6x6 #36

I have been told that I walk like a man.

Last night a woman followed me at a party. I see something in you, she said. You’ve been raped. I know because I have too.

I want to ask you: Can you bear the life that you have?

Walking my dog down the street, passersby ask, “How old is he?” My dog is in fact a she. The mounting irritation I experience seems puerile, for what does it matter if a stranger incorrectly refers to my dog as male?

Today a tampon unwrapped and ejected itself into my tote bag.

When you talk about someone, it is a way to talk about yourself.

Sometimes I get a sore back.

One time, at Gussie’s urging, I took the neighbor’s baby for a walk in the carriage and, inspired by passersby admiring my beautiful sister, offered to sell her for three dollars.

When I use my left hand it doesn’t feel like I’m me anymore.

The knot, an associative network that intersects at a hidden center, rising to the surface as a word.

This is the nodal point where discourse forms a hole.

A lunch bag full of donuts. A blank face. This smelly life.

If a topologist cannot distinguish between a coffee mug and a donut, since a malleable donut can be reshaped into a coffee mug, then how do I know whether I am a man or a woman?

I can be one as easily as the other. (Sarah Wang, “An Image Always Precedes”)

I’ve long been an admirer of Brooklyn’s 6x6 [see my prior reviews of issues #35, #32-#33, #30, #26 and #25], produced through Ugly Duckling Presse, and the most recent issue #36, is the final in the series. There hasn’t been much explanation anywhere as to specifically why they’re ending the run of the journal, other than the suggestion that they want to try other things, and the hint that there might be another project come up in its stead. Still: 6x6 is not only one of my favo(u)rite American poetry journals, but one of those (now) late-lamented journals that I’m very disappointed I couldn’t manage to get any work into (along with Nate Norward’s The Gig). So, while I’m sad to see the journal end, I can at least remind myself that multiple back issues are most likely still available through the Ugly Duckling Presse website, which will allow me, potentially, a few more opportunities to discover writers I might not have been aware of (6x6 facilitated my discovery of writers such as Anna Gurton-Wachter (who now has a chapbook forthcoming with above/ground press), Judith Goldman, Cat Tyc, Tony Iantosca, Jon Boisvert and William Minor, among others, for which I am entirely and eternally grateful).

The final issue, subtitled “prodyourheadwithastick,” includes (as it always does) new work by six writers: Anselm Berrigan, Chia-Lun Chang, Cheryl Clarke, Lisa Fishman, Vasilisk Gnedov (translated by Emilia Loseva and Danny Winkler), and Sarah Wang. New York City writer Sarah Wang’s extended prose piece, “An Image Always Precedes,” is incredibly striking, and I’m surprised, slightly, that she doesn’t seem to have a book out yet, despite work published in Joyland, n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Conjunctions, Stonecutter Journal, Story Magazine and The Third Rail, as well as an excerpt of a novel-in-progress in BOMB magazine. I’m quite amazed by how the disparate sentences of her six-page work manages to cohere, even as it moves in multiple directions. Contributor Chia-Lun Chang, a Taipei, Taiwan-born poet, artist and translator, currently a member of the Belladonna* collective, is also the author of the chapbook (already out-of-print) One Day We Become Whites (No, Dear, 2016). Her six poems included in this issue are unapologetically political (concurrently responding directly and indirectly to the current political climate of the United States, and their current President), lyric and restless, and very much make me want to see what else she is capable of:

The Government Makes Me

lie if I want a visa. They paint me

a bunch of aloe. Locked fluid inside

my skin. But I’ve become a cactus

by adjusting to dryness. Others suggest

to mimic a rose. That’d make it easier to

get picked up. No one appreciates aloe,

people squeeze it to swallow and

apply on skin in summer kitchens

only. Check the box for venus flytrap,

to be a frozen predator.

None of the above dare to grow roots

until the government announces

that all of the thorns build a fence

preventing connections

from another side.

What can I say about 6x6? Just read it; just read everything in every issue. I mourn the loss of such a fine journal, yet eagerly await what might just be to come.

Anna Gurton-Wachter, The Abundance Chamber Works Alone

To enter the realm of writing one must take one’s self to divorce court. I’m sorry it has to be this way. The re-education of my working eye winks. To enter the realm of writing is to suffer losses. Run off other sufferers, run off. I wanted to but could not say run off. I need someone to pet me until I fall into a lava tank engine love. The construction worker concept is just an unused drill by the side of the road. The well-lit crane sways in my direction. The trial of the snail is set to begin. Take your time. The trial of the elephant is told to us by the parakeet mind. (“Maya Deren Lives Forever / in the Speedboat at Night”)

Ever since discovering her work via Ugly Duckling Presse’s 6x6 [see my review of such here], I’ve been eager for more work by Brooklyn poet, editor and archivist Anna Gurton-Wachter. I’ve now been rewarded for my patience, thanks to Essay Press producing her chapbook (both as a free pdf online and limited-edition print edition) The Abundance Chamber Works Alone (2017) as #92 in their “Groundloop Series,” a series that seeks “to bring together authors exploring diverse subjects through loud, innovative architectures.” Set in three sequence-sections of prose poems—“Maya Deren Lives Forever / in the Speedboat at Night,” “A Development Proposal / for the Center of the Earth” and “Instances of the Corpse / Flower Pose, a Study Group”—she opens the small collection with an introduction/prose poem titled “PREFACE,” that reads:

There are competing visions of the swamp. Females deposit their eggs in a parasitic territory for gratification alone. The intruder salivates. An act is magnified by formal study. End scene. Later, back at the lab, the summer spirit remains unknown. Parasites surround the forest. What we call a self-created memory worthy of the father and worthy of the mother and worthy of the mountain of golden guts. What we call, “lurking in the water,” or “stable speech acts.” The world is sufficiently killable as the squatters can attest. The abandoned critters are so modest and struggle to become a symbol for the cosmos, seeping through the soil deep inside the earth.

I want to know how to feel when I wash ashore. What to communicate first. You might find yourself the viewer, the violent concept, alive to the spill of sight as it tries to expire. The viewer is meant to experience a faint memory comprised of all possible readings. To feel like the act of reading has accomplished a tunnel display of denied tenderness. You might find yourself inside this lonely boycott state, active inside a motionless pit.

I’m absolutely blown away by the music of her lines, and a rush that sweeps the reader off their feet and into further, unexpected spaces. There is something fascinating in how Gurton-Wachter’s poems exist as abstract essays, constructed as expansive lyric catch-alls, structured to be able to include anything and everything, even while providing a linearity and purpose through each individual sequence. Her work is absolutely stunning, and she is easily one of my favourite American poets without a full-length poetry collection; I can’t imagine such a thing is far off.

6x6 # 35

How long have you been here, mirror-writing bloom? Tongue exploding, mouth exploding inwards—is origin even interesting? I want to keep my eyes truly open. Deliver the sugar rush. The corpse flower is about to bloom. But, tell me—what is meant by the phrase ‘impossible memory’? There it is again, the horror of placating an image back into its signal. A voice says Cooperate, and Decimate, and then Quiet, the corpse flower is about to bloom. (Anna Gurton-Wachter)

The new issue of Ugly Duckling Presse’s 6x6 (#35, February 2017) has landed, with work by six (hence the title) poets, only the final of whom I’d been aware of previously: Kim Hunter, Anna Gurton-Wachter, Judith Goldman, Bridget Talone, Ted Dodson and Katy Lederer. I’ve long appreciated the variety of 6x6, and, through each issue, have been able to discover at least one new poet that has startled me (if not more). In this issue, the first to leap out at me has to be New York poet, archivist and photographer Anna Gurton-Wachter, and her selection of prose poems titled “from Abundance Acts.” Given there are no author biographies included with the issue (something I’ve been warming to over the past little bit), I’ve had to independently discover that Gurton-Wachter is the author of two chapbooks—CYRUS (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2014) and Blank Blank Blues (Horse Less Press, 2016)—and that “she is the co-editor of DoubleCross Press with MC Hyland and works full time as the archivist for The Keith Haring Foundation.” There is something that really connects to me in Gurton-Wachter’s poems, from the density of her language to the leaps that occur between lines and images. As well, I’m intrigued by Ted Dodson’s selection of poems that each read like a coda, all individually titled “An Additional Poem.” The fourth of which reads:

An Additional Poem

So who’s going to clean up this mess?

Rules come into effect,

And you’ve been moonlighting on the regular

Without getting taken deep over the stadium fences.

These words illustrate an oddity

But they’re easily replaced. You’ve never moved on

To remove your shoes in pittance

But what is lost in the world you rebuild elsewhere.

The movie is about to start. A miraculous story

Comes across this second to last line—you

Think better and get up to turn everything off.

And then, of course, there is Katy Lederer and her striking suite/poem “Negative Capability,” (a piece that requires slow, repeated readings) that includes:

Fully formed antrum.

Presence of

a class two

cell. Fully

formed

in estrogen.

Pre-

ovulation stage.

Cortex

post-

conception in

the follicle.

Decrease

the range.

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.