I thought to write
and wrote a language
that I use, I didn’t write
to that
language as in a letter
or something
but one cannot be
blamed
for thinking so. Isn’t
it odd
the channels words cut
open like
look over here I am
stuck in one
and there’s an earthen
weight
bearing down with
lexical meaning
so it’s really hard to
talk any longer
about this, if not
entirely
impossible but I’m
learning
effective communication
skills. (Tony Iantosca)
I’ve
long been an admirer of the American poetry journal 6 x 6, produced through Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse. As the
title suggests, each issue features healthy selections of work from six
contributors, and the most recent issues to appear at my door include work by
James D. Fuson, Lyn Hejinian, Barbara Henning, Tony Iantosca, Uroš Kotlajić (translated
from Serbian by Ainsley Morse) and Morgan Parker (issue #32), and Amanda Berenguer (translated from Spanish by Gillian Brassil and Alex Verdolini),
Jeremy Hoevenaar, Krystal Languell, Holly Melgard, Marc Paltrineri and Cat Tyc
(issue #33). Part of the appeal of the journal, other than the obvious appeal
of a journal that supports strong writing, is the variety of form and style
displayed in each issue, as well as translations from other languages (and
countries), and a list of contributors running the length and breadth of
emerging, established and all points in-between. This list can include poets I’ve
known the work of for years, to those I’m being introduced to for the first
time. Take, for example, this excerpt from Brooklyn based filmmaker/poet/video artist Cat Tyc’s “Memory Is Not a Test”:
10. Being the
sixth wheel, she wishes for a bigger dance floor to watch the lunar eclipse
from.
More copper than red,
and everyone goes home to spoon and make babies.
Baby this, and baby
that. They always get the last word.
Her cab driver says,
that in his country, it is believed that if a pregnant woman sleeps through an
eclipse, her child will not come to term.
His stern sensitivity
garnered prudent reservation.
She saw herself in him.
Sometimes when no one was looking, she would walk around the apartment without
a shirt on.
Just to try on that
petulant boy role.
Enough already, it is
fall, and she is still swatting mosquitoes.
The author biography on her website writes that her work is “interested in
exploring the paradoxes of class,” and her work in this issue of 6 x 6 is enough to make me curious to
see what else she’s produced. In a recent interview over at Weird Sister she says: “I am identifying
as a writer first mostly these days because that is my primary creative act in
this moment in time. The last few years I have been focusing on filmmaking but
after a while I found myself wanting to differentiate from the conversations I found
myself in. If I called myself a filmmaker, the conversation would always
devolve towards film festivals, camera models, distribution models, financing….
All of that felt really disconnected from some of the things I feel most
passionate about in filmmaking and making art in general which are story,
character development, and directing. After being frustrated in this way one
too many times, I remembered that all of those aspects I loved stemmed from
writing and I realized it might be a lot easier to get back to my favorite
parts of filmmaking if I just stopped and said, ‘Hey, I’m a writer.’ I think
creative identity, like most identifying quantities, is for the individual and
the individual alone to decide. It also feels important to mention too that in
honing my focus back on writing…it helped me reconnect to the literary, or to
be more specific, radical poetics, which are at the foundation of my education
and have been my primary creative community for most of my life.” Another is
poet Tony Iantosca, author of Shut Up, Leaves (United Artists Books, 2015), a poet with, beyond a handful of
pieces posted in a variety of online journals, a remarkably small online
footprint. As one of his untitled poems from his “Excerpts from Creative Writing” in issue #32 reads: “A cloud in the
shape / of a shape. It is shaped / how it’s shaping itself and being /shaped
too I suppose because / it’s a cloud. All my problems / shape up to be
rainstorm / and then it all becomes / something else entirely.” Of course, one
can never overlook Barbara Henning, who has a striking and powerful matter-of-fact
meander on life and film reminiscent slightly of the work of Toronto poet David Donnell:
Madagascar
I’m watching Madagascar
with the boys—hilarious
hip city zoo animals
end up
in Africa but long to
come
home to the Central
Park Zoo.
With the emergence of
zoos,
pet keeping and animal
toys,
John Berger explains
that animals
were slowly
disappearing from
our daily lives. When
the boys
take a bath, Like
stretches his
long young thin body
under
the warm water and we
play
with little action
figures
and plastic frogs. Then
I put
my feet into the tub,
singing
row row row your boat
gently
down the stream. Later
it’s raining and we’re
together
under an umbrella,
walking
through the park.
Surely,
radioactive ocean water
from the Fukushima
Daiichi
nuclear plant will
migrate
around the globe and
even if we
don’t die this year, we
will
all die eventually, so
for now,
let’s hold each other
loosely.
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