6 x 6 : issues #32 + #33

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.