Ongoing notes: the dusie kollectiv,

The appearance of dusie chapbooks [click the dusie tag underneath to get to all my previous reviews of such] in my mailbox seems to be slowing down. I've received probably ten more than I've reviewed (I can't like everything); why does it feel as though I haven't yet received as many as I should?

Santa Cruz CA: Two chapbooks seem to have arrived together, but I seem to have noticed them separately. Alongside Jessica Breheny's Ephemerides (Embusan Press, 2011) [see my review of such here] came James Maughn's Playing the Form (Embusan Press, 2011), producing a chapbook of daily meditations, writing poems as daily practice. As Maughn writes at the back of the collection:

Playing the Form is the first section or a three-book section book in which the poem engages with my practice of the internal arts of Pa Kua, Hsing I, and Tai Chi Chuan, as taught in the system of ShorinjiRyu by O'Sensei Richard Kim. The 108 stanzas in Playing the Form correspond to the 108 movements of the long form of the Yang Family Tai Chi Chuan. Each poem was written after my daily practice of the Tai Chi form, and after study of each of the 108 movements.

There is an entirely different point-of-view between those who see writing as a daily activity and those who wait for the next big idea, and I've always been more partial to the daily activity side of the spectrum, with George Bowering's year-long My Darling Nellie Grey (Talonbooks, 2010) being one of the finest examples of a daily-practice project, alongside such classics as bpNichol's once-ongoing The Martyrology, or even Robert Creeley's A Day Book (1971). Maughn, in his example of daily practice, writes quiet, subtle moments and movements in these small poems, and a long poem that eases its slow way into something like an ongoing accumulation, never completion. Parts of his cadence even remind (slightly) of Bowering, possibly even from his His Life: A Poem (ECW Press, 2000), a book he has probably never even heard of.

We're left sitting hard in bumper cars.

Momentum's forward but

not in your face.

Whatever a tide turns, it doesn't rush.

There's no where to go

where it isn't already. Ballast keeps

it all below the waterline.

Like Death says, it's a lifetime.

Know the art: Where your pulse stops.

New York NY: The only frustration with Deborah Poe's submission to this fifth dusie kollectiv is that participants aren't able to see all of these small collections, as her work is a single project quartered, four chapbooks, mine being the second of these, the tiny /pleis/ (2011). But might that mean all four will be (eventually) available as dusie pdfs on the website? And is this a single unit quartered, as it appears in print, or something more, perhaps?

Death Mix

all lines from Paul Celan

leaf-green heart of a shadow looks at itself

there comes a stillness, comes this storm

which crossing awakens?

snow-bed under us both

sky of paris, giant autumn crocus

is that a ferry?

we dig a grave in the breezes

black milk of daybreak

I see through it down to the bed

stone, wherever you look, stone

in the passages, passages

let the grey animal in

O one, o none, o no one, o you

Poe writes out a map in pockets, parcels, and allows the connections to create themselves, in a small work created, in part, during a Soapstone Writing Residency in July 2010. After reading her work in various places and corners, Poe seems strongest in her attention to the smallest of moments, carving down and further, down. As she writes in her acknowledgments:

“The title of this collection is based on a quote from Nahezhda Mandelstam's Hope against Hope (Athneum Publishers 1970): Once, resting by the pile of rocks, [Osip] said: “My first book was Stone, and my last will be stone, too” (399, emphasis mine).

Ongoing notes: the dusie kollectiv,

Here are some brief reviews of more of recent chapbooks received as part of my participation in the “dusie 5 kollectiv” [see my previous note on such here].

New York NY: New York poet Lynn Behrendt's offering is the chapbook This is the Story of Things that Happened (2011), a long poem of thirty-six stanzas, with all but one composed in four-line stanza-sentences. Apparently the author of a number of other small chapbooks, as well as the full-length collection petals, emblems (Lunar Chandelier Press), her poem is composed of a list of items, accumulating lines and cross-purposes, writing out what happened, what might have happened, should or even never did. As she writes, “Every rock tells a story / about how it formed. / This is an anecdote / about how to sound like yourself.”

This is not a story about recruiting,

not a story about me

and most certainly

is not a story about you.

This is a story about a new subset

a black sheep story

the resettlement, revolution

& reform of the Chinese in Cuba.

Santa Cruz CA: There are two sequences that make up Jessica Breheny's Ephemerides (Embusan Press, 2011), “Ecliptic” and “Lunar Calendar.” I'm taken with Breheny's sharp turns, and her inventive takes on familiar patterns of astrology, writing, at least in “Ecliptic,” small fictions wrapped in poems. There are some fine moments here, as she writes as part 3 of her second sequence, “Open your blurry mouth. You will not / always swallow the sky from right to left.” I'm intrigued by these string-bound chapbooks, produced by American poet Jim Maughn, through a press so new the website claims only “under construction.” When will there be more than construction? Although, admittedly, I'd rather he be making books than websites. Here's the last of the twelve poems that make up her first sequence, said to be the last of the twelve signs, holding the best and the worst of all the rest:

Pisces

Today you will meet a man with a mysterious accent who will serve you figs

on a plate made of ground whale bones. You will dip a fig in honey

and your tongue will know each calorie as sunlight.

The man will take a book out of a satchel and read to you words made of feathers

and footprints. He will reach across the white clothed table for your hand and kiss

your index finger, and in that moment you will not feel the rattle of bones,

the gamble-game of knuckles, or your inclination to point,

“You.”

The language of your hand will fall silent,

your beaked no's and fisted yes's stilled.

You will look into the obsidian of the man's eyes

and see only your ink-blot self there.

Your tongue, stunned with honey

and all of the processes of sun, will not answer the question of the mirror.

And when you stand up, you will find that the man has removed all of the props,

such as the door, the chair, the music stand.

And your life, once again, will be a clean bone plate.

Dillon MT: Rebecca M. Knotts' We Speak of Sacred Things (2010) exists as a series of meditations, riding intent and straight lines across in sequence, writing:

And they say, “Each one prays to God according to his own light.”

And I find it difficult to believe there was nothing I could do to save you.

Self-described as a “polyphonic collage” using quotes and/or excerpts from such as Sophy Burnham, Paramahamsa Yogananda, David Smith, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Gerard Manley Hopkins and others, Knotts' poem works very much in a meditative mode, straighter in intent and language than many of the (so far) dusie offerings. Discovering its own grace through its singularity of purpose through collaged elements and unadorned speech, it is a poem searching for what can be said after such great trauma, when all else has been burned away.

Sadako Sasaki was two years old when America dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

Sadako was a little over one mile from the site of the explosion. All around her, adults and children –

and this is where you should speak and there is only silence