Category — Books/Reviews

Of note:

“The Big Melt”, President of the United Hearts: See www.factoryschool.org. © 2007. A collective poetic slap at the political detritus of our time. Published a few years ago, but you can read it as if it were tomorrow.

“Bring Down the Sky”, Karen Schubert: See www.kattywompuspress.com. © 2011.  Comingling of artistic spirits, poet-sculptor-photographer, brought to bear in words. Culminates in a series of powerful poems that imbue the reader with swatches of PTSD.

“Allegorical Beasts”, Leo Schulz: See www.facebook.com/leoschulz. © 2010. I sat to read, soon realizing this was no book to breeze through or cast off. From tangible sonnets at the beginning to prose poems at the end, this episodic manifesto first of sex, then of pain, longing and futility, is a wrenchingly active and beautiful take on man’s struggle to find love and meaning in love and loss. Cruel and gentle as a child. Plan on taking your time.

To Our Readers…

FYI…. Ragazine is expanding its overview to include publications of merit, not just books and book reviews. Feel free to send us abbreviated descriptions of your favorite on-line and/or print publication(s) for consideration, and tell us how/where we can get to see ‘it’ … We’ll try to add at least 1 or 2 each issue …

e-mail to: editor@ragazine.cc

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The Representation of Subaltern Women in Postcolonial Literature

J. M. Coetzee: Disgrace

By Miklós Horváth

Disgrace is a novel by the Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee, published in 1999; the scene is set in South Africa.

The protagonist of the novel is David Lurie, a South African professor of English. His first ‘lover’ is Soraya who leads a double life, spending her time as a postmodern creature with a split personality. She is, by profession, a prostitute, therefore a subject of the male-dominated society. Soraya is the first woman in the novel whose body is colonized by the scholar.

Lurie gives a lecture on Romanticism at Cape Town University and his favorite poet is, of course, Byron. He appreciates romantic poets because they are less hemmed by convention and more passionate (in subject). Byron is a liberal poet; he went to Italy and experienced the biggest love affair in the last years of his life. Although Byron himself and most of his characters in his poems are often represented as womanizers, it is important to note that in his unfinished satiric poem Don Juan, Byron portrays him not as a womanizer but as someone easily seduced by women. Don Juan is not sexually active, but rather sexually attractive. Lurie does not take into account this passive and innocent hero, therefore he is unable to understand Byron in his complexity. Regardless of his fragmentary understanding of Byron, in chapter seven, Lurie talks about his ambitions to write an opera reflecting on the last years of Byron.

After his affair with Soraya, Lurie does not stop his life as a womanizer. He perceives himself as ’a servant of Eros’ (Coetzee 2000: 52). He is mildly smitten with one of his students, Melanie. When this intimate relationship between a student and her teacher is revealed, Lurie is dismissed from his teaching position. This love becomes his disgrace (Lurie refers to it as his castration) and he is excluded from the stir of society.

Lurie does not fit in this landscape anymore, and goes to his daughter’s farm in the Eastern Cape. First, he meets Bev Shaw, a dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckles. She is, in fact, not a veterinarian, but a priestess trying to lighten the load of Africa’s suffering animals. Shaw’s character may remind readers of the postcolonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea of Aunt Cora who curses an angry servant when he stops the family from entering the carriage, and also of Christophine who is associated with obeah and voodoo. Benita Parry views Christophine as a defiant, native woman who is a powerful presence in Wide Sargasso Sea. Her voice confronts the repressive system without difficulty. Due to her seamless merging of a wide variety of languages, Christophine transcends boundaries and dichotomies: she is both servant and master, native and non-native, voiceless and voiced (Russell 2007: 88).

1.1 Living far from Society

In his memoir Boyhood, Coetzee talks about his belief that farms are the places of freedom. He reveals his attachment to every stone, every bush and bird (Barnard 2003: 200). In his novel, Disgrace, written two years after Boyhood, Coetzee speaks about the same notion that living on a farm gives people a certain freedom. Coetzee says that Lurie recognizes the state of independence in Eastern Cape. The dogs, the gardening, and Lucy’s asexual clothes connect him to a natural, untouched world.

On the one hand, Eastern Cape is the symbol of a natural, untouched world; but on the other, it represents a kind of disorder in a savage society. Although Coetzee seems sanguine regarding the future, he represents a rape with which he destroys the notion of being free in South Africa. Eastern Cape becomes the place of rampant crime. Graham Pechey uses the religious term ‘purgatory’ when he describes Eastern Cape’s and sub-equatorial Africa’s social conditions. He says that Africa is an in-between place,  neither infernal nor paradisiacal (2001: 374).

Pechey’s description of South Africa reminds the reader of the double life of the Muslim woman, Soraya. On one side, she has a respectable suburban existence, but on the other, she works for an escort agency once or twice a week. Among many difficulties, this duality represents the difficult enterprise of rebuilding South Africa after apartheid.

After her rape Lucy seemingly talks as a colonizer. She adopts the view of the colonizers, trying to understand why the intruders thought that this type of sexual conduct is reasonable. Her own scrutiny of herself helps her endure the crushing burden of being raped and relieves her suffering. She understands the patriarchal hierarchical society within which she lives, and her role as a subservient woman. She says that there are too many people, but too few things; what there is, must go into circulation, so that everyone may have a chance to be happy for a day (Coetzee 2000: 98). These sentences do not only recall Darwin’s view on the world that there is competition for limited resources, but also echo the very beginning of the book, where Lurie explained to Melanie that women are only the subjects of the desires of men: “A woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it” (Coetzee 2000: 16).

In chapter thirteen, Lurie suggests that Lucy should visit her gynecologist because of the risk of pregnancy, the risk of venereal infection, the risk of HIV. He proposes for her to move to another farm for safety reasons. Lucy does not want to move, but insists on staying and living with the memory of her past. She is aware that the past is undeniable, as it plays a part that is for ever present.

Postcolonial literatures often represent a vigorous connection between present and past. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s postcolonial novel The Namesake, a Bengali couple struggle to make a new life in the United States. While the couple is devoted to creating a new future for themselves, their past is always present, constantly reminding them of who they are and what they could become. According to Ziauddin Sardar, Lahiri seems to be saying that the past is ever present and a viable future depends on recognizing and appreciating this past (2010: 178). Zadie Smith opens her book White Teeth with a quotation from The Tempest which claims that the past is prologue. With this citation from Shakespeare, Zadie Smith asserts that the past continually influences and impregnates the present. The past always de- and reconstructs an understanding of ourselves. It constantly generates new perspectives of the better understanding of our subliminal and gives the sense that something new and entirely different will come.

After his disgrace at Cape Town University and the rape of his daughter, Lurie does not think that women have to share their beauties with men, but compels Lucy to tell the story of her rape to the police. Readers can locate a kind of contradiction in Lurie’s thought. On the one hand Lurie refuses to accept that one’s private life can become a public interest: he claims that nobody has the right to rape a woman, but on the other hand he commands Lucy to share not her body, but her story with others. Lucy refuses a confession and she becomes the symbol of censorship in literary works.

In chapter eighteen Lucy says to her father: “I can’t talk anymore, David. I know I am not being clear. I wish I could explain it but I can’t.” (Coetzee 2000: 155). Although she tries to construct theories about the day of the trauma and analyses the incident (by using ordinary language), the shock simply does not go away. It is what Jean Améry calls the confrontation of intellect and horror after a devastating tragedy (Clarkson 2009: 168). The shock holds Lucy back.

Lucy did not lose her sanity after the tragedy as opposed to Antoinette’s mother in Wide Sargasso Sea. She tries to recover herself in the corrupted Eden by developing and strengthening self-discipline. Self-control is exactly what I call the new dimension to the devastated Garden of Eden and the positive message of the novel. It helps one to become conscious of the self-life-thoughts, eliminates the feeling of helplessness and being dependent on others and rejects negative feelings and thoughts.

In his novel, Coetzee suggests the reconsideration of the role of the women in a patriarchal society and the separation of private and public life in order to create the new Eden of freedom and confidence in Africa. He says that the separation of public and private spheres (but not the entire separation of these categories) would give the sense of safety in one’s life, would reduce the large number of rapes, and would save Lurie from the feeling of disgrace. Rethinking the question of personal and public would open a different dimension in the life of the African people.

References:

Barnard, Rita (2003) J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” and the South African Pastoral, In. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer, 2003), pp. 199—224.

Clarkson, Carrol (2009) J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices, Palgrave Macmillan

Pechey, Graham (2001) Coetzee’s Purgatorial Africa: The Case Of Disgrace, In.

      Interventions, 4: 3, 374—383.

Russell, Keith A. (2007) Now every word she said was echoed, echoed loudly in my head:

Christophine’s Language and Refractive Space in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Journal

of Narrative Theory, Volume 37, Number 1, Winter 2007, pp. 87–-103. Published by

Eastern Michigan University.

Sardar, Ziauddin (2010) The Namesake: Futures; futures studies; futurology; futuristic;

foresight—What’s in a name?, Futures 42 (2010) 177—184.

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Pick of the issue/July-August:

Contemporary Literary Horizon/ORIZONT LITERAR CONTEMPORANoffers poetry, short stories, novellas, and other articles of literary merit in both the original language, and in translation to Romanian. Published from Bucharest, Romania.

Another Independent Journal of contemporary culture…

http://contemporaryhorizon.blogspot.com

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Poetry from Russell Streur, grand poohbah at Camel Saloon, that other online watering hole for the soul … isbn 978-1-937202-00-2, © Russell Streur 2011, Published by Poets Democracy, Perfect Bound Paperback. Available at http://thecamelsaloon.blogspot.com/ $11.00. “Cheap at half the price…”

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Paul Sohar’s WAYWARD ORCHARD is available now through Wordrunner Electronic Chapbooks. Sohar’s poetry has appeared in the Kenyon
Review, Ragazine.CC, and other journals and zines, and collected in Homing Poems from Iniquity Press.  He has translated seven books from Hungarian. His latest work is True Tales of a Fictitious Spy, a creative nonfiction book about the Stalinist prisons.
Sohar’s echapbook can be read at: www.echapbook.com/poems/sohar

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Fiction by Neila Mezynski, Price: $12
Shipping: Free (USA only) / $3 (Canada) / $8 (Everywhere else)
5.8″x8.3″ Paperback book,  90 pages
ISBN forthcoming

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The Chronology of Water: A Memoir

Lidia Yuknavitch, introduction by Chelsea Cain. Hawthorne Books, $15.95, 268 pp, ISBN 978-0-9790188-3-1

Competitive swimmer explores her past, including paternal abuse, birth of a stillborn daughter, drug addiction and failed marriages, before finding herself in the struggle with the written word.

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New Release from New York Quarterly Books for May 2011

Cool Limbo by Michael Montlack — ON SALE NOW

“Cool Limbo is a series of dazzling portraits that are accessible yet complex, hilarious yet poignant, down-to-earth yet ethereal. Like its cover, which features the title poem’s sexy 70′s chick lounging—stoned—by the pool (as she neglects the water-winged kids she’s supposed to be babysitting), the book is the best kind of party-unofficial, unpretentious, and unabashed. And everyone’s there “on plastic lawn furniture…with six packs and lit cigarettes.” From Liz Taylor, Gertrude Stein, and The Golden Girls, to Orpheus, Vanity Smurf, and Stevie Nicks. Poem after poem, these figures somehow mingle with the poet, in the not-so-still life studies of his boisterous family and friends, building a narrative about the departure from suburbia to the big city (from the ghost of a boy to a realized though sometimes-haunted man)—all while commenting on, as Elaine Equi puts it, the “constantly shifting sexual codes” assigned to men and women alike. Few places can you find a poem about a gay porn star that concerns itself with the meaning of objectivity and art just pages after a charged feminist manifesto called “If Hello Kitty Had a Mouth.” But beyond that colorful variety of subject and theme, not to mention his mastery of dialogue and what Mark Bibbins calls “devious one-liners,” what’s most remarkable about this poet in his debut collection is his ability to confront the serious and painful while never abandoning his sharp sense of humor and playful spirit.”

Forthcoming from NYQ Books in June 2011

0.174: The Complete Numbers Cycle by Gordon Massman

Takes Guts and Years Sometimes: New and Selected Poems by Linda Lerner

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In this issue:

The Piano Player, by Elfriede Jelinek
Enigmatic Plot: A Tale Too True, by Kris Saknussem
The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive, By Vanessa Libertad Garcia

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The Piano Player

A Destiny Paved with Good Intentions

The novel by Elfriede Jelinek

By Daniel Dragomirescu

Jelinek

Elfriede Jelinek — recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature — is a writer displaying a lucid and ironic spirit, and capable of seizing upon the many flaws that exist in our present world ( automatisms, prejudices, stereotypes). Her prose is highly epical, carefully stylized, lacking any idyllicism or compromise, in the good old central European German literary tradition.

At the center of her novel, The Piano Player — published in Romanian by Polirom Publishing House, translated by Nora Iuga —  stands  Erika Kohut, a 35-year-old piano teacher, helplessly caught between the love of an authoritarian, oppressive and over-possessive mother, and the love of Walter Klemmer — one of her students — a seemingly naive young man and a novice in the art of love, eager to gain experience as a Don Juan on the back of an older woman (mirroring some characters in Balzac’s or Stendhal’s works). A victim of her mother’s ambition to turn her offspring into a great musician (as suits Mozart’s country), a mother who drove her on a road paved with the best intentions into a sort of existential hell, Erika paradoxically represents a case of depersonalization “in the name of music”, according to a journalist of the French periodical “Le Monde”. And this is to show that depersonalization, failure or defeat in an individual’s existence can also stem from “noble” causes and intentions.

The fact is that those insane maternal ambitions do not stick at all with the true skills and ideals of her daughter; this situation resembles some of Kafka’s prose where the son – Gregor Samsa, Karl Rosman etc. – gets into an insurmountable conflict with the father, a conflict generated by serious clashes of opinions and characters. In this respect, Erika could be said to embody the female version of several Kafkian heroes; the novel unfolds in a world perceived as dillematic-existentialist. Or a world which is still permeated by such echoes.

Erika’s life next to her old decrepit mother, the relation between the piano teacher and her student, the heroine’s relationship with the world in general — all these forms of manifestation in a postmodern existence — thoroughly scrutinized by the writer, are utterly and definitely governed by the absurd.

The unwinding romance between the piano player — an old maid who keeps her sadomasochist tendencies to herself — and the young Walter Klemmer, is presented as having an emphatically picturesque nature, thus standing out from the typical, meek patterns of classical love stories. In a grotesquely parodistic style, as well as via the refined use of details, rendered into an exquisite Rabelaisian language emphatically picturesque nature,  one of the key features of the novel’s emphatically picturesque nature, we witness the “conquest” of the old maid by her admirer. If in Shakespeare’s work we see Romeo declaring and proclaiming his fatal passion for Juliet in a poetic and seraphic setting (the balcony scene), the Conservatory student confesses his passion for his piano teacher in an utterly prosaic and vile way, in a setting provided by the toilet cabins of the Conservatory he attends. The scene is monumental: “Walter Klemmer takes Erika out of the toilet cabin jerkily. To begin with, he applies a long kiss on her mouth, the expiration date of which is long overdue. He gnaws at her lips, while his tongue probes her throat. After a tiring and long toil, he pulls back his tongue, subsequently uttering her name. He’s investing a lot of work into this piece of a woman. His hand reaches under her skirt and realizes in a flash that he had finally taken the next big step.”

The tangled love affair reaches its peak in the second part of the book when Erika brings the student into the family home, against her mother’s will. At this point the distinguished musician with a penchant for perversity briefly, but minutely instructs the innocent wooer regarding the tortures she wishes to be subject of, unraveling a long list of violent physical acts in the name of the adamant Eros: “Tie my ankles with a tight rope (…) Could you, please, put me on my feet, straight, like a column, in front of you, a gag in my mouth, tied hand and foot. Then I’d thank you from the bottom of my heart. Please, wrap my arms in leather straps…” etc. etc. Shocked by his darling’s demands, the second-hand lover breaks down and bails out. The counterpoint technique, the intertwinement between what happens in Erika’s room and the old woman’s furious reactions (while being locked in the room next to Erika’s), are superbly and perfectly depicted in this episode: “Subsequently, she asks her again: and what do I gain from this? Then she laughs. The TV set is buzzing. The door is closed. Erika is silent. Mother is laughing. Klemmer is scratching. The door is creaking. The TV is off. Erika is.”

Using a style that is both terse and expressive, even aphoristic at times, Elfriede Jelinek captures very convincingly and punctiliously the essence of a character, a situation, states in general. For example, Erika is defined by what differentiates her from the others (but not in a positive way):  “Some people want to be the center of attention, whatever the cost, Erika doesn’t. Some gesture. Erika doesn’t. They know what they want. Erika doesn’t.”

Erika’s relation with her aged mother – permanently marked by violent rows, conflicts and frictions – is a living hell, rendered in tragicomic touches. A grand and noble theme of universal literature (motherly love, filial love) is presented in this novel in ironic and skeptical tones. But this is not without grounds. Erika’s case is that of a person who cannot free herself (not even at adulthood) from her mother’s heavy influence.

Very relevant is the intermingling of various narrative voices with an emphatically picturesque nature — the mother’s, the daughter’s, the lover’s, even the narrator’s, which arise in a ceaseless dynamic flow outlining a complex perspective of the epic and the problems adjacent to it. However, the writer’s comments regarding the educational Austrian system  ( in music ) are debatable, as the said Austrian system enjoys a very good worldwide reputation. The same goes for the biting irony, of feminist origin, which is used to depict men in general ( ignorant and greedy bipeds ), a view that is present in the interwar novels of Romanian writer, Hortensia Papadat Bengescu, or of renowned British novelists belonging to the XIXth and XXth centuries. Quite inordinate is the way in which the author has denigrated her fellow countrymen, who are maliciously depicted as “a bunch of gluttonous barbarians, belonging to a country where culture is dominated by barbarism.”

However, every writer or artist has the right of refusing to butter up national prides, if he or she deems it worthless. After all, denouncing the vices of one’s nation can be as valid a proof of patriotism as writing poems dedicated to one’s ancestral homeland or pious panegyrics in the memory of the nation’s fathers.

About the author/translator:

Dragomirescu

Daniel Dragomirescu (born in Bucharest, in 1952) is a Romanian writer, literary critic and journalist. Member of Writers’ Union of Romania (Uniunea Scriitorilor din România, USR). Published books: The Last Minstrel and Other Stories / Cel din urmă rapsod şi alte povestiri (2002); novels: Nothing New Behind the Iron Curtain / Nimic nou după Cortina de Fier (2003), Chronicle of a Lost World /Cronica Teodoreştilor (2008) etc. Published articles and short stories in cultural and literary magazines from Romania and some other countries. Nomination to annual literary prizes of USR Iaşi in 2009 for the novel Chronicle of a Lost World. Editor-in-chief of “Contemporary Literary Horizon”, a multicultural magazine, published in Romanian, English and Spanish languages.

This review appeared originally in Romanian in the July 2009 issue of Contemporary Literary Horizon Magazine. The translation is by Alina-Olimpia Miron, University of Bucharest.

See also: http://contemporaryhorizon.blogspot.com

Jelinek Photo from Jelinek profile page.

Read “Chained by Law,” an excerpt from Dragomiresscu’s novel Chronicle of a Lost World, in “FICTION”.

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Enigmatic Pilot: A Tall Tale Too True

Kris Saknussemm, Del Rey, $16 trade paper (368p) ISBN 978-0-8129-7417-1

Outrageous and baffling, this puzzle-packed yarn seems to fall in the same (non)category as Saknussemm’s Zanesville (2005), combining the fusty diction of Charles Portis and the deadpan weirdness of Thomas Pynchon. Readers meet little Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd as a young genius who resists the stifling social pressures of antebellum Ohio while creating marvelous, disturbing inventions. When Lloyd and his parents head west in search of better prospects, the boy encounters numerous wonders: a riverboat gambler with a deadly mechanical hand, a 13-year-old escaped slave who becomes Lloyd’s lover, automatons masquerading as people. The setting is convincingly gritty, and the action darts wildly from scene to scene as Lloyd develops a sense of personal responsibility–until an abrupt viewpoint shift throws, literally, everything into doubt. Readers who don’t expect all riddles to have answers will find this surreal adventure delightful. (Apr.)

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The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive

Vanessa Libertad Garcia.  Fiat Libertad CO.  $10.00. (72 pages.) Available at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, and independent bookstores.

A jaunty walk through the confusing and difficult world of a young gay Latina coming to terms with her sexuality. Highlighted by “anxiety and addiction” frequently reserved for those exploring the narrow apron of social norms, this small cast of characters takes on the challenges of their days and nights with the frequent youthful love affair with sex, drugs, music and alcohol. Acceptance comes from within after the narrator casts a vote in the Presidential elections of 2008. Coming out of the voting booth and coming out as a gay person being coincident with hope and trust, and the epiphany that hope and trust are all, really, that anyone has to go on.

– MRF

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Kayleigh Wanzer/Reviewer

“We’re Empty, We Will Be Well Again”

Ghost Lights, by Keith Montesano, Dream Horse Press, 2010.

Ghost Lights, Keith Montesano’s full-length poetry debut, is an intriguing and layered collection, a literary ode to crime, pop culture, and small towns. Though varying in theme, each of the poems in Ghost Lights speaks of the unspeakable–obsessive love, fires that destroy, those who die too soon, and everything that continues to haunt.

Ghost Lights opens with “Before the Fire,” telling the tale of a man with “earrings and make-up stolen from his dead wife, pink dress with white pumps clicking on the floor.” Like all the poems in this collection, it is earnest and sincere in its observation, with a keen eye for what lies beneath the human visage. Writes Montesano,

“And if you look now, something’s there –
passing through, stopping to offer the difference
between the space of our world and the next: the sweet, stained
tongues of children, and those wrenched sobs of a man
who could never find his way out.”

And these are the most striking parts of Ghost Lights — when Montesano is able to climb inside the human conscious and explore it with objectivity and fairness. In “All the Sighs of Fire,” he starts with a note, torn from the headlines, “teacher impregnates 12 year-old, sentenced to 16 years,” and manages to create a sympathetic portrait of a man who was locked up while “the palmed grip of a newborn holding on through choking air,” still said he “did not have the strength to stop.” When he asks us,

“I imagine—nothing but the softness
he felt on his face, the unshaven silhouette of a man on hers,
Bill confused and wanting more, if she knew what more
really meant. But are we so scathed to believe
there was nothing real between those two bodies that bare
fall day, acetylene dusk looming above front lawns?”

We are afraid to answer, knowing the truth would defy any realistic set of morals. Whether wearing a dead wife’s clothing or impregnating a twelve year old, Montesano treats his poetic characters with an undeniable tenderness and reflectivity.

Though they vary in form, length, and execution, there is a similar theme of destruction and subsequent rebirth found in most of the poems of Ghost Lights. He plays with juxtaposition. In “Service Plaza, Somerset,” a “trucker getting blown by a rest-stop hooker will land fifty yards down the ravine, hoping he’ll someday hold a woman and make love again,” while “headlights blur into news stories, your life safely out of view, the door’s snap, closing off the world you never knew from the beginning.” In “Love Song for The End of the World,” one of the standouts of Ghost Lights, he speaks of the end of the world with a celebratory sense of relief, “those who expected never to love will be thrilled, and those who were blind like rats at birth /will feel the body and what it’s like to wilt under a roof/where glasses will be raised until nothing’s left but molecules.”

Montesano exhibits an enviable range here, from the narrativity of “Poem Ending with a Hundred Year-Old House on Fire,” to the confessional style of “Going Home,”

“And if you run home now,
past the charred prison, the overgrown churchyard lecherous
with leaves, past pocked roads battered by years, the only
boarded window fronts of the last downtown diner,
you’ll arrive again at the house of your childhood, fighting through
ditch grass, singed fields to broken back windows, edged
like knives.”

It is ambitious but the results are impressive, Montesano showing poetic prowess in the short burst that is “Second Floor Fire” and the epic long form of “Self-Portrait Ending with the Last Flight of the Body.” Whatever the form, the poems are immersive and haunting.

In its entirety, Ghost Lights is an impressive debut, engrossing the reader in its stories of unsolved crimes and missing children, of houses on fire and eulogies for dead drummers.

You Know, Feel Like a Human Being

By Kayleigh Wanzer

 3, Ted Greenwald’s 2008 poetry collection (Cuneiform) is, in a word, ambitious. For all parties involved. It is an ambitious read, consisting of three epic poems that take the reader on a spiral journey throughout Greenwald’s mind.  And it was most likely an ambitious effort for Greenwald, a New York native with a poetry career spanning more than thirty years. 

For some, 3 is a departure from Greenwald’s previous collections, leaning toward the experimental, as well as experiential.  This departure, however, seems as much as a continuation of life’s journey.

3 begins with “Going Into School That Day,” the most accessible of the three sections, romantic in its themes and simple in its word choice. Greenwald speaks of universal yearnings, wanting to “feel like a human being in the ashes of my desolation.”  It is the most reminiscent of Greenwald’s earlier work, rhythmic and making sense even when it shouldn’t.  “Going Into School That Day”, as the title suggests, is an introduction.  When Greenwald speaks of

           “The evening
            Where the beautiful face
            I love
            Told me
            This is real”

we, as the readers, are introduced to presumably the same person who later has “severed several ways to listen.” We watch with Greenwald as he looks at his “transformation which belongs in a dream.” Something is missing, we’re just not sure what yet.  And maybe we’re not supposed to be. Maybe he isn’t either, though:

“Is it Peggy or Sue
I think I love you
Looking wordlessness
Remind me what’s your name”

 Throughout the poem, Greenwald contrasts the excessively verbose by comparison with the brief. Eight beat lines presented across the page from two and four beat lines. It is effective.  When he tells us,

“Thoughts go public
You start to remember
You’re so small, almost invisible
Start on fingertip           Point
Out the most important parts of life
Lined with vital signs”

We believe him. And when he says beats later, “See things/Can’t see,” the brevity is felt and understood. “Going Into School That Day” concludes with anxiety, mentioning trouble, assuring that there will be turbulence ahead: “From outset, trouble/Pin down what, exactly.”

The second section of 3, “Anyway,” is the shortest and most deceptive of the three poems. Consisting of mostly three line bursts, “Anyway” appears to be an aside of sorts, a break from the comparative concreteness of “Going Into School That Day.” It is cohesive in its absurdity, at the same time focusing on how words sound together, rather than just what they mean. If 3 is the manifestation of a journey through a storm, “Anyway,” is the eye. It is disarmingly calm, the type of poem that needs to be read aloud, lines like “Won’t in ruby, wear over dusk blue crush/Long sleeve baby dawn, eat leftovers/Giftwrap in signs, shake on” somehow sounding better and meaning more when resonating throughout a room.  Yet the same themes remain present, tying together the sections. Still around is the yearning, the romance of empty nostalgia. Sometimes it is even sweet: “As in those movies, a wonderful first kiss/One long grin, keeps awake/Without cuts, a wonderful first kiss,” yet Greenwald does not take long to remind “Nothing’s personal, including yours.”

 The transition that takes place in “Anyway,” a shift from accessible poetry with a traceable plot to one with a focus on sound and emotion, becomes especially noticeable in the final section of 3, “Dawn On.”  This poem acts as almost a combination of the earlier two, molding together a stream-of-conscious writing with hidden familiar theme and plot points.  It is dense and at points, intimidating. But it is all together meaningful. When Greenwald says “Forget the forgotten. Not worry not you/The smells and the feel vitrine/Different need different not worry not you,” it is understood what he speaks of without fully understanding how he speaks of it. And this is perhaps the most important part of 3. Greenwald manages to leave out words that maybe should be included, he switches syntax order, he has the audacity to spit out lines like “Groovy pants runways.” It is almost as if, after one hundred and sixty three pages of trying to make us understand, he wants to tear it all down.  But he doesn’t. And he won’t. And we will close 3 knowing more and less at the same time.

Available from Cuneiform Press, www.cuneiformpress.com, Austin, Texas.

by Kayleigh Wanzer

Poetry and Sibling Rivalry:

The Dickman Brothers

In a society where the written word continues to struggle for adequate appreciation, it may seem that it takes a catchy gimmick to gain notoriety in the literary community.  And upon first glance, twin brothers Matthew and Michael Dickman seem to be just that — ploys for attention from otherwise average writers, their only marketability being the fact that they share similar faces. Because it seems so coincidental and too contrived. Twin brothers who both happen to be poetry geniuses, overcoming a poverty-ridden childhood in the Northwestern United States, only to be profiled by The New Yorker and simultaneously publish poetry collections? It all reads, admittedly, like a made for television movie. Yet behind the hype, high profile interviews, and book deals are two young men with extraordinary amounts of talent. This talent is executed in strikingly different ways in Michael’s collection The End of the West and Matthew’s All-American Poem.

Michael’s collection begins with “Nervous System,” an off-putting and eerie contrast of death and childhood, two reoccurring themes in The End of the West (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). Michael utilizes spacing for emphasis and shock value, blasting lines at readers like,

“Make a list
of everything that’s
ever been

on fire”

yet contrasts them with sad and hopeful lines like the standout of this opening poem, “When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying on a windowsill.” He fills the pages with as much white space as he does text, creating a symbolic spiral, a mystical puzzle. There are references to addict parents and their equally tragic addicted children in “Seeing Whales” and “Scary Parents.” In “Seeing Whales” after speaking of watching his friend Leif shoot up “when we were twelve” Michael writes,

“Leif laid his head back on a pillow and waited for all the blood inside him
to flush down
a hole

After seeing whales what do you see?”

He draws unlikely comparisons between things. Whale sightings and twelve-year-old heroin addicts, both huge in different ways. “Seeing Whales” links the rushing of water through a whale’s blowhole to the rushing of heroin through an addict’s arm. It links the relief as opiates make their way through the bloodstream to the surprise and elation of seeing a whale. What do you see after seeing whales, what do you see after watching your friend shoot heroin? “The green sea,” Michael answers with a surprisingly fitting simplicity.  “Ian broke his mother’s nose because she burned the pancakes” Michael states blankly in “Scary Parents,” painting the portrait of a family that functions through dysfunction. “No one is singing us to sleep,” he says, not asking for pity, just for the point of saying it. Michael’s poems are consistently disarming, especially in their endings. From “Into the Earth,”

“No one I loved had died for almost two years.
Then Amy bled out
in a bathtub.”

The standout of The End of the West is arguably “We Did Not Make Ourselves,” an epic if Michael would write one, themes spanning from Advent, to self-destruction, to breast cancer, to funerals and death. It is a random collection of spaces and phrases that comes together beautifully and powerfully.

“This morning I killed a fly
and didn’t lie down
next to the body
as we’re supposed to

We’re supposed to

Soon I’m going to wake up

Dogs
Trees
Stars

There is only this world and this world

What a relief
created

over and over.”

The themes prevalent in “We Did Not Make Ourselves” are the ones common through The End of the West; the inevitability of death and the circle of life, watching those you love die and not sure if you want them to come back, absentee fathers and alcoholic grandfathers. It is a collection that, while decidedly postmodern in execution, spans genre and classification. It is poetry that concentrates on form as much as it does word choice, and does so to the reader’s great benefit.

If Michael writes alongside the ghost of E.E. Cummings, Matthew carries with him the spirit of Ginsberg and his beatnik co-conspirators.  All-American Poem (American Poetry Review Press, 2008) is indeed a collection of poetry based in the roots of Americana; Matthew is almost assuredly thinking of Whitman just as frequently as Ginsberg did. But they are also poems entrenched in modernity and the guilt that comes from leaving a predominantly lower-class neighborhood behind. Or at least, attempting to. In “For Joe Sullivan Upon Joining the South-Side White Pride” Matthew writes,

“I want to say you’re leaving
something important behind.
But I know where you come from
and can’t imagine what it might be.”

Interestingly, Matthew’s poems are simultaneously narrative and confessional. When he says “you can carry your groceries home in your public radio tote bag” in “Country Music,” he says it with an air of disgust that can only come from self-loathing. “I wanted someone to beat me,” he later plainly states in the poem. It is honest and it is relatable, two qualities that make Matthews’s poetry as successful as it is.  Unlike his brother, Matthew does not heavily rely on poetic form and spacing. He chooses instead to focus on deep, verbose descriptions of the lives of strangers and connecting back to his own. From “Something about a Black Scarf,”

“At any rate
my neighbors are having sex. I can hear them, I can
smell the coffee they made
when they thought they were still getting out of bed,
and there is something about how the woman is moaning,
how her right foot may be pressed down
against the side of his thigh that makes me think
the man squeezing her nipples has never been in debt.
Has never yelled at her because of it.”

Matthew’s poetry has a strange way of taking the reader outside of the originally planned narrative and then unexpectedly dragging them back in, just when they’ve become attached to a stranger’s sex life.  Just when they are invested in the smell of coffee and sex, the sound of moaning, Matthew reminds the reader of those who are not so lucky.

Every poem in All-American Poem is, ultimately, an epic one, reaching across geographic landscapes, from the snow of Ann Arbor to the rainy Pacific Northwest, telling the tales of misplaced youth. But it is the poem “Lents District,” fittingly enough, that best embraces and explores what Matthew is trying to say. He tells the story of his unfortunate hometown as a guilty observer, easily placing the reader within the torn up streets, within the broken homes. Comparing the daily life to a “musical some rich kid from New York wrote about credit, debt, and then threw in Kool-Aid to make it funny for everyone,” Matthew tells of “furious mothers” who “applied their lipstick that left red cuts on the ends of their Marlboro Reds,” and fathers that “quietly did whatever fathers do.” He speaks of orchestra pits made up of angry Pit bulls, kick lines of skinheads, “twirling metal pipes, stomping in unison.” Matthew creates beauty within the ugliness of impoverished America. He does not want to be away from it, he embraces the gangs, the violence and the terror for all the poetic beauty it is worth.

“Dear Lents,
Dear 82nd avenue, dear 92nd and Foster,
I am your strange son,
you saved me when I needed saving
and I remember your arms wrapped around
my bassinet like patrol cars wrapped around
the school yard
the night Jason went crazy—
waving his father’s gun above his head,
bathed in red and blue flashing lights,
all American, broken in half and beautiful.”

The America Matthew speaks of is one that is rarely spoken of, but he screams it with pride. The red and blue flashing lights, the evictions, the single mothers. What is most important about “Dear Lents” and his entire collection is that Matthew does not shy away from the ugly. He instead finds the magnificence in it and makes it accessible for all readers.

As poets, Michael and Matthew could not be more different. The End of the West is based on the intangible, on the ghosts of dead friends. All-American Poem is ultimately for the disaffected 20- or 30-something, lost in a world of Pepsi products, haunted by the memories of a stolen youth, and as Matthew says in “Country Music,” “something about cigars and bourbon I no longer want to be a part of.” Even when they speak of the same friends, Matthew, too, mentions violence-prone Ian and his junkie mother from Michael’s “Scary Parents,” it isn’t comparable. While Michael finds and forms emptiness, Matthew strives to fill that emptiness with description. Their poems appeal to different parts of the brain and the senses; Michael’s striking emotional chords with simple words while Matthew bases his in reality and examples, placing the reader in concrete places with people we become certain existed, with people we begin to think we know. What is definite, however, is that both Dickman brothers, regardless of what critics say, are worthy of any and all praise coming their way. Their story seem to be a strange fluke, but it is very real, very rare, and deserves our attention.