I’m
slowly sifting through my stack of elegantly designed chapbooks from Little Red Leaves Textile Editions, designed and sewn by Dawn Pendergast, including three
wildly different yet incredibly playful works: The Windows Hallucinate (2013) by Mary Kasimor, Sheep Dip Excerpts (2013) by Doug MacPherson, and Arcanagrams: A Reckoning
(2014) by Amanda Davidson. There is the most interesting cadence present in the
work of Minnesota poet Mary Kasimor, staggered and staccato through a series of
spacings and capitalizations:
multipl
e s of wine
Sin ersshining s in bla c k e
ye black s in in multipl e s of
los t cha nces overt hehil l
& char co al out lin e s cert
aintyp e s o f belief s i n sin
hl e fil e
o n a flat ho riz o n
sta r s s pea k i n
for e
igntonquechangeli
ngba l lso
f ten wine
The
author of three trade poetry collections—& cruel red (Otoliths, 2010), silk string arias (BlazeVox Books, 2008)
and The Landfill Dancers (BlazeVox
Books, 2014)—Kasimor nearly speaks in a coded language, hidden within such
familiar English. Her poems manage to explore and challenge sound and meaning
while moving quickly across the page, revealing an unusual (and even
refreshing) cadence that I would be interested to hear her perform, such as in
the opening of her poem “a starry night,” that reads:
Plants speak in CODE
tongue
WALKERS in desert
talK straight
Dope IS for THOS
Who EXHale A
Starry
STARRY night WHEN the
painter
DRoppeD over for
COcktailS
WHEN we GathERED
Around WAITing for Kool
Aid
IS an ALLUSION To the
PAST
in the JUNGLE the
plants
HABITAT was involved IN
A Sting OPERation
WHO knew?
As
the colophon of San Francisco/Tahoe poet Doug MacPherson’s Sheep Dip Excerpts reads: “This collection of poems is an excerpt
from a larger work called sheep dip, a creative translation of O Guardador de Rebnhos by Fernando Pessoa, who wrote it under the persona of Alberto Caeiro, a shepherd. It is
also in conversation with two English translations of Pessoa’s book—The Keeper of Sheep by Edwin Honig and Susan Brown and Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person by Erin Mouré.”
No
16
for Altus
who would publish me
minha living life as an office boy?
squeaking early morning
down the road with my cart
returning with my cart
at dusk down the same road
i have no tinge of hope
i have these wheels
i am getting old
without wrinkles or gray hair
i am no longer of
service take off my wheels
i am left upside down
and broken at the bottom of a drain
While
I’m unaware of the Honig and Brown title he speaks of, MacPherson’s
translations are certainly far straighter than the work in Mouré’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person [see the piece I wrote on such here], without the vibrancy she worked through her
own transelation of the same text. Still,
this is certainly a compelling collection, and I’m intrigued to see what the
full text looks like, once its published in trade form. MacPherson manages,
through his sequence of numbered translations, to respond to Pessoa’s original
text in intriguing ways.
No
49
i go inside
fetch a channel tracy with candle says night
minha voice
content says night minha life sighs to day check
of sun saved
rain afternoons pass on channel O last hello
friend soggy
trees deposit Os i fetch another channel light a
candle night
of withouts course like a river bed and four big
silences like days that
sleep
The
most compelling of these three works has to be Amanda Davidson’s wonderfully
playful Arcanagrams: A Reckoning,
which responds, in part, to the works of Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772),
best known for his book on the afterlife, Heaven
and Hell (1758). Davidson’s bio includes the fact that she is “currently at
work on a performance novel about the mystic Swedenborg,” and she includes this
intriguing fact in the colophon of the short collection: “‘Dromböken,’ on page
twelve, is a cut-up poem using text from Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams. This English-language edition was translated
from the Swedish by my great-great-grandfather, Carl Theophilus Odhner (Bryn
Athen, Pennsylvania: The Academy Book Room, 1918). This book is now in the
public domain.” I’m fascinated by her interest in the work of Swedenborg,
especially given her personal connection to him and his work, and wonder (in
the “chicken-and-egg” way) which may have come first, her interest in his work,
or her knowledge of such a connection?
DROMBÖKEN
I was neither in a
state of sleep nor wakefulness.
Throughout the whole
night I seemed to be
going deep down, by
ladders and other spaces.
This signified moving
from celestial to natural
understanding
I slept deeply for
eleven hours
I dreamt I was being
punished
I dreamt of a woman
I dreamt of cages
I was arrested
Whipped
Climbed down
I flew
This signifies inmost
affection from the Lord
This signifies the
grand man
This signifies natural
truths
This signifies the
highest heaven
This signifies I had
not washed my feet
I spoke long and
familiarly with our Successor
who changed into a woman.
What it may signify is
best known to our Lord.
In the morning my
eyesight was so improved that I
could read the Bible
without glasses.
What this signifies I do
not know.
Something will happen
to me after I finish the first
chapter on the sense of
touch.
Whether I am to take
one road in my work or am
being prepared for
another, I know not; it is dark
to me.
I was not able to have
the strong faith I ought to
have. I believed and
yet did not believe.
Once again I was thrown
onto my face.
I do not know what this
means.
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