Leah Nieboer, soft apocalypse

 

an argument is rising through the roof
I’m spaced out listening
to the couple next door
on the upper edge of love, or something
lifting off –

I could it seems
skate the length of these powerlines
to Ophiuchus, taking care
not to trip on a constellation of sneakers
dangling where
the others had thrown them off

I believe in love

in the prayers crossing up
this completest dark (“MINOR EVENTS 3”)

I’m fascinated by the deeply precise and dreamy lyric of Denver-based Iowa poet LeahNieboer’s full-length poetry debut, soft apocalypse (Athens GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2023), published as part of The Georgia Poetry Prize as judged by Andrew Zawacki. Across twenty-three poems, ranging from extended lyrics to prose poem stanzas, Nieboer works in lyric clusters, from the assemblage of her individual lines and individual pieces, to cluster-groupings as part of the construction and arrangement of the poems. “failing spectacularly at orderliness the primroses,” she writes, to open the poem “DREAM OF RISKED PHRASES IN SPACE,” “rush hour yellowness // a soft geometry unfinishing // the edges the sentence // giving in to its most // we could say phosphenic [.]” Her extended lyrics pull and fragment, fracture and bend, and manage to simultaneously hold an incredible precision across a landscape, and it is through her lyric fractal and disruption that she offers such unique clarity. “the official measure of // a complete and undeviating /’ orbital oranging everybody,” she writes, as part of “FLASH PROCESSING OF A PRIVATE YEAR,” “this is the year baby // lashing against // the backward infliction of [.]” Nieboer offers a blend of connection and disconnection; almost a tether of disruption that runs through the length and breadth of her text, one that resists the pull of expectation and late capitalism, a multitude of crises, smoke and accident. “in the soft underside of the ashen city,” she writes, as part of “ON A SLEEPLESS NIGHT, KILOMETRES AND / KILOMETRES BELOW WHAT HAD BEEN A / GREAT CITY,” “I dream we’ve written // the end of the movie. I wake up and fine we’ve written only // how do I get out of this production machine.”

Nieboer offers shimmering scenes through memory and her immediate, flashing along akin to landscapes beyond the window of a fast-moving train, or something filmic, disjointed. There is something deeply compelling about the way her lines allow attention to become entirely lost, absorbed. “as it happens,” she writes, as part of the fourteen-page “FORECLOSE ME,” “I have always believed // in the baptismal properties // of yellow // in the way violet // fucks pink into purple // a big promise // a little change // something // falling from your hand [.]”

Andrew Zawacki, Unsun

SURFACE-TO-SURFACE SONNET

Daughter you need a real jetlag plan

For the wee hours

When sleeping it off isn’t working

A banter of scare quotes to antler

Any storm : the angels

Playing marbles, trucks that try to fly

Daughter you need a new landscape

– sodic soil, ablation zone, graffiti

            blinging the airport route –

To tuck you in at night, the lavish noir

            de zed à a

– Dada what does dead mean is

Dead it’s when you can’t

Come back?

I might have missed it when it first came out, but I am finally catching up with Georgia poet, editor and translator Andrew Zawacki’s latest poetry title, Unsun (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2019), a lyric propelled by sound, fragment and cadence, utilizing meaning almost as a means to a end. There is something reminiscent in Zawacki’s poems of the work of Windsor, Ontario poet Louis Cabri through their shared propulsion of sound [see my review of Cabri’s latest here], such as the opening of Zawacki’s “DIXIE PIXIE SONNET”: “Solar panel, a Fresnel lens / Five-pound bag of M&Ms and we could 3-D print a clone of you // Pell-mell all hell and ill will will unfurl / If you don’t wear your cheap synthetic, frilly fuchsia princess dress / Fake glass high heel sequin slippers clacking on the tile // In your lifetime, the Arctic will have been [.]” His lines suggest both precision and perpetual motion. “Everything I say is a meteor shower,” he writes, to open the poem, “STREWNFIELD.” Mid-way through the same piece, he writes: “Half transistor, / half self / my voice is flensed mid- / flight inside the glare between two screen : // a bezelled Citibank tower / in blue and the NASDAQ ticker spitting its intraday / figureds and decimal // squall.”

The book is constructed in numerous sections around shape and sound and image, but what really strikes are the paired sonnet sections, “Sonnensonnets,” collecting eleven in the first “Sonnensonnets” section and eleven more in the further. Zawacki is a master of effectively blending precision and motion, such as the twenty-part sequence “WATERFALL PLOT,” a sequence of poems that pairs each short poem with a photograph, a sequence of what he calls “loose variations” influenced by and responding to works by the eighth-century poet Wang Wei. As he writes in his “NOTES” at the end of the collection: “The accompanying large-format photographs – shot with 4x5 film, to replicate the aspect ratio of Wang’s poems: four verses containing five characters each – were taken at a compound of disused chicken coops in Athens, Georgia. The site has since been dismantled altogether.”

5.

The affect of flatness : in a woods without branches, or

Needles or bark, late sunlight bleaches the shadows to silver –

echo an arrowkeen flexing, no feather – and night is a country

where no one lived, and loved like a language, and left.

In an interview at OmniVerse around his prior collection, Barbara Claire Freeman opens her questions with: “I just read ‘Sever Sonnet,’ a gorgeous and exquisitely sever/e sonnet you published in the spring issue of A Public Space. Re and re-reading it makes me hope that the poem is part of a sequence or book that’s soon to be published. Can you offer reassurance?” Zawacki’s lengthy answer is interesting, in part due to the fact that the poem isn’t yet part of a larger manuscript-length consideration, the not-yet of Unsun. “Daughter is an / Edge, edge / A verb –” he writes, as part of “LIMIT SONNET.” The poems for and from his daughter provide a fascinating pair of sonnet-suites, articulating parenthood in ways I haven’t seen, managing to provide a fresh language into a long-familiar subject, as well as breathing new life into the sonnet-structure, a poetic form that is too often replicated poorly. His response speaks to the early sparks of what would eventually become Unsun:

Thank you for your kind words about that poem. The ending needs rewriting, somehow. But I’m sorry I can’t reassure you just yet! It isn’t included in my latest volume, Videotape, though some of its companions have appeared in or on BOMBlog, Poetry Northwest, a new online journal I’m excited about called Flag + Void, and here at OmniVerse.

The sonnet is one of fourteen—a corona whose ligatures have been altered—that I wrote for, and from, my daughter Ella. Begun when she was just over a year old and more or less abandoned when she was around two and a half, the series was meant to accompany her through her acquisition and nascent deployment of language—or of two languages, since her mother is Parisian and we speak French at home. I’d been seeking a way to stand, or sit, beside her, attentive to her earliest attentions to the world, in order to articulate my experience of what I could fathom of hers. A phenomenology not of speech, then, but rather of listening: my daughter and I composed the oblique lyrics together. Referencing Béla Tarr’s film The Turin Horse or a microwave’s voltage, a Pink Floyd song or ski slopes manufactured in Dubai, are moments that come from my own consciousness, of course. But misquoting The Cat in the Hat, intoning “bye bye,” auditioning the differing pronunciation of the English word “ours” and the French word ours for bear—those are slippages Ella spoke for herself. Even within a language, there were the—I don’t know what to call them—declensions or conjugations or trills of sounds within the same sonic zip code: doudou, for doll or security blanket; dodo for a nap or good night’s sleep; dada, the name Ella still calls me, although it’s not really correct French—and that word refers me, in turn, to Dada, as a sort of principle of ludic elasticity presiding over this elaborate naming game.

[…]

I’ve called the suite “Sonnensonnets,” from the German for sun, intending to establish a kind of antagonism, beginning from Derrida’s anxiety—not that he redressed it in Politiques de l’amitié—that the history of friendship in the West has always been a matter of brothers and sons, despite the fundamental role that Antigone might have played in altering that discourse. (George Steiner wondered in Antigones what might have happened had Antigone’s tale, instead of her father Oedipus’s, been identified as the fundamental text of psychoanalysis; but it took Judith Butler to think that missed opportunity through, in Antigone’s Claim.) The other contrary in the title, of course, involves the trope of the sun as central, primary, unifying. In the sonnet you mention, my daughter is done being anybody’s moon. In my mind—and maybe because we’re expecting another in September—daughters are the new sons!

VERSE magazine, Vols. 24 + 25;

We can only seek a sentence by means of another sentence.
— Pierre Alferi, “from To Seek a Sentence,” trans. Anna Moschovakis, Verse, Vol. 24, Nos. 1-3

The editors of the American journal Verse (produced through the Department of English at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia) were nice enough to send me copies of their two most recent issues a while back, Volume 24, Nos. 1-3 (2007), produced as their “French Poetry & Poetics” issue, and Volume 25, Nos. 1-3 (2008), produced as their “The Sequence (II)” issue. Headed by editors (and poets themselves) Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki, these impressive annuals are packed with writing, interviews and reviews, and make me wonder just how I’ve been living so long without going through this journal, and certainly make their way onto my list of American literary journal “must haves,” along with P-Queue, FENCE and The Chicago Review (there are probably others I can’t think of right now). The first volume of the two exists almost as a continuation of the conversation started a few days ago when I talked about going through issues of sentence: a journal of prose poetics, since the prose poem is so much more prevalent in French writing than in North American writing. The issue, edited by Abigail Long and Zawacki, consists of a great amount of writing, as well as interviews with Dominique Fourcade and Claude Royet-Journoud, and reviews and essays by various writers, including Nathalie Stephens, Rusty Morrison and Eleni Sikelianos. In her review of Two Worlds: French and American Poetry in Translation (ed. Béatrice Mousli, Otis Books/Seismicity Editions), Canadian expatriate writer Nathalie Stephens, who has written on translation and done much of her own, begins:

The question of language’s intimate relationship to nationhood, and to violence as such, continues to demand consideration. The implied causality of as such, in addition to the suggestion of an ontology of violence, necessitates explication, gives pause to this consideration, that is, suspends it spatially, temporally, between the carefully determined boundaries that distinguish languages from one another and the nations – nationalities, nationalisms – to which they adhere. In and of themselves.

That the act of translation may interpose itself as deconstructive, that it may detach – although by no means necessarily – a language from its nationalistic discourse, suggests the possibility of an engagement that determinedly crosses borders, and may do more than cross, but dismantle them in the process, or at very least resituate them, expose their mobility. Process is the admission of flux, of movement, of mutability, of a gesture that is always already in motion, the emotion of which is itself, may be, transforming. And the many and various bodies with it: textual, geographical, linguistic, national, and so on.

One of the highlights has to be the opening piece by Emmanuel Hocquard, trans. Steve Evans and Jennifer Moxley, his “Notes by Way of an Introduction,” that traces the history of his own relationship with American poetry.

1980, my first extended stay (six months) in the United States, where I make the acquaintance of Claude Richard. The beginning of our friendship.

I make my way to San Francisco, where I meet Michael Palmer at Robert Duncan’s. Larry Eigner at Robert Grenier’s, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Barrett Watten and Carla Harryman, Lyn Heginian, Tom Mandel, and others. Apologies to those I’ve forgotten to mention.

I became conscious of the possibilities for a productive relationship (based on numerous shared ideas and similar approaches to the problems of writing) between French and American poets of the same generation. But, excluding a small handful of initiates who, owing to their travels abroad and friendship circles, can keep up to date with what their contemporaries on the other side of the Atlantic are thinking and writing, the vast majority of us are at the mercy of rare anthologies and translations published in magazines. And even these resources are inadequate, bringing the news – especially in the case of anthologies – one, and sometimes many, generations too late.

I wonder, is this, perhaps, why the United States has more of a relationship with the prose poem than Canada does? Was it through the forging of such relationships between writing/writers?

DAY SIX

If I skipped a day, would there be
a song? Let the cat do it, stretched
on the bed, sprawled against me, not wary
for once. Let the print of a print of a print
Dore once did
do it, there on the wall, angels in the dark
coming at me off a ship in those waters,
the 19th century endless and adrift
and never light enough to see. Let the three
doors of this room open to it. Let the laundry basket
overflow with it. Let the books piled
whichever way and too many
do it, cry aubade, cry
word no one knows anymore,
its little scheme to stop time
almost stopped. Let my tea
do it, a hit of milk, no sugar. Am I done
with this? Am I? Day that will pass
and not be remembered, lighter
than its air.
— Marianne Boruch, “Seven Aubades for Summer,” Verse, Vol. 25, Nos. 1-3

The second volume was produced as their second issue on “The Sequence,” with works by Rosmarie Waldrop, Kate Fagan, John Kinsella, Rusty Morrison, David Wojahn and more than a dozen others (including John Matthias, a poet Lea Graham has been trying to get me to read lately), as well as interviews with Theodore Enslin and Morrison, and a slate of the usual book reviews (one has to admire the journal, if for no other reason, than their impressive collection of book reviews in every issue). The wonderful sequence by Corinne Lee, “Those Discernible Coonskin Caps,” had an openness and movement that reminded me of my favourite of Toronto poet Jay MillAr’s recent works, but would be impossible to replicate here, and there was just something about Marianne Boruch’s “Seven Aubades for Summer” that really struck, but I couldn’t say why.

This is the book I’d mentioned I’d been meaning to write. The one with the laughing person in it. I blush. A chamber pot, various basins at the end of a rope. A revolving door. It is true that I enclosed the scene with a fence. There was no center, but I wanted to say something about a trip. About color. About two bodies, a thigh, the platform of the present. Citrus trees, the very real smell of lemon zest. In it, I do something funny, you are pleased. Touching ensues. I feed you. But I have tried in vain to affix the lemon to the page. The peel has gone soft. What matters is matter. I hope you are not embarrassed to read this.
— Anthony Hawley, “Autobiography/Oughtabiography,” Verse, Vol. 25, Nos. 1-3

After reading for years the Canadian sequence, it’s interesting to see how various American writers work their own versions of same, and it makes me intrigued to see what they did for their earlier issue on such. What did this magnificent journal do before these?

How simply words cluster,
love and death, maroon resolve
folding to a page.

The soles of feet are elegant originals.

I am driven to absurdity
by such pained law, a large O,
our temples of delivery and exit.

Awareness comes in material shades,
owl in the hedge for instance.
— Kate Fagan, “Observations on Time, Cargo,” Verse, Vol. 25, Nos. 1-3

What really makes this issue interesting is the range of styles being covered through these twenty sequences, giving a good show as to what the form is capable of, and through such, giving their own statements on what the form can do. Still, it would have been interesting to have another interview or two; or am I just spoiled from reading various editions of The Long Poem Anthology, with each writer a statement at the back of the volume on their individual piece? The closest the volume comes is through the interview with Enslin, where he talks about his 2004 poetry collection Nine (National Poetry Foundation):

Actually my reason for calling the collection of what I consider my best late sequences Nine was much more simplistic than any scholastic thinking. There are nine of these, and there is an old superstition among composers, from Beethoven on, that nine symphonies are all that a composer can produce. Superstition, yes, but certainly there are a number of topflight examples: Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler, Dvorak. I won’t deny that I later thought of nein and eine, but that was merely for my own amusement.

ongoing notes: some recent American poetry collections by Zawacki, Padgett, Young & Byrne

A whole bunch of things since getting back to my western desk; I’ve started posting more interviews for that 12 or 20 questions series (Peter Darbyshire even noticed); Amanda Earl, but today, posted a list of what some Ottawa writers are up to on their various poetry projects, and wrote a "best of" for 2007 (that was nice enough to include me). Pearl chimed in on Phil Jenkins' original article on potentially bringing back Ottawa laureates (with a follow-up letter or two in the Ottawa Citizen); here are some photos I recently posted from two Alberta adventures (Calgary extravaganza and the Olive Reading Series), and the Ottawa launch of the Peter F. Yacht Club #8. And did you see this strange little mention of a few Canadian poets, including John Newlove, Max Middle and Sharon Harris?

Athens GA: On the recommendation of expat nathalie stephens (currently in Chicago) [see her 12 or 20 questions here], I got in touch with American poet Andrew Zawacki (co-editor of Verse), who sent me a copy of his third poetry collection Anabranch (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), a follow-up to his previous By Reason of Breakings (2002) and Masquerade (2001).

2

snow today and through tomorrow
and through tomorrow night, in a stutter

the logic of dominos, music the method
of dice: northsouth and isterdriven

do not tarry, do not turn, because
the impartial, because because:

gigolo heat and the haze it chafes against
encrypted blue, a prayer for their sickness

that went, that went: the salt of x
is the psalm of x, encoded in apricot,

gunpowder tea, and given
to being given again and against:

I owe myself, I owe myself,
dancing in front of the doorway my debt,

dancing in front of it, open or shut (from “Viatica”)

There is something vaguely ghazal-like to Zawacki’s lines, pushing further his lines of thought through a series of accumulations. I like the slowness of his poems, in the four long poems that make up this collection; these four poems that stretch out as far as he can take them. Still, this book is (now) four years old; how long do we have to wait before we see another?

alone and in advance
over an unknown grave (from “Viatica”)

New York NY: It’s interesting the difference between confidence in Canadians and Americans, with the title of American poet Ron Padgett’s new poetry collection, How to Be Perfect (Minneapolis MN: Coffee House Press, 2007); the first thing it reminds me of is Charles Gordon’s non-fiction title How To Be Not Too Bad: A Canadian Guide to Superior Behaviour (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1994) (not that one has anything to do with the other). The author of roughly twenty books of poetry and prose over the years, the second generation New York School poet Padgett (check out this recent interview with Padgett) is capable of some fantastic and subtle wisdom in his poems, one that makes it more and more obvious how he could be a favourite of Toronto poet and fiction writer Stuart Ross (and also reminiscent of some recent George Bowering pieces) [see my recent review of Padgett’s book of collaborations, published by Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press].

History Lesson

I think that Geoffrey Chaucer did not move
the way a modern person moves.
He moved only an inch at a time, in what
we call stop action. Everyone in his day moved
like that, so they could be shot into a tapestry,
but also because time moved in short lurches
and was slightly jagged and had fewer colors
for them to be in. But that was good. Humanity
has to take it one step at a time.

Great Barrington MA: Despite ending his infamous press The Figures a few years ago (1975-2005), American poet and curator Geoffrey Young continues to produce collections of poetry through other publishers, most recently The Riot Act (Lowell, MA: Bootstrap Press, 2008).

THE 97TH KENTUCKY DERBY

She yelled
the horses are prancing through introductions
& I dropped the book of Job
hustled in
& heard we had six minutes til post-time.
She’d just put on short pants and a shirt
after taking a bath & was trying
to get a comb through her long tangled hair.

I said wait a minute
unsnapped her pants
pulled them down around her thighs
slid down her standing body
& buried my tongue in her moist bush.
I perfumed it, she said.
I can taste it, I said.

Pretty soon I was sitting on the floor
& she was sitting on me
riding me back and forth
yelling giddiup giddiup
way out ahead of those other horses
who hadn’t even arrived at the starting gate yet.
I heard a trumpet announce something & the crowd got excited.

& carefully I manoeuvered her until she was flat
on her back, head below the TV
and now I was riding her, rocking gently
not even racing now
as the announcer spoke of the Derby’s glorious history.

Arching her back, she looked upside down
at the horses on the screen
some in the starting gate
others glistening and edgy and powerful
about to enter
but we couldn’t wait for them
& in a beautiful homestretch
at least a minute before Cañonero II

won the 97th Kentucky Derby by three lengths
we kicked it all the way home.

I find it interesting just how far some of Young’s poems move through narrative (much like Canadians David W. McFadden and Stuart Ross, and American Padgett), yet he titles, perhaps ironically, perhaps not, a poem and the first section of the collection, “Why I Don’t Write Novels” (particularly reminiscent of the work of both Ross and Padgett).

WHY I DON’T WRITE NOVELS

A man approaches a closet,
opens the door, reaches in,
selects a shirt, slips it off
the hanger, replaces hanger

on rod, turns from closet
with shirt in hand,
and without shutting closet
door, walks into bathroom,

stands in front of mirror,
puts shirt on, watches
his hands buttoning it, loosens
his belt, tucks shirt into pants,

tightens belt, smiles at
the glass, leaves the room.

The first section, as well, starts with three quotes by other writers:

“To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance.” William Carlos Williams

“And could one make a sonnet of nothing but trees.” Clark Coolidge

“I am not a sonnet, you are not a sea urchin, and this is not a poetry contest, comrade.” Stephen Rodefer

That first quote is quite a challenge; where did Williams say this? I would be interested in finding out. I wonder what a poet such as Stephen Brockwell would make of such quotes?

Young also runs a summer art gallery down there in Great Barrington (the same town, incidentally, where Canadian ex-pat poet Jan Conn lives).

Providence RI: The author of a number of other poetry collections [see her 12 or 20 questions here], Irish ex-pat Mairéad Byrne’s most recent collection is Talk Poetry (Oxford OH: Miami University Press, 2007). Made out of a series of prose fragments [see also the short review by Rachel Loden on her own blog], almost as short essays/stories, they remind me a bit of George Bowering’s recent chapbook published through Edmonton’s Olive Reading Series [see my note on such here], except not as fiercely tight. Byrne’s pieces move through “life itself,” as referenced by the opening quote by Claes Oldenburg that reads “I am for an art…that is heavy and coarse and / blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.”

Global Hastening

I don’t know what happened to May. It disappeared in a blur of rain & grading. One minute it was May 1st. Now it’s May 19th. Everything’s whizzing by. When I was young summer lasted all year. It was like the ocean. Amber waves of grain rolling way off to the horizon. Now it’s like zzzpptt! As soon as it’s Monday it’s Friday. Months are like weekends. You make a note to do something & 3 years later it’s done. There’s no point in looking forward to anything. I understand that as you get older time speeds up. But this is surreal. Everyone’s hit. And it’s not just a horizontal thing. It’s vertical too. My daughter says I can’t BELIEVE freshman year is almost over. My 9-year old confides to her friends Time flies. Babies go bye bye bye bye. And they can’t even talk. What’s happening? The temporal caps are melting. This
one’s for Mr. President.

There are a number of these pieces working through temporal concerns, whether ageing or simpley the passage of time, almost the theme that runs its way through this collection. Byrne’s prose-poems read almost like floating entries, and drift and flow like water, like clouds along meandering lines that sometimes close, and other times, allow the reader to continue once the piece is done; a good poem stays with you, long after you’ve finished reading, and there were a number of pieces here that strayed, and even stayed.

Figures

I used to be 4 years younger than my husband then he left me with 2 children & I got 7 years older very quick. Two years went by. I was 11 years older by then. He stayed the same age, always 30, possibly even younger. In no time, I was 20 years older than him & hurtling towards old age. Even the children began to age. They were small & wrinkled, older than their own father. His skin was baby-smooth, his brown hair rising like a stack above their wilting heads—or like a vividly brushed dun & purple mountain ringing the horizon in the pan of which, somewhere, they tottered