October 10, 2013

Review by Gregg MossonBar Napkin Poems by Moira Egan

BAR NAPKIN SONNETS
by Moira Egan

Ledge Press
40 Maple Ave
Bellport, NY 11713
2009, 32 pp., $9.00
ASIN: B003N35YGG
www.theledgemagazine.com

Picking up a good book of poetry is akin to entering a new world. Moira Egan’s Bar Napkin Sonnets takes the reader on a bittersweet, sexy, and comic jaunt through the bar scene, being middle-aged without a partner, romantic without a golden cloud, and narrated by a 40-something who’s out and about. Yet, with her handy humanism and hardy lust, this poet in this poetry sequence keeps going to the bars for more adventure and, yes (maybe, well probably not), love. These humorous, endearing, sometimes lonely sonnets all are expertly done: conversational, contemporary, metrical, with occasional rhyme, and paint a short story in snapshots. Overall this chapbook is both a technical accomplishment and simple pleasure. As Egan writes in “Sonnet 22,” parenthetically as if talking to herself:

(I want to fall in love, but not forever.
Is that the truth, or am I still confused
where love’s concerned? Or am I simply used
to Solitary broken by Whoever …

Bar Napkin Sonnets will appeal to the metrical reader of contemporary poetry and also to his or her brother, spouse, or nephew who does not read poetry (but might try it). Why? These sonnets incorporate action, something not seen often in contemporary American poetry but which did appear more often in Modernist verse, from the rural narratives of Robert Frost to the metaphysical journey-stories of T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” and “Magi.” Plus, these stories are impactful. They are not highly tinctured, confessional navel-gazing. Rather, these concise sonnets feature just enough story to create a scene, set up some suspense, and turn a conclusion. Further this chapbook’s unity permits these poems to resonate. It is a significant effect in today’s poetry publishing marketplace with 60-page-plus and 100-page books, as if poetry was a grandpa who never shuts up. Moira Egan’s Bar Napkin Sonnets won the 2008 Ledge Press Chapbook Contest, and this sequence also appears in Egan’s more uneven full-length collection Spin (Entasis 2010). I prefer the chapbook because of its great design and its more complete resonance.

In the Bar Napkin Sonnets, a speaker narrates her experiences and feelings, as in an Elizabethan sonnet sequence. Instead of addressing her true love, the Elizabethan norm, Bar Napkin Sonnets take place in absence. Here we have a femme-fatal female speaker, confident in her sexuality, yet insecure about making lasting connections. Quite typically in Bar Napkin Sonnets, the twelfth untitled sonnet in the sequence begins:

I don’t mind bar food, sit and eat alone
and read and write and listen to the hum
of voices wafting up like smoke, the drum’s
insistence, all those men in bad cologne.

Yet, at the end of the sonnet, two people emerge from the humdrum to spark a private dance.

In the sonnet on page 17, the speaker opens with an image of romance:

We pause in conversation and the air
around us stills. I feel as if a globe
of yellow light’s enveloped us, alone,
and everyone around has disappeared.

It turns out, however, that the lover is “only twenty-five.” The femme fatal has already established herself as middle-aged. Throughout this sonnet, there’s a sense of romance willed into existence—a self-created illusion—floated upon the evening’s dance. With the dawn, romance comes and goes in this sonnet “ephemeral as youth.”

In the sonnet “He says his last girl didn’t like his muscles,” the speaker engages in a carnal one-night stand. However in the next sonnet (“It’s not my place or his to want to fuck”), the speaker is both repulsed and attracted to a one-night stand with a married man. In the end, the female speaker values love as well as lust. She does not ask the reader to agree or disagree. As with most good literary art, the sonnet leaves such evaluations to the reader.

“Sonnet 15” also recognizes a more fundamental desire for permanence. However, the speaker does not believe in such permanence. This ambivalence does not stop the speaker of these poems from living life and enjoying others. This complex ambivalence is well-conveyed in Bar Napkin Sonnets. The speaker also is introspective in these poems, which acts sometimes as a chaser to her adventures. In fact, the speaker is a poet, writing catch-as-catch can. This fact also appears in the sonnets, but lightly, smartly, and indicating a desire for more depth than offered often in a bar.

Moira Egan, the author, is married and lives in Italy. Before she moved there, I first encountered Egan as a fellow poet in the lively Baltimore poetry scene. I even heard some of these sonnets read at a midnight poetry reading years ago, at a local artist’s loft space. I had a sense then that she hit her stride. I am glad to see it’s true. The sequence closes with the connection between love gained or lost, and the desire to embody it in writing:

Are love’s inscriptions like a form of art,
or injuries incurred from constant motion:
tennis elbow, carpel tunnel, arrhythmic heart?
And you should see my scars I sit alone,
a glass of wine, a napkin, and my pen.

On the one hand, with successful love, writing embodies it in “love’s inscriptions.” On the other hand with love lost, it resembles “injuries.” The writer is left with a Keatsian negative capability (“a glass of wine, a napkin, and my pen”), a blank introspection and emotional resonance.

Romantic British poet William Wordsworth, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, said that poems should provide pleasure as well as rely on colloquial speech. Wordsworth’s directive toward pleasure is not as often remarked upon. Bar Napkin Sonnets, simply put, is a good read. Its expert craftsmanship and storyline provide pleasure. The sequence creates a real window on the real world. That’s valuable.

Aristotle argued that catharsis was the key feature of Ancient Greek tragedy, the audience feeling the harrows of Oedipus’ fall without having to live its consequences. Maybe empathy is a key mechanism of lyric poetry, permitting the reader to travel with a poet and experience, at a safe distance, all that is encountered. Bar Napkin Sonnets is lighthearted, yet reflective, about getting older, and staying young. The sonnets take you there. Enjoy.

__________

Gregg Mosson is the author of two books of poetry, Season of Flowers and Dust (Goose River 2007) and Questions of Fire (Plain View, 2009). His writing and literary criticism and reviews have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Potomac Review, Measure, The Lyric, Smartish Pace, and Rattle.

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May 5, 2013

Reviewed by Gregg Mosson Zoned Industrial by Patric Pepper

ZONED INDUSTRIAL
by Patric Pepper

Jankowski Associates
35 Circle View Drive
Elysburg, PA 17824
ISBN 978-0-9788954-9-5
2010, 60 pp., $10
www.amazon.com

In Greek mythology, the iron-worker god Hephaestus walked around as a brawny, hulking and deformed figure, yet hammered out the finest metalwork and weaponry in the known world. Out of heat, fire, and dirty toil, he forged the brilliant Shield of Achilles, as described in detail in Homer’s Iliad. The modern shield, depicted by British poet W.H. Auden in his post-World War II poem, “The Shield of Achilles,” bitterly showcases a modern wasteland. Patric Pepper, of Washington, D.C., and also Cape Cod, has achieved a startling feat himself: turning his 32-year career as an industrial engineer into compelling and contemporary metrical poetry in his expanded chapbook. Zoned Industrial is not heroic, like the divine shield in Homer. Nor is it bitterly disappointed, as in Auden. Rather Zoned Industrial offers a pragmatic view of a professional navigating the compromises and concerns of modern American life.

Pepper’s focus in his poems on broader contexts as well as exacting detail make his journey told here personal as well as ring true to any reader who’s experienced the hodgepodge of the workplace (humorous, random, insightful, fortunate, and annoying). Each episode in Pepper’s engineering career—from production to meetings to commuting to lunchtime to Sunday respite—appear in well-crafted metrical poetry. The rhyme mostly sounds contemporary. Forms are pleasingly varied. Simply put, Zoned Industrial will appeal to non-readers and readers of crafted poetry alike through its smooth form and well-observed common subjects.

In Zoned Industrial’s title poem, the bare “December woods” rustle and glint outside the factory, reminding the poet of “non-durable goods/ of the non-manned/ natural land.” These woods might indict the industrial factory—yet the “oaks rock and creak,/ and all but speak.” In the end, nature is silent. Nature does not “speak.” Yet the “rock and creak” of the oaks “all but” spark the human conscience to reflect on the disharmony between nature’s grace and our man-made clatter. Zoned Industrial frames this dilemma in poem after poem. However, the poems never take a stance.

Later in a poem “Landscape,” which takes place in a “midnight dumping ground” of woods “behind the industrial park,” the poet reflects, in the end, that he should praise “such gritty grace,” because “nature is not bitter.” There is a certain truth to that remark. As the doves whirl in “Landscape,” and the poet looks up to the sky, the poet recalls that nature, however much “junk” is dumped in the woods, is larger, and still permits a glimpse of grace. Keep looking, says this poetry, at least implicitly. Don’t get swallowed up. The chapbook as a whole, by continually featuring unspoiled nature and the clear blue sky in contrast to American consumer-industrial culture, frames the issue as tension, not conclusion. Pepper’s silence is not as assured as Frost’s, for instance, who in poems like “Christmas Trees,” turns his back on the mercantile world. Nevertheless, “Provide, Provide.”

Zoned Industrial focuses on this tension throughout the journey of the chapbook’s everyman-poet speaker. In “So,” the speaker gets a promotion only to find his first encounter with the boss is comically vulgar. Yet the speaker has been promoted—pay and all—and, “So what,” he says, “So what.” In “The Bosses,” the speaker notes that they are all “just five guys thrown together.” Yet the speaker later remarks, “I love these guys/ but I would never tell them.” He tells us, though, in the poem. As for the tension between nature and industry, this everyman-poet is not romantic; he does not see himself as a world-changer, and chooses to live a professional life without giving up his ability to appreciate nature or have empathy (see “Sunday Poet,” “Blue Skies,” and “Idle Thoughts at Lunchtime”). In the end, the poet is an outsider who needs the world far more than the average person needs a poet.

Personally, this position falls short for me. A poetic sense, for instance, probably animates our green builders and environmental entrepreneurs. Each person can support this more harmonic industrial direction with purchasing power. In “An Invitation to the Factory”—a poem that sums up an entire era—Pepper implies what he does not conclude: Society is tending where we want it to. I quote in full:

Come have a look.
See how the world is made.
Put down your manufactured book.
We’re building circuit boards
for the human hordes.

They’re spun from sand and ore and oil,
your pleasure the measure of our toil.

Come see the crew
bang out their shift tonight,
the managed hullaballoo
here in the thundering plant.
Don’t say you can’t

Please. Please, see your world is made.
Come see your orders are obeyed.

I like this poem. First, it astutely places the force behind the existence of factories, industrial life, and consumer culture on us all. Second, as anyone who has worked in a factory or office knows, this man-made world offers a mixed blessing. In Antler’s excellent poem Factory (City Lights Books), factories are our self-devastation. In Patric Pepper’s “Invitation,” the blessing is an implied appreciation of productive power. This appreciation is implied, I believe, in the end of “Invitation” where the poem praises, and warns, that we make our own world.

Technically there is much to admire here. First, the poem offers intriguing verbal music through varied, short punchy lines. The first stanza surprises with the rhyme change from B to C, when one expects A B A B. (The poem rhymes A, B, A, C, C, D, D). The lower sound of “boards” / “hordes” in the C-rhyme couplet shifts the tone to ominous. Further, that couplet comes in the middle rather than at the end of the poem, against expectation. These counter-rhythms help make effective metrical poetry. I also enjoy the precise description of the factory: “the managed hullabaloo/ here in the thundering plant.” Four well-chosen words communicate a huge scene. If there is any technical flaw in “Invitation,” it’s the last two lines. They don’t sound as contemporary. Maybe the phrase “your pleasure the measure” is archaic.

Raintown Review editor Quincy R. Lehr has noted how much new formalist work—American metrical poetry written since the 1980s—suffers from a conservative nostalgia, a “when Rome was Rome, and Greece was Greece” mentality for some yearned-for bygone era. Patric Pepper’s Zoned Industrial, in contrast, speaks colloquially in meter about today. It addresses these subjects with consideration and intelligence. It is a confessional book that offers a window to the world.

In conclusion, Zoned Industrial is one of the best collections of contemporary formal verse that I’ve read. While the first half of the book is strongest, this 40-page chapbook avoids a lot of filler in today’s ever-expanding full-length collections, and presents solid and sometimes startlingly good poems, page upon page.

__________

Gregg Mosson is the author of two books of poetry, Questions of Fire (Plain View, 2009) and Season of Flowers and Dust (Goose River, 2007). His poetry, literary criticism, and reviews have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Potomac Review, Smartish Pace, Unsplendid, Loch Raven Review, and previously in Rattle. He lives in Maryland with his family.

 

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January 5, 2013

Reviewed by Gregg MossonTalking into the Ear of the Donkey by Robert Bly

TALKING INTO THE EAR OF THE DONKEY
by Robert Bly

W. W. Norton
500 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10110
ISBN 978-0-939-08022-3
2011, 107 pp., $24.95
www.wwnorton.com

In this age of electronic technological innovation—from electricity to the Internet—it’s good to know a mystic poet can still live on a farm in America and write about very simple things, in surprising ways.  That poet is Robert Bly.  He does it well in his latest book, Talking Into the Ear of the Donkey, published in his ninth decade.  The book adds to Bly’s oeuvre, especially the opening ghazal poems, as good as any he has written.  Bly’s latest will delight fans, like myself, who encounter this poet late in his life, and discover in fireside-chat language both a mystic and rewarding human perspective on the world and on living.

In “The Sympathies of the Long Married,” Bly combines experiential writing with the leaping imagery and logic long associated with his poetry.  Bly’s confessional work, more prevalent here than in prior collections, is enlarged with learning and references springing from Medieval and Eastern philosophies, mystic poets such as Rilke, Whitman, and Rumi, and to global poetic traditions.  Bly’s Americanized ghazal opens:

Oh well, let’s go on eating the grains of eternity.
What do we care about improvements in travel?
Angels sometimes cross the river on old turtles.

Here we see a poet talking about old age and how it has changed his perspective of time and space.  At the same time, sans biography, the lines above can stand for a statement in favor of the contemplative life over ‘progress’ (in line 2).  Like Blake who could see the world in a grain of sand and alluded to in line 1, Bly is content to travel through the eternities of daily life.  This constitutes a stoical triumph, considering that the poem by implication understands the passing of youth and its pleasures and strengths.  Unlike Blake who saw the world in a grain of sand, and “eternity in an hour,” Bly here is “eating” the grains of eternity.  This review would become a book if I tackled all aspects of this six stanza poem.

Bly’s ghazal offers a three-line stanza, with a repeating phrase often at the end of each stanza, a refrain.  Bly also combines Biblical, literary, and mythological references with casual diction, with questions, and with emotional utterances, all of which creates interesting viewpoints, counterpoints, and rhythms.  In the fifth stanza of the same poem, Bly exclaims:

It’s all right if we’re troubled by the night.
It’s all right if we can’t recall our own name.
It’s all right if this rough music keeps on playing.

In “Paying Attention to the Melody,” the ghazal opens:

All right.  I know each of us will die alone.
It does not matter how loud or soft the sitar plays.
Sooner or later the melody will say it all.

Bly poetry presents common wisdom in an inventive way.  Here, it plays with a cliché: Hear the music.  Yet Bly does not simply restate this metaphor.  For instance, the first line begins with a theatrical utterance, as in a play.  “All right,” the poet says, implying an off-stage preceding dialogue.  The in media res beginning creates a desire to know more.  Then Bly states, “I know each of us will die alone,” which is invested with energy here because the phrase is not some objective statement, but a stream-of-consciousness remark after the poet just made up his mind (“All right.”).  The speaker states, “I know,” and decides to believe it.  Thus, maybe there is doubt too.

Lines 2 & 3 then present a conflict that the poem tackles.  The “sitar” player is trying to play his or her own music, to also control music by making it more or less “loud or soft.”  However “[s]ooner or later,” the musician’s creation will express its own “melody” and story: human mortality.  If the opening stanza is interpreted to be about art itself, subjectivity becomes objectivity despite best intentions, and offers unintended and universal messages.  Wisdom, for Bly, is experience’s lesson which we do not always want to hear (“Sooner or later the melody will say it all.”).

Bly ends the poem in a self-knowing and charmingly candid manner:

Robert, don’t expect too much.  You’ve put yourself
Ahead of others for years, a hundred years.
It will take a long time for you to hear the melody.

Poetry readers who prefer the confused contemporary scene of American poetry, where poets use disjunctive language to recreate the experience of being overwhelmed by everything, should look for a different poet.  Readers who believe poetry should teach and delight should dwell here.  Bly’s Talking Into the Ear of the Donkey is only book-ended by ghazals.  There are a number of plain poems in the middle that offer ostensibly autobiographical snippets from the latter part of a long life, in simple elegant writing.  This sort of honest writing can also fall flat, and sometimes does here too.  For readers unfamiliar with Robert Bly, I recommend his first book Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) and the more recent and excellent My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005).  For poetry readers interested in Bly the poet at his most plainspoken and also in his leaping musical idiom, check out Talking Into the Ear of the Donkey (2011).

D.H Lawrence, in his poem “The Mystic,” defines the mystic as someone simply alive to experience.  Lawrence closes: “But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake./  Hogging it down like a pig, I call the feeding of corpses.”  Bly’s work embraces that sort of mystic naturalism of Lawrence and Lawrence’s precursor Walt Whitman.  Unlike them, Bly’s mysticism is also one of detachment from the moment.  Bly mixes the present with the historical and with archetypes.  Here, acrobatic knowledge and allusive, leaping imagery make hearty food.

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Gregg Mosson is the author of two books of poetry, Questions of Fire (Plain View, 2009) and Season of Flowers and Dust (Goose River, 2007).  His poetry, literary criticism, and reviews have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Potomac Review, Smartish Pace, Unsplendid, and other journals. He lives in Maryland with his family.

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