Published as the first in an ongoing series of “City Lights Spotlights,” the collection works through twenty years of her trade collections of poetic activity (starting some ten years after leaving Toronto for San Francisco), from Mace Hill Remap (Moving Letters Press, 1988) through Moira(O Books, 1996) to Spinoza In Her Youth (Omnidawn Press, 2002) to Natural Light (Libellum, 2008)
LIKE FIRES
Like wasps’ nests
where we were
like many fires buildings
crumpling in flames in a
forest of trucks rushing
past in the night, headlights
blazing
To see, hand
covering her eyes, hand
brushing back his hair, the sounds
of forest days and night
sounds sun comes up or is
obscured by clouds or it is
raining or blazing light is it
late, too late for me to
come back to your place
I can only applaud City Lights for producing such a collection, but one thing that always frustrates about a selected poems is when it comes without an introduction (Dennis Cooley’s Sunfall from 1996 did the same); certainly, any book should speak for itself, but wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of word to provide a context for the work and for the author, some kind of explanation as to why and what the poems are doing, why we should be listening? Still, this is the sort of collection that makes me want to read deeper into her writing (rumours of a chapbook came out of Montreal last year, published by Angela Carr, but I still haven’t found a copy), into the individual collections, to see where her deeper engagements lay. Can twenty years of service come through in only one hundred pages?
Saint Paul MN: It’s been a while since I referenced unarmed journal (did you ever see the issue jwcurry and I guest edited a few years ago?) but the publisher sent a little packet some time ago with issue #61 and subsequent chapbook published alongside, Vancouver writer George Bowering’s a little black strap (2009). Part of what I’ve always admired about Bowering’s decades of publishing (his first book appeared in the very early 1960s) has been his, despite publishing with large houses, ongoing and continued engagement with the small and micro presses and literary presses. Recently, he even worked to produce a chapbook a month throughout 2006, eventually publishing the results through BookThug, No Press, Laurel Reed Books, Pooka Press, Rubicon Press, Gorse Press, Nomados, above/ground press and CUE Books (as well as a couple of other presses). What makes this engagement real is how his work manages to keep a dialogue going through such enterprises, furthering his own writing as well as furthering the possibilities of who can see such (subsequently, Robert Kroetsch’s new poetry title doesn’t seem to have a single publishing acknowledgment, which seems odd).
You Can be Poisoned
You can be poisoned by ground beef,
even while remembering the lovely cheeseburger
you had at the party in David’s back yard, e-
coli because there was a hurry at the barbecue,
or the clubhouse hawaiian burger at the south slope
golf course, where the grass is greener than
the illustration on the egg cartons, greener
because there are finely mixed chemicals
slipping down between the grass roots,
lunches for little kids next door affected by science.
You can be poisoned by ground water.
a little black strap is a collection of what appears on the surface to be “misfit” poems, going against his usual construction of publishing single units or collections of units, writing the series, the sequence, the connected and/or long poem. Is this, after some fifty years of publishing, Bowering watching his own writing book/chapbook constructions shift, or is this simply a mash of other projects for the sake of a smaller, disconnected unit? Either way, I am enjoying the difference.
Satchel Paige
July 7, 2006, according to some books
Satch is a hundred years old today.
He’s pitching somewhere. It’s from Leroy
we learned that looking goofy
is a way to be hip as you’ll ever be.
We knew the Globetrotters could have
whupped the Fort Wayne Pistons. Satch
wasn’t about to fetch it, he told us
baseball turned him from a second class
citizen into a second class immortal.
Too bad baseball got played in the U.S.,
where Ty Cobb was afraid of Darkies, where
Babe Ruth got 60 home runs off tired white men
the year Satch turned twenty-one, you know,
the year you’re called a man?
Northampton MA: I like these graceful little publications, Invisible Ear, edited by Seth Landman, with issues #3 (February 2009) and #4 (July 2009); does that mean there might already be a fifth by now? Each issue features a short list of poets, each with their own small sections of poems. Unfortunately these don’t include author biographies (perhaps this, apart from the production, is what adds to the graceful mystique of the chapbook-sized journal).
As Landman writes at the end of his small introduction to issue #3:
The space I take up is a small enclosure, and within in, things are happening all the time. The poets and poems you will read in this third issue of Invisible Ear have stepped into my enclosure, and I can feel homesick for the spaces they take up themselves.
To mention highlights, in a particular way, is to mention the whole of each issue, as the highlights abound, but the third included Edward Mullany and Lesley Yalen, and fourth, pieces by Eric Baus and Luke Bloomfield. For further information, check out the links at invisibleear.wordpress.com or email the editor/publisher at seth.landman@gmail.com
STAPLED TO THE BACK
We pulled back and realized the sun had risen
and people were boarding a train to Tuscaloosa
We know someone who had an orgasm
on a parking meter in the most hum-dee-dum way
We have fallen for people and things are trivially
as you would write your name on a chalkboard
We would rather not spend three days alive in a mass grave
We love you even when there aren’t bombs falling on us
Must write poems to fill the huge demand for them (Miss America)
It’s only been a few weeks since my review of American poet Catherine Wagner’s most recent poetry collection, My New Job (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2009), appeared; but what was she doing before she acquired employment? Since we connected, I was able to trade two of mine for the first two of hers, and her Miss America (2001) and Macular Hole (2001) quickly appeared at my front door. What I find fascinating about these books, read as a whole, is in part through just how spread out around a subject Wagner can actually write, pushing as far and further around, making the reader have to almost decode where the poems are going, or coming from.
Without (honestly) knowing a thing about the author, the books read, in order, as a woman newly married, a woman pregnant and third, a woman returning to the world, through employment and fitness. Aren’t Wagner’s concerns fairly common, almost (in a western context) fairly universal? But what becomes so spectacular is how she writes her poems, her leaps and jaunts, strange juxtupositions and wonderful, filthy mouth.
A Poem for Marketplace
I can’t see the cars
Human riding on the sound
All press forward with a mute over their strings
For a moment there were no cars
God I love that noise
A person strapped in warm and going
They are all going to work
I think it is nice that they all go
Recalcitrant surge
Left the definite Indian behind (Miss America)
In her first collection, Miss America, Wagner writes sections riffing Jack Spicer’s Book of Magazine Verse, yet it’s unclear if these were written with Spicer’s (supposedly) true intent—poems for journals that unfortunately, for the most part, turned them down (Poetry did but Tishdidn’t, or the Vancouver Conference)—or if they’re written ironically, which takes (I must admit) some of their power out of them, such as her “A Poem for Guideposts,” “A Poem for Nature,” “A Poem for Good Housekeeping” and “A Poem for Poetry.” I appreciate what she’s doing, if this is what is happening, but it can appear on the surface to be a kind of throwaway cleverness, apart from the kind of ego-driven desperation that Spicer might have engaged. If she didn’t actually send her poem to Good Housekeeping, then what’s the actual point?
Girl, you have gorgeous skin, milkbottle skin,
I am so afraid
I lift your little skirt but you have leggings on (Miss America)
Still, Wagner doesn’t so much twist or turn expectation as throw the whole of it out the damned window, doing something else entirely, perhaps making the point irrelevant. And making this a magnificent book, whether first or otherwise. I revel in her twists.
Allied with it were all receptacles
A mailbox doesn’t change what it takes in.
The mail arrives if crumpled in integral state.
I wrap what I take in
and ject it out objectified.
This pleasure is a mighty wine
to turn the outward in, unfurl it
realigned until the corners match
my corners, I do so without thinking
in my thinking. Who is alert enough
to watch the corner while it vamps and shudders
repositioning the being hall as bright and deep
or fantastically dismemebered
walls of animal?
The food inside my breast
needed a needer. (Macular Hole)
In her second collection, Macular Hole, the book exists, unlike the first, as a whole; not sectioned, the poems twist and turn their magnificent way through what appears to be a pregnant and new-mother narrator, writing (as the last two lines of the collection): “The boat was called Induce. It made some people / up and down, up and down, and a hole in the water.” Not as strong, somehow, as her first or third collections, but worthy for her name, alone. The poems, from beginning to end, move as a kind of accumulation, a building sweep that by the end simply takes, and takes over. This is a worthy collection, if by a poet capable of better. This we already know.
Macular Hole
Please god love me and buy me
Read this hillock and ride me
Wraith typing all day for money.
God bought me today for two silver fish in a can
God bought me tomorrow for bland in a pan
and a card an email from Rebecca
Bought four hours of my control alt delete shut down
