan, and Cloudbank. He writes and teaches in Syracuse, New York with his wife and dog. He can be contacted at: wjneumire@msn.com.

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January 15, 2011

THE WONDERFULL YEARE by Nate PrittsPosted by

Review by Bill NeumireThe Wonderfull Yeare by Nate Pritts

THE WONDERFULL YEARE
by Nate Pritts

Cooper Dillon Books
San Diego, CA
ISBN 9780984192823
2010, 74 pp., $14.00
www.cooperdillon.com

Recently, I checked out the new press, Cooper Dillon Books, and, after some perusal, I purchased Nate Pritts’ third collection, The Wonderfull Yeare. Why did I choose this title? Well, I found out that Pritts lives in Syracuse just as I do, though we’ve never met. Next, I found out that he graduated from SUNY Brockport, my alma mater. Too much of a coincidence for me to set aside. Pritts even thanks several former professors of mine in his acknowledgements: Ralph Black, Judith Kitchen, and Stan Rubin (the latter two moved to Washington state and started the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program).

Once I received the book and cracked it open, I read the epigraph from Thomas Dekker. Dekker’s original pamphlet, The Wonderfull Yeare, was a multi-genre account of the events of the plague year 1603 in which the word “wonderful” was meant to mean astonishing, not good. Meanwhile, Pritts’ book, a calendar of sorts, is composed of four seasons, and each season is essentially one long poem. Within a poem, lines and phrases manifest and re-manifest in new positions with new punctuation lending new meanings. It’s sestina or pantoum-like in this way, but less predictable because there’s no prescribed algorithm for where or when the language will reappear. But like Januaries and Julys in the calendar of a wonderfull yeare, lines keep returning. As a matter of fact, the book opens with the lines: “Each year it’s the same damn thing / a constant red ache.” As an example of this reincarnation, take this section from “Spring Psalter”: “Darling, I leave you the forever unblooming / twig half-sunk in spring mud (…) / Darling, darling, darling: my voice is a branch that would reach.” Later in the same poem this becomes: “My voice dissipates into hush & whiffs of light, / A twig in spring mud (…) Darling, darling: my voice is a branch that would reach,” and even later in the same poem it becomes: “Darling, I leave you the forever unblooming. / (…) / Darling, I leave you.” I must admit, I’ve never read anything quite like it. Whereas the sestina is almost always (whether or not intentionally) silly, the pantoum always fraught with simple redundancy. The fact that the repetition here is not predetermined allows Pritts to make the poems more impactful.

There are gobs of white space on these pages; the poems take up no more than 14 lines, and there’s always space within and between lines. These are very airy, intangible, poems, thought-emotion machines with little concrete anchoring. Pritts has said that he’s more comfortable writing in a series or collection as a whole instead of writing each poem extempore and compiling them. As a result, this is not the musical album with poppy singles; this is the album that feels like one long song. Because of its holistic composition, it’s a very fast and pure read. Nothing feels forced into place like an errant puzzle piece. Nothing’s struggling to fit the theme; it’s tremendously organic.

As for the individual seasons, spring, here, is not the season of life, but the season of doubt. It’s as though Pritts ignores the conventional symbolism of the seasons and starts over. As a matter of fact, there’s a plenitude of language about renaming later in the book. Following spring, the poems of “Endless Summer” are each four lines long and are typed vertically, ivying up the page. Ironically, “Endless Summer” is the shortest season of the book, composed of only six four-line poems. Next, “Sonnets for the Fall” is an assemblage of 14 poems, 14 lines each. They have the same white space and airy quality as the other seasons, but this time they’re arranged as sonnets, though without the conventions of rhyme and meter. They do, however, address the classic sonnet theme of romantic love: there’s a relationship between the narrator and the “darling.” These pieces then accumulate into a 14-poem season. You’ve got to hand it to Pritts–he’s clever with his own form and moves with acuity therein. And it can be beautiful, as the sonnets don’t begin and end; they roll into each other like an avalanche of fallen leaves. Lastly, there’s winter “& then afterward.” Some of the sections of “Winter Constellations” actually read like haiku. Take “(xii)” for instance:

Snow dropped in clusters,
staggered & jagged
We don’t matter a bit.

Yet other slices of the winter section reveal some of my linguistic concerns. They seem too easy, too unmoored. Take this, for example:

& first sunlight.
Snow continues.
I could never close my eyes to light.
But there was no light
& you looked like night.

It takes a hefty setting of groundwork to build a reader’s trust enough to accept the preceding lines. I’m not sure I completely felt that trust, though I must confess that I haven’t read Pritts’ previous two collections, Honorary Astronaut (Ghost Road Press) and Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX).

So, what’s at stake in these cerebral, yet emotional pieces? It seems to be an abstract struggle against meaninglessness, against “not matter[ing] a bit.” The context is a romance, a troubled romance with a “you” and a “we.” This is a tough and lofty project, and the hovering language doesn’t always feel warranted. Take this section as a second example:

Seasons of travail, happy seasons of agony, the look
of pain & anguish, that same transcience, the seasons
transient, changing, always holding on & then the fall

Certainly, this is plucked up and laid bare in front of you, but it’s representative of the risk this collection takes. On the other hand, there are certainly very poignant, thought and language-provoking sections as well. Here is a personal favorite from “Spring Psalter”:

Proclaim, with me, the dawning
of an attempt to ascertain the meaning, to figure out
where the wires plug in & what, then, might happen.
Reaching, wind-blown, imprecise lack, worry—
these are the many names of the sorry condition
I hope to define. But who can understand the complex
vestiges that limit us, the vast machinery of what
has gone trudging before. Determinant & co-determinant!

In order to be fair, we as readers and critics must have room for more than one poetics. We must meet each poet on his or her own terms. The narrator of this collection operates with a frailty of doubt in a land where negative capability is a passport. What are his terms? In an interview with Elizabeth Hildreth of Bookslut, Pritts said of his own collection, “I want you dizzy & confused right alongside me; I want you befuddled & awestruck while holding my hand. There is no medicine when one is sicke at heart, save ‘comforting speech.’ That seemed crucial to what I was doing in these poems.” Certainly, this book is worth its quick read, and I have no doubt that it will leave you befuddled and dizzy; will it leave you awestruck and holding his hand?

____________

Bill Neumire’s reviews have appeared in the Cortland Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, and Umbrella. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Sugar House Review, The Toucan, and Cloudbank. He writes and teaches in Syracuse, New York with his wife and dog. He can be contacted at: wjneumire@msn.com.

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September 10, 2010

THE REAL WARNINGS by Rhett Iseman TrullPosted by

Review by Bill NeumireThe Real Warnings by Rhett Iseman Trull

THE REAL WARNINGS
by Rhett Iseman Trull

Anhinga Press
P.O. Box 3665
Tallahassee, FL 32315
ISBN-13 978-1934695111
2008, 94 pp., $15.00
www.anhinga.org

In my ever-expanding search for worthwhile literary magazines, I recently came across Cave Wall, a journal edited by Rhett Iseman Trull and her husband Jeff Trull. After a quick Google search of the editor, I found a handful of poems that demonstrated the rare poetic ability to swerve from humor into pathos and regret. A poem like “Naming the Baby for Mark and Terra,” for instance, initially pokes fun at the ridiculous games we play with naming:

Anything
is possible for Thunder/Claw/Cathedral/Wing. Imagine:
how many letters he’ll sign Love, Avalanche

This poem is one of the most entertaining in the collection. It begins light, simply having fun with the idea of naming a child, parodying the ridiculous names only millionaires would give their children. Then it whirls out into the absurd and really has fun:

In the high score columns of which games
blink the initials PWT? Phoenix Wildebeest Trull.
Listen to the roar in twenty-two years
when Mercury Flyer takes the stage, electric guitar
over his shoulder, sparkly indigo pick in his teeth. Hey!
What about Sparkly Indigo? No, make that Indigo Spark.

But after the fun has run its course, the poem turns and becomes denser, more poignant:

as soon as he adventures out of the womb, he belongs to the world,
to its swindle and swoon, its crow and cringe,
where you can’t protect him with a name, you know.
All kids are going to get beat up in some way over something.
At least give him a name he alone can claim as he tumbles
into the fray.

In a recent interview with Go Triad, Trull said of her debut poetry collection, The Real Warnings, “the book is about how life and love are worth the pain.” Winner of the 2008 Anhinga Press prize for poetry, this collection brims with narrative free-verse poems about love, jealousy, insanity, movies, comics, parties, video games and asylums. As a matter of fact, the author explains that many of these poems, though fictionalized, stem from her own adolescent experience with bipolar disorder. Several of these poems are written by a narrator looking back with “the kind blur of hindsight” wishing—or wondering if she should wish—to warn her family, friends, even herself about what will happen. Sometimes they are apologies, sometimes confessions, sometimes accusations, and sometimes jokes. The poems are not an assembly of strangers, but rather they inform each other and accrue meaning from preceding poems.

With 40 poems in 78 pages of poetry, this book demonstrates the poet’s smooth use of metaphorical language, her gift for internal rhyme, and a flood of Carolina sea imagery. Although many of these poems are about romance, break-ups, and jealousy, the book centers around a longer, nine-section poem, “Rescuing Princess Zelda,” about the narrator’s stay in a mental hospital. This poem is populated with characters who endear themselves to the reader: Josh, who plays Nintendo and rescues princess Zelda every night; May, who is in love with all the inmates but sobs after dark; Casey, who plays guitar; Estelle, the orderly who lets Casey play guitar even though the strings are against the rules. At the center of this poem and this collection is a benevolent madness, any danger always directed toward the self. Each disorder catalogued within seems to be simply a reflection of the desires and disappointments, hopes and disillusionments that are universal to characters on the “outside.”

There’s a definite arc in this collection, and it starts with the realization that “love can fail” in the poem “The Last Good Dream”:

And we give
With unthinned hearts, little knowing
How, even if banked by the best words

And buoyed by honesty, love can fail.
Or maybe we do know
And unharbor ourselves anyway.

This knowledge that love can fail pervades the book, yet so does the “unharboring ourselves anyway.” The relationships in this book are full of romance, wit, idiosyncrasies, jealousy, disillusionment, and magic. Ultimately, though the book is centered around the longer poem on a stay in the mental institution, this is a book about love, about the way it fails and then finds itself again, about the way we are built through our relationships, even failed ones.

In terms of style and device, Trull has magnificent command of metaphorical language. In the poem “The Boy in the Full-Length Women’s Fur Coat” she writes, “The sky is a black laugh above him,” and then she ricochets off of that metaphor again in “Solitaire” a few pages later:

he can’t help feeling left out,
As if he’s the punch line to night’s only joke, as if the dreams
He could be having are piling up like unclaimed luggage.

This demonstrates Trull’s acuity with metaphor and simile to build for the reader an emotional connection to the characters in these poems as they proceed from and overlap each other. Likewise, the poet employs images that often take an uncomfortable seat in the Windsor chair of the reader’s mind and stay awhile. Take, for example, this one from “Signs”: “What I can’t say, the tipped-over shopping cart outside Wal-Mart / says for me.”

To be sure, though, Trull’s best, and perhaps most subtle device, is her internal rhyme. It doesn’t beat you over the head like end-rhyme (although she does have a deftly rendered sonnet dropped in toward the end of the book), but it’s there, anchoring the poems with a strong sense of sound, with a calling card attached to these narratives that insists, yes, we are poems. Look, for instance, at this section from “Everything from That Point On”:

drumming your chewed fingernails

with a hollow ruc-a-tuc, ruc-a-tuc on the bumper
of your father’s truck

Now, every reader could use a little levity in a book about love, disillusionment, and contemplations of suicide, and Trull doesn’t fail to offer it up. Look, for example, at “Nobody’s Goddess”:

You’re a goddess we’ve misunderstood.
(…) Please
let us hang our dreams on the hook
of your nose. Let us launch our hopes
behind the talisman of your unibrow.

This is the kind of clever humor at which Trull excels. At times, like in “Picked Up at a Party by Superman’s Super-Hearing,” (which hinges on the final punch line, “Trust me, hon, when it comes / to what matters, / flyboy’s / just a man / after all”) it comes across as too easy, too fluff, but here it’s just the right conglomeration of pathos and punch line.

For most of this book, I was in. I was invested in the narratives, swallowed by the metaphors, and floating in the imagery. There were only a few poems that I glazed over, often the weaker attempts at humor and levity. At its worst, which is maybe two poems, this book can hover over the pages of an emo girl’s suicide diary. At its redeeming best, though, this book is smoothly narrative, populated with great metaphorical language and imagery. Although there are rare exceptions, the narrator of these poems does not wallow in the melancholy of love’s failures, but rather the ability to be a part of the ride at all is often approached with a graceful gratitude.

Trull bookends this collection with her opening poem, “The Real Warnings Are Always Too Late,” a hindsight wish to go back and warn and apologize to her parents for all of the damage she will cause, and then at the end with two crucial poems, the first being “Girls Who Will Never Be Prom Queens.” This is my favorite piece in the collection. It captures all of the themes the author’s been pushing: hindsight, love, disillusionment with love, regret, pathos, even paranoia. The narrator is recalling Mariah, a young girl from her childhood who is dancing in a dress, dazzling all of her onlooker friends. The girls are awash in thoughts of love and benign jealous, but the narrator breaks in:

I want to go outside to the garden
and tell the little girls the truth: that there is no truth.

(…)

                                                         Love is not bluebells
and tadpoles, I will tell them. It’s not even the sweet
bloom of heartache. One day you’ll look up and see
the stars are not windows. They’re blisters on the sky.

But it wouldn’t matter.

(…)

Still those little girls by the marigolds would insist on falling in love.

And here the warnings fall apart. They won’t help. Not only is it too late, but they wouldn’t work, and maybe we wouldn’t want them to, which exactly the vacillation the book leaves readers with:

                                                                                                   I

               am (…) relieved
                                           Not to know what’s coming. Do I want us
               to die at the same time and turn
               into trees or start over
as ourselves: our first
               encounter, kiss, our great mistakes
                                                            ahead

This a fine demonstration of Keats’ negative capability. And this book of poems is a fine read that will leave the reader resonating on the poem that is the book for a good long spell. The Real Warnings is certainly worth the cover price.

____________

Bill Neumire’s reviews have appeared in the Cortland Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, and Umbrella. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Sugar House Review, The Toucan, and Cloudbank. He writes and teaches in Syracuse, New York with his wife and dog. He can be contacted at: wjneumire@msn.com.

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