Ted King calls this beatnik jazz, but it has as much in common with spoken word: he rhymes.
Lines slam and slither together linked by the sound repetition but also by a staccato rhythm. He speaks of everyday stuff like trying to be cool and being misunderstood and lighting a cigarette in the wind and believing in being true and authentic.
But the poetry isn't traditionally "deep," true and authentic: it tells stories. The heart is in the narrative, the characters, the children and wives and girlfriends.
This is about getting close to the cool when you know there is no such thing.
As much self-effacement as proclamation.
To me, there is no "cool" in King's universe, rather it's a teasing, unattainable ideal that no one can touch. How do I know this? The accordian playing behind him on some songs creates an ironic counterpoint. His lines often pull him down and make fun of himself. Sometimes, he lets the musicians take over.
The music varies—sometimes rock, sometimes jazz, sometimes French torch. This is a fun, multi-faceted CD by a Twin Cities artist who seems to me most interested in swaggering for the fun of the swagger, not because he actually believes in it.
The CD can be picked up at The Beat Coffeehouse, just east of Hennepin on 28th. If you don't live in the Twin Cities, check out the link. They will figure out how to hook you up with a copy.
Also, Ted King will be giving a talk/presentation on jazz and poetry 7:30 on Monday, April 2, 2012 at the same The Beat Coffeehouse.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Geof Huth's review of Jonathan Brannen's DEACCESSIONED LANDSCAPES (Chax, 2005))
Sonnets from this Enterprise: north white south blue east red west yellow
by Geof Huth
Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York
Though it be jade
it crumbles. Though it be gold it breaks.
Though it be feathers of quetzal
it tears and fragments in time.
One day in college, I ran across a surprise in the reference section of the main library at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In an unobtrusive glass case backed up against a shelving unit full of books, there rested a tiny exhibit of the visual poetry of Jonathan Brannen. Before that moment, I thought I was probably the only person on campus with any interest in visual poetry, but someone had found the work of Brannen interesting enough to set up a little display of it. At that time, Brannen was producing rich sculptural typewriter poems in which he would type layers of type over each other (sometimes twisted on their axes against the grain of each others’ text) to produce striking three-dimensional effects. Not until years later did I discover that Brannen himself had worked in that library at the time, and by the time I did Brannen was already a friend of my sister Kathy, who might have had no idea of his visual poetic skills. I’ve known and corresponded with Jonathan for many years, and he’s one of those few visual poets whose homes I have visited.
The swimming word is swimming in a tidal wave
washing away abodes where there is no discernible
discrepancy between bringing down the house
and bringing down the horse.
So when I approach the border of Brannen’s remarkable new book of poetry, Deaccessioned Landscapes, I bring with me some history. This history helps me understand the poetry a tiny bit better, just as my career helps me understand the book’s title. Deaccessioning is the formal process used by an archives (or even a library) to remove items from its collection. In an archives, deaccessioning is a sensitive issue, since the items in an archives tend to be unique and since deaccessioning is an absolute. Archives rarely deaccession, and when they do they usually carefully determine that the items do not fit their collection or were never valuable enough to have kept forever anyway.1 The title of Brannen’s book appears to refer to the way in which it uses language: pulling it out of context, moving whole landscapes of language out of the archives that is the earth and allowing them to exist apart and alone.
Real life artless and unmetaphored
be mine even if my voice comes from other
worlds like a bird broken by the wind.
Deaccessioned Landscapes consists of one hundred poems, which are divided into fifty numbered pairs. For instance, there are two poems numbered 1. To keep the paired poems en face, the text of the book has to begin unconventionally on a verso page. The first poem in each pair always has fourteen lines and almost always consists of a single stanza. The number of lines cannot be an accident; we must be expected to read these poems as some kind of neo-sonnets, even though these do not exhibit the structure of either Petrarchan or Shakesperean sonnets. The facing poems, strangely, also have fourteen lines, but they resemble sonnets even less. Rather than being simple blocks of text, these heavily visualized twins of the left-handed poems scatter bits of texts over each page and operate with, at best, a crooked sputtering syntax. The two facing poems, however, appear almost never to have any direct relationship to one another.
The way
snowflakes turn sunlight or sunlight bends rain.
But the structure of the book is more complex than we might at first imagine. At some point a little past the middle of the book, I realized that the right-handed poems of atomized text are created out of left-handed poems from other parts of the book. For instance, left-handed poems numbered 1 through 12 provide the source text for right-handed poems 38 through 27.3 In most cases, Brannen picks a few words from each line of the source text then visualizes the chosen text. However, in a few cases, he adds new words to the extracted poem or mixes up the order the text in other ways. This entire enterprise of his exhibits a strong visual poetic imagination, one interested in shape and structure.The contraction of small muscles.
The cinematography of sleep.
Each of the syntactical sonnet-like poems is a disjunctive sequence of sentences, and these sentences only occasionally and tenuously relate to one another. The poems themselves do not represent wholes, but fragments. These sonnets are guided by a mild surrealism that is mirrored on the recto page by poems that are gentle disbowelments of text. Brannen uses a number of techniques to keep these poems moving: anaphora; the occasional use of arcane “poetic” language (“O,” “doth”); the use of “unpoetic” scientific and technical terms (“diode,” “encapsulated,” “compound interest,” “wetware,” “denticulated”); the intrusion of references to popular culture; the constant process of putting unrelated words, phrases, and sentences adjacent to one another; and aphoristic turns of phrase (“Grey does not equal gray,” “Words generalize,” “Gaps between memories/are named history,” “To speak is an act of faith”). In the end, we are left with quiet elegant poems that pull in the reader with a Siren-like congeries of images and thoughts. The world here is both linguistic and visual, and it shimmers in and out of view like the world seen through a sunshower.
The best of the visualized poems take the chosen bits of source text and set them up on the page like toy soldiers in a frozen battle. We can read into and out of the visual structure of the text; it tells us something about the meaning and reading of the poem. In this poem below (12, recto), the structure of the poem replicates the subject of the poem, the lines ebb and flow, they form a space in which meaning occurs, they are cut and misplaced and displaced, and they finally drift away into sleep.
dying
ebb and flow
space formed out of
an idea represented
unforeseen worlds
nature our eyes
the way form
absences distances
progress cut
signifying want
misplaced displaced
here
place not from
the contract
of sleep
The poems in this little book are filled with beautiful and alluring phrasings, strange tricks of language that allow us to see things that cannot exist. In subtle ways, this is a book of didactic poems, since out of the Sargasso Sea of metaphors and unexpected pairings there float little thoughts about the world, and especially about language. For this is a book about language and the making of meaning, and Brannen rearranges his own words to make us see the invisible.
You can verbally rearrange situations
which in themselves would resist rearrangement
a sort of wetware tsunami recollapsing
the universe to zero as easily
as a cat in a necropolis
rearranges priorities.
These lines from one of the last poems in the book explain the process of the book. Jonathan Brannen amasses words into a poem, then he removes words from that poem until he is left with another poem—a secret mate that he slips into the book elsewhere. But this isn’t the only way he rearranges words. As I read through the book, I discovered that phrases in one sonnet frequently appeared in other sonnets. Brannen moved the phrases into new environments to give them new significance. These repeated phrases change kaleidoscopically; from a new point of view, after a flick of the wrist, they are some new beast in some new Eden. Finally, I can’t help but believe that many of the words in this book—if not all of them—are appropriated from other sources. Brannen has written at least one entire book of found poems, without ever noting the sources of his words . . . or the fact that the words had another source besides his imagination.
How I wish I could invent a brand
new color just for you to daze the night.
Brannen opens the book with an epigraph from Ludwig Wittgenstein, in which the philosopher of language wonders if our visual memory of an event is ever truly an accurate representation of the original. This epigraph focuses on both the language of memory and the process of seeing, just as Deaccessioned Landscapes provides us with language and image, with different views of the same meaning.
This isn’t everything but like everything
It seems so.
Jonathan Brannen’s Deaccessioned Landscapes is available from Chax Press for $16. It is a small square book with a vispoetic cover, and you can almost hide the whole of it between two hands.
_____
1Coincidentally, my first job ever was in that same library. Just before my senior year in high school, my family returned to the United States, and I attended Father Ryan High School, literally two blocks from Vanderbilt’s campus. Coincidentally again, my job in the library was to reclassify books, marking some for deaccessioning. The year was 1978, and I reviewed books still classified using the Dewey Decimal system2 and used the Library of Congress classification system to reclassify any that had been charged out of the library at least twice during the 1970s.
2Since coincidences are inevitable, I might as well point out that the Dewey Decimal system was devised by Melvil Dewey, who headed up the New York State Library, a sister institution to the New York State Archives and one currently housed in the same building as mine. Before the formation of the State Archives, as a matter of fact, the State Library was the holder of the archival records of the State of New York.
3To understand the processes Brannen used, I searched for the source text for every right-handed poem in the book, and I discovered that he divided the book into four twelve-poem sections and one extra two-poem section. (This fairly closely mimics the structure of the French revolutionary calendar, which divided the year into twelve equal months of thirty days each, but then ended up (in a non-leap year) with five extra days—the fêtes—at the end of the year.) The orphan pair of poems, remarkably, do not seem to be related to one another at all. The message in this division of the poems is that perfect order is not possible, no matter how hard we try. Below is a full accounting of the structure of relationships between the poems in the book.
01 = 38
02 = 37
03 = 36
04 = 35
05 = 34
06 = 33
07 = 32
08 = 31
09 = 30
10 = 29
11 = 28
12 = 27
13 = ~4
14 = ~4
15 = 26
16 = 25
17 = 24
18 = 23
19 = 22
20 = 21
21 = 20
22 = 19
23 = 174
24 = 184
25 = 16
26 = 15
27 = 12
28 = 11
29 = 10
30 = 09
31 = 08
32 = 07
33 = 06
34 = 05
35 = 04
36 = 03
37 = 02
38 = 01
39 = 50
40 = 49
41 = 48
42 = 47
43 = 46
44 = 45
45 = 44
46 = 43
47 = 42
48 = 41
49 = 40
50 = 39
4These poems break the set patterns of the book.
Here where weather is the only landscape
I’m swearing off of ordinary letters.
___________________________
Geof Huth is a longtime poet and blogger from New York State.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Raymond Federman's DOUBLE OR NOTHING (FC2, first published in 1971)
Go here to get a sense of what this book looks like. Since it needs to be seen to be believed, don't skip this step.
The novel is a typescript in which each page is conceived of as an object and typed differently. Federman may even on occasion have used freehand ink lettering or stencils. (See page 9.) It is a classic contemporary novel, one of the landmarks of meta-fiction, where the author reflects on the making of the fiction as the book is made.
The 18th-century's Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne is an early, if not the earliest metafiction, in that it spins its wheels obsessively focusing on details before the putative beginning of the story so as to almost not get there. Federman's book is similar. It follows an author getting ready to lock himself in a cheap motel room for 365 days with a typewriter, noodles, cigarettes, sugar, coffee, and a few other things in order to write the story of a character he initially calls "Boris" who comes to the U.S. from France after WW II.
The book, however, only speculates about what the author will write or might write about "Boris." He never actually commits to a story, though he does spin a lot of potential story lines that are quite interesting to follow. And it spends an equal amount of time speculating about the daily needs of the author in his motel room. He even worries about how weird it will look when he carries in the dozens of toilet paper rolls he has computed that he needs.
Complicating all of these (playful) complications is the fact that, if you know anything about Federman, you will realize that Boris' "biography" is remarkably similar to Federman's. Both are Jewish and from families who were massacred in the Holocaust. Both are French. Both come to America after the war.
Federman, of course, also shares biographical details with the author. Most importantly, both of them write books. Both of them are also gamblers ("double or nothing"), although the reader would have no way of knowing this.
This book has been written about extensively, and I will probably not contribute anything to this discussion. This post is more about my coming to terms with the book, and I welcome you to come along if you like.
There are five levels of self-conscious play in this book:
1. The typescript - Each page is an object unto itself. It is not simply a transparent window pointing us to the action. At times, we don't even know where we are to read next. This forces the readers to not only help to create the very page, but to encounter the pages not as media but as made. This entails that Federman's book does not stand between the reader and the story, conveying the story to the reader, but is story. Every page is a chapter unto itself, and we encounter it in its singularity, and come away having been at least challenged, maybe rattled, maybe laughing.
2. The character of Boris - Federman refuses to make him a "character." Rather, he is the making of the making of a character. My guess is that Federman believes that fictional "characters" in novels do not resemble human beings. Rather, they are functions of the larger structures and issues at play. He chooses to make this self-consciously and explicitly clear by going no further than suggesting ways to develop Boris. In this way Boris is always at play, always at limbo, always not closed off. The way traditional novels make characters feel "real" is, paradoxically, to round them off, i.e. to close them off, rather than to leave them open, which is the human orientation toward the future. With the future closed off, literary characters are just not people at all. Boris, in all his unfinishedness, is closer to a person, even though Federman keeps reminding us that he, Federman, can make him do whatever he wants.
3. The third level of self-conscious play is between Federman's biography and Boris's. Federman gives us enough teasers to make it clear that the novel is semi-autobiographical, yet at the same time he doesn't spell out the differences, except in a few hilarious places, generally when he claims he wasn't as shy as Boris. We become voyeuristically curious about Federman. What is true? What is not? He is such an interesting raconteur that I find myself much more curious about the gap between fact and nonfact in his writing than in, say, Jack Kerouac's.
4. The author - The author is perhaps the most interesting character in the book. Why doesn't he sit down and just get writing? Why does he spend pages and pages itemizing how many rolls of toilet paper, boxes of noodles, tubes of toothpaste, etc. that he will need to write his book? And why does he keep rewriting the book, or going back to the beginning? Is the author supposed to be someone operating with traditional assumptions about writing but too honest to go through with them? Does he sense on a visceral level the falsity of those traditions? Is there something else that can account for his obsessiveness, both about the things of his daily needs and Boris?
5. The fifth level is the most obscure. It is the play between the author and the writer, Raymond Federman. While he doesn't leave the same teasers about the similarities between him and the author as he does between himself and Boris, we nonetheless can't help but speculate. Things are not as voyeuristic because Federman does not give us enough details: This is a more abstract connection, or disconnection as the case may be. Here, the play seems most uneasy and even haunted, the obsessions are so overwhelming, the concerns so seemingly unimportant. I am not sure Federman gives us enough information to explain this obsession, other than the one I offered earlier, it is an anxiety borne of a visceral recoiling from traditional narrative. And given that traditional Western narrative led, in part, to WWII and the Holocaust, can you blame him?
This book is a made object, asking us to do with it what we will, but refusing a closure that will allow any simple reading. All literature can, of course, withstand multiple readings. But not all literature intentionally creates the playful circumstances for multiple readings. What I've looked at today is one way of going at it. It offers a structure. There are undoubtedly others.
The novel is a typescript in which each page is conceived of as an object and typed differently. Federman may even on occasion have used freehand ink lettering or stencils. (See page 9.) It is a classic contemporary novel, one of the landmarks of meta-fiction, where the author reflects on the making of the fiction as the book is made.
The 18th-century's Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne is an early, if not the earliest metafiction, in that it spins its wheels obsessively focusing on details before the putative beginning of the story so as to almost not get there. Federman's book is similar. It follows an author getting ready to lock himself in a cheap motel room for 365 days with a typewriter, noodles, cigarettes, sugar, coffee, and a few other things in order to write the story of a character he initially calls "Boris" who comes to the U.S. from France after WW II.
The book, however, only speculates about what the author will write or might write about "Boris." He never actually commits to a story, though he does spin a lot of potential story lines that are quite interesting to follow. And it spends an equal amount of time speculating about the daily needs of the author in his motel room. He even worries about how weird it will look when he carries in the dozens of toilet paper rolls he has computed that he needs.
Complicating all of these (playful) complications is the fact that, if you know anything about Federman, you will realize that Boris' "biography" is remarkably similar to Federman's. Both are Jewish and from families who were massacred in the Holocaust. Both are French. Both come to America after the war.
Federman, of course, also shares biographical details with the author. Most importantly, both of them write books. Both of them are also gamblers ("double or nothing"), although the reader would have no way of knowing this.
This book has been written about extensively, and I will probably not contribute anything to this discussion. This post is more about my coming to terms with the book, and I welcome you to come along if you like.
There are five levels of self-conscious play in this book:
1. The typescript - Each page is an object unto itself. It is not simply a transparent window pointing us to the action. At times, we don't even know where we are to read next. This forces the readers to not only help to create the very page, but to encounter the pages not as media but as made. This entails that Federman's book does not stand between the reader and the story, conveying the story to the reader, but is story. Every page is a chapter unto itself, and we encounter it in its singularity, and come away having been at least challenged, maybe rattled, maybe laughing.
2. The character of Boris - Federman refuses to make him a "character." Rather, he is the making of the making of a character. My guess is that Federman believes that fictional "characters" in novels do not resemble human beings. Rather, they are functions of the larger structures and issues at play. He chooses to make this self-consciously and explicitly clear by going no further than suggesting ways to develop Boris. In this way Boris is always at play, always at limbo, always not closed off. The way traditional novels make characters feel "real" is, paradoxically, to round them off, i.e. to close them off, rather than to leave them open, which is the human orientation toward the future. With the future closed off, literary characters are just not people at all. Boris, in all his unfinishedness, is closer to a person, even though Federman keeps reminding us that he, Federman, can make him do whatever he wants.
3. The third level of self-conscious play is between Federman's biography and Boris's. Federman gives us enough teasers to make it clear that the novel is semi-autobiographical, yet at the same time he doesn't spell out the differences, except in a few hilarious places, generally when he claims he wasn't as shy as Boris. We become voyeuristically curious about Federman. What is true? What is not? He is such an interesting raconteur that I find myself much more curious about the gap between fact and nonfact in his writing than in, say, Jack Kerouac's.
4. The author - The author is perhaps the most interesting character in the book. Why doesn't he sit down and just get writing? Why does he spend pages and pages itemizing how many rolls of toilet paper, boxes of noodles, tubes of toothpaste, etc. that he will need to write his book? And why does he keep rewriting the book, or going back to the beginning? Is the author supposed to be someone operating with traditional assumptions about writing but too honest to go through with them? Does he sense on a visceral level the falsity of those traditions? Is there something else that can account for his obsessiveness, both about the things of his daily needs and Boris?
5. The fifth level is the most obscure. It is the play between the author and the writer, Raymond Federman. While he doesn't leave the same teasers about the similarities between him and the author as he does between himself and Boris, we nonetheless can't help but speculate. Things are not as voyeuristic because Federman does not give us enough details: This is a more abstract connection, or disconnection as the case may be. Here, the play seems most uneasy and even haunted, the obsessions are so overwhelming, the concerns so seemingly unimportant. I am not sure Federman gives us enough information to explain this obsession, other than the one I offered earlier, it is an anxiety borne of a visceral recoiling from traditional narrative. And given that traditional Western narrative led, in part, to WWII and the Holocaust, can you blame him?
This book is a made object, asking us to do with it what we will, but refusing a closure that will allow any simple reading. All literature can, of course, withstand multiple readings. But not all literature intentionally creates the playful circumstances for multiple readings. What I've looked at today is one way of going at it. It offers a structure. There are undoubtedly others.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
FIND THE GIRL (Coffee House), poems by Lightsey Darst
Sometimes the awards get it right: Lightsey Darst won the Minnesota Book Award for this stunningly original collection, and does she deserve it. She left me shaken.
For me, the key to Darst's drama lies in her complex, writhing rhythms. She reminds me of the interplay between Charlie Ellerbee and Bern Nix on some of Ornette Coleman's mid-70's Prime Time Band albums—as with them, I can never tell where the rhythms will go, and they almost invariably go in an interesting and sometimes shocking place.
Notice the following line breaks:
"We argue abortion, slaphand and sing, but it's real
this slashed-face time. Don't think we're nothing but children" (19, italics in original)
"If you open it little parasite little tick
digs in, cyst
drains loose &
inside you a hazelnut skull grows" (37)
" A girl is a woman
is a rack to be hung with gashed sky, take it off me you say" (41)
"I said You must be the killer by your clear blue eyes—
so sit with me" (47)
"I am not the good sister.
I am a peach queen, I am welcoming you" (49)
"I wanted bones to cry out of me from the earth—
*
on all sides, thin bones
that were mine only—
*
girl-bones that knew my hand." (54)
" At twenty what won't she do. These splinters
her fears, these hairs her dreams. I give you all there is." (65)
" how old were you, when the winged shadow
flashed between you and desire, and one organ
that never ceased began pumping?" (80)
Part of me thinks I should just leave it at these quotations; the skill seems so obvious. Time and again Darst manages a rhythmic and thematic seeming misdirection that arrives nowhere but home. And it kind of hurts. And it kind of thrills. We are in the realm of Gothic gone fragmented poetry.
Slash and puncture, rip pop those guitars Ellerbee and Nix.
This rhythmic complexity, to me, underlies and makes possible how creepy this book is. It emanates from the sensibility of middle school girls—and the obsessions with violence, death, and sex that many of them have.
It is the age of cutting.
And this sex is rarely erotic—one exception would be the poem "Trail"—but frank, dirty, and brutal. It's the sex of teenagers who do not know what they are doing and hurt each other physically and emotionally.
Sometimes, Darst's line breaks record a literal break.
Strangely, this is not a downer of a book. In spite of the obsessive focus on serial murders, particularly of women and girls, Darst seems to revel in the wildness and horror of it all. In fact, as the book unfolds the later poems become more and more like the wicked underside of fairy tales in their raw vitality. I couldn't look away. Because life was right here.
This book might sizzle you.
_____________________________
For years Lightsey Darst has been a great friend of literature and dance in the Twin Cities. According to this interview, she sees poetry and art as collaborative—as do I. On Monday, March 26 at 7:30 she will be giving a presentation on multimedia and performance poetry at Bull Run Cafe in Minneapolis, at the corner of 34th and Lyndale. All are welcome.
Sample poems from Find the Girl.
For me, the key to Darst's drama lies in her complex, writhing rhythms. She reminds me of the interplay between Charlie Ellerbee and Bern Nix on some of Ornette Coleman's mid-70's Prime Time Band albums—as with them, I can never tell where the rhythms will go, and they almost invariably go in an interesting and sometimes shocking place.
Notice the following line breaks:
"We argue abortion, slaphand and sing, but it's real
this slashed-face time. Don't think we're nothing but children" (19, italics in original)
"If you open it little parasite little tick
digs in, cyst
drains loose &
inside you a hazelnut skull grows" (37)
" A girl is a woman
is a rack to be hung with gashed sky, take it off me you say" (41)
"I said You must be the killer by your clear blue eyes—
so sit with me" (47)
"I am not the good sister.
I am a peach queen, I am welcoming you" (49)
"I wanted bones to cry out of me from the earth—
*
on all sides, thin bones
that were mine only—
*
girl-bones that knew my hand." (54)
" At twenty what won't she do. These splinters
her fears, these hairs her dreams. I give you all there is." (65)
" how old were you, when the winged shadow
flashed between you and desire, and one organ
that never ceased began pumping?" (80)
Part of me thinks I should just leave it at these quotations; the skill seems so obvious. Time and again Darst manages a rhythmic and thematic seeming misdirection that arrives nowhere but home. And it kind of hurts. And it kind of thrills. We are in the realm of Gothic gone fragmented poetry.
Slash and puncture, rip pop those guitars Ellerbee and Nix.
This rhythmic complexity, to me, underlies and makes possible how creepy this book is. It emanates from the sensibility of middle school girls—and the obsessions with violence, death, and sex that many of them have.
It is the age of cutting.
And this sex is rarely erotic—one exception would be the poem "Trail"—but frank, dirty, and brutal. It's the sex of teenagers who do not know what they are doing and hurt each other physically and emotionally.
Sometimes, Darst's line breaks record a literal break.
Strangely, this is not a downer of a book. In spite of the obsessive focus on serial murders, particularly of women and girls, Darst seems to revel in the wildness and horror of it all. In fact, as the book unfolds the later poems become more and more like the wicked underside of fairy tales in their raw vitality. I couldn't look away. Because life was right here.
This book might sizzle you.
_____________________________
For years Lightsey Darst has been a great friend of literature and dance in the Twin Cities. According to this interview, she sees poetry and art as collaborative—as do I. On Monday, March 26 at 7:30 she will be giving a presentation on multimedia and performance poetry at Bull Run Cafe in Minneapolis, at the corner of 34th and Lyndale. All are welcome.
Sample poems from Find the Girl.
Guest Post by Gail Lukasik, Poet & Mystery Writer
Looking
for Spring and All
By
Gail Lukasik
When
my writing stalls, I often look to the natural world for rejuvenation. In the
following essay, I embark on a ramble, a journey close to home, searching for
the first signs of spring and a sense of renewal.
The first day of spring this year
it snowed, three inches of spitting snow that plunged me back into a wintry
frame of mind. The day before had been a
sunny 60 degrees making me believe in possibilities—bike rides and hyacinths, reading on the patio—what was I thinking? Haven’t I spent the majority of my life in
the Midwest? So on Monday I decided to
go looking for spring with my digital camera in hand, my gloves in my jacket pocket,
and William Carlos Williams’ poem, Spring
and All, as my guide.
Why Spring and All
and not T.S. Eliot’s more famous springy poem, The Wasteland? Because I was
on a mission of hope, not a mission of despair.
And I was hoping what I found would inspire my writing.
My first stop was my suburban backyard. Purple headed crocus punching through the
snow and brown dead leaves. Okay, I
wasn’t “By the road to the contagion hospital,” where Williams’ poem begins,
but I was “under the surge of the blue/mottled clouds driven from the/northeast—-a cold wind.”
For
Williams, spring is about movement amid the winter waste, about “stuff” coming
to life. So next I headed to
Independence Grove Forest Preserve, a ten minute drive from my house, because
the one sure indicator of spring where I live is the annul overflowing of the
Des Plaines River, which closes all the low lying areas along the forest
preserves’ trails, making biking and hiking next to impossible and canoeing
dangerous.
As
I walked the muddy trail toward the underpass to document the flooding, all
along the way were “the reddish/purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy/stuff of
bushes and small trees/with dead, brown leaves under them/lifeless vines—“ that Williams describes. But what’s not in his poem were the staccato
clicking of spring frogs, the sewing machine calls of redwing blackbirds, and
the tentative murmur of the river rippling sunlight.
There
were also echoes of Frost’s spring poem in the budding willow trees whose first
color is yellow not green. Chickadees pecked seeds from tall grasses
sending fluffs like hair across the brown fields. When I reached the flooded underpass where
the cars spun by overhead in their hum to be somewhere else, the river didn’t disappoint. Brown and sunlit it pushed itself everywhere
with a pulsing that I envied in its passion and its intent.
Walking
back I was caught by everything green that I’d missed earlier. ”Now the grass, tomorrow/ the stiff curl of
wildcarrot leaf.” I was so taken with
green, I left the trail and wandered for a while trying to decide if the green
leaves tight among the dead leaves were the start of wild geraniums or some
other wild flower I’d yet to learn. And
while I looked and thought about the green leaves, the redwings whirled their
song, and the morning stayed cold, as “the profound change/ has come upon them;
rooted, they/ grip down and begin to awaken.”
___________________________
Gail Lukasik is a poet and mystery writer who lives in Illinois.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
DUETCETERA (Shearsman Books) by Ira Lightman
reviewed by Elizabeth Burns
Ira Lightman's Duetcetera asks of the reader what it asks of itself: "Are you with me?" "Are you able to travel?" The questions do what the best poems can: they ask. Bishop's Questions of Travel, and Ashbery's Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror are two examples of book-length poems disguised as questions, and these are just two obvious examples. Stein's work, measured aside Bishop and Ashbery, shows how shape and question tease a reader into a temptation of statement. But statement, as we read at the end of this project, never comes. We arrive at a kind of knowledge, but only because we have been unafraid to travel the distance, and we have trusted the poet, our guide.
Duet says we're in this together, the writer and the reader. Etcetera says there's something else, or many other things, along with this duet. Let's conflate, imaginate, deviate. I say this last because, once, I was accused of being a "deviant" reader because I read only last lines of a Milton sonnet. My crime was imagining that a poet read his own poetry, and enjoyed wreaking a little havoc with it.
Lightman's Duetcetera is not havoc. It is at its lightest a parry and a volley. And at its heaviest, an exchange of both knowledge and pain. Because Lightman is a visual artist, the shape of the poem is the poem as much as the poem is the words. This poem/book is carefully split, a mirror/not mirror work impossible to reproduce here because of my own technical ignocrankiness. Each line is flush center, and fans out in mirror shape. In the following, notice Lightman's ability to flow downstream and across the water. Column two slaps back at any surfacing meaning in column one, causing a sort of belittling rhyme attack. But should each column be read separately, as it flows downstream, we read a sadness, tender and questioned. Even then, meaning is not settled, since to know Lightman's work is to know there would not be "a wife governed" but rather "life governed slovenly by my lapses." The poem will not let you slip between lines.
As much as a commentary about joining and separating, wondering and declaring, Duetcetera questions epistemology. Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" is one of the most astounding comments on knowledge, in part because of its "transmutation" of knowledge into a startling physical pain:
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Like Bishop, Lightman inspects the physicality of knowledge by drawing on the British educational system, which can be a set up for a class system insofar as it points children towards a "respectable" career or manual labor. He entwines the British system of education tracks, in which "comprehensive" and "streamed" refer to the categories of the average student and the above-average, respectively. A question here might pose the placement of "families/ under a happy/ deal" who luckily have children smart enough to be "streamed" into the better, more challenging education track. Lightman offers more questions about the twinning stanzas of DNA: what kind of genes, of history, of biography and environment are we weaving into the life of our offspring? Are there tolls taken in courtyards, the gangs of the comprehensive students hating (and therefore beating up) the adolescent streamed children? Are we responsible for the fragility of DNA, the obscurity and possible uselessness of the information and scholarship we pass along? This last question is a rough one, but essential. Yet, poets can't turn from it. We can't take back what we have already passed to our children, or what has been inherited either genetically or environmentally.We have dipped our hands into what we imagine knowledge to be like, Bishop writes,"and since/ our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown." Like the flowing river of Lightman's verse, knowledge is not contained, and at any point, we find ourselves swept, and startled.
"Sacrapparent!" asks what is obvious about the sacred.What about the sacredness of the Church is our "parent," as in, our holy parent? Our Sacred Parent is on one side, and those who are related via marriage, who have our DNA, reside on the other side. "Copies" play with the sequence of our life story hidden in genetics, but "Coptic" hides the sacred stories of the Church. Our own biographies are pressed against the son who was swaddled, and yet, our souls are solitary. This son is God made flesh, which indicates a holiness and a knowledge made, well, available. What the soul can know is sacred, and beyond words, but not beyond reference.
Duetcetera ends with
Daddy put me to bed with knowledge accounts
no time for bath, with a story veils of smoke screen rent.
This is the way I feel: I have been put to bed with a story, and the screens have been rent, one column by the other. The knowledge pierced through has been cold or warm, flowing or not, and down or through. Nevertheless, the veil is gone. One might sidestep knowledge accounts, but not the mirrors.
[Duetcetera by Ira Lightman is part of a larger project titled Coinsides, and is published by Shearsman Books, Exeter, UK, 2008. It is available through amazon.com, or www.shearsman.com.]
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
MOTORMAN by David Ohle
I came to read this novel because I heard Brian Evenson recommend it during a talk he gave at the Fiction Collective 2 conference I attended several years ago. Am I glad I read it.
It was first published by Knopf in 1972, but Soft Skull brought it out again in 2004. I read the original version: there was a barely touched copy at a local college library.
The book enjoyed cult status for a long time, and it is not hard to see why. It is close to wholly original, and it deals with a dystopia more gripping to me than the prophecies of either Orwell or Huxley. (Yes, you read that correctly.)
The book is divided into 109 sections over its 116 pages. Some sections are only a few sentences long. But, as with many if not most books that could be dubbed 'science fiction' on some level, the setting is perhaps the most important factor.
Ohle never tells us anything about this setting. He simply lets it sink in. Apparently, early in his life Moldenke, the main character, lived in an atmosphere similar to the one we inhabit: there was only one sun and one moon, people did not have to wear special goggles, and people had only one heart.
By the time Moldenke is more mature, artificial suns and moons compete with the real one, 'jellyheads' rather than people do a lot of the work, and, most bizarrely, he has four hearts, three of which came from sheep. And there is a river so thick and polluted it can be walked on.
It is very difficult, if not impossible, for us to fully orient ourselves to the timeline in this book. There are a lot of unnanounced flashbacks and, to make matters more complicated, undated letters that could come from any number of places on the time line. I have figured out a rough timeline: perhaps a future literary critic will complete the job (and I have no doubt there will be a lot of critics writing on this book).
1. Childhood - "they kept him in a crumbling home."
2 &3. Working as a bug taster at a lab run by a jellyhead named Featherfighter - Working at Tropical Gardens. Meets Cock Roberta, the love of his life.
4. Fights in "mock war." He agrees to sacrifice a minor broken bone and the continued ability to feel a list of feelings, including it would seem love.
5. After war he and Cock Roberta exchange letters, but never seem to meet again. Moldenke tries valiantly to feel again, but fails.
6. Kills two jellyheads
7. I am a little unsure about this, but I believe Bunce, a hardboiled talker who seems to control most everything in this more and more artificial world, imprisons Moldenke for the crime.
8. Bunce calls Moldenke on the phone repeatedly and threatens him. A Dr. Burnheart, who implanted the sheeps hearts in Moldenke, tells him how to escape.
9. He wants to 'go South' across 'The Bottom' to where he believes Burnheart is
10. Stops by Shelp, the weatherman's place. Learns that Bunce orders the sort of weather he wants, and Shelp is to announce it.
11. Runs into Roquette. He helps him walk across the Jelly River. They get on a boat that seems to be like a cruise ship. Cock Roberta is on the ship but they never meet up.
12. Things get really crazy: the boat seems to be, at the same time, a boat, a vehicle on a street, a vehicle in a tunnel, and so forth.
13. The end, which I won't divulge.
Let's just say that this book is about the overwhelming artificiality that threatens our very human dignity. In the end, poor, lonely Moldenke, makes a stab at reasserting his dignity. It might not work, but the attempt alone is enough: it proves that Bunce and his crew have not completely destroyed who we are.
_______________
Interview with David Ohle
It was first published by Knopf in 1972, but Soft Skull brought it out again in 2004. I read the original version: there was a barely touched copy at a local college library.
The book enjoyed cult status for a long time, and it is not hard to see why. It is close to wholly original, and it deals with a dystopia more gripping to me than the prophecies of either Orwell or Huxley. (Yes, you read that correctly.)
The book is divided into 109 sections over its 116 pages. Some sections are only a few sentences long. But, as with many if not most books that could be dubbed 'science fiction' on some level, the setting is perhaps the most important factor.
Ohle never tells us anything about this setting. He simply lets it sink in. Apparently, early in his life Moldenke, the main character, lived in an atmosphere similar to the one we inhabit: there was only one sun and one moon, people did not have to wear special goggles, and people had only one heart.
By the time Moldenke is more mature, artificial suns and moons compete with the real one, 'jellyheads' rather than people do a lot of the work, and, most bizarrely, he has four hearts, three of which came from sheep. And there is a river so thick and polluted it can be walked on.
It is very difficult, if not impossible, for us to fully orient ourselves to the timeline in this book. There are a lot of unnanounced flashbacks and, to make matters more complicated, undated letters that could come from any number of places on the time line. I have figured out a rough timeline: perhaps a future literary critic will complete the job (and I have no doubt there will be a lot of critics writing on this book).
1. Childhood - "they kept him in a crumbling home."
2 &3. Working as a bug taster at a lab run by a jellyhead named Featherfighter - Working at Tropical Gardens. Meets Cock Roberta, the love of his life.
4. Fights in "mock war." He agrees to sacrifice a minor broken bone and the continued ability to feel a list of feelings, including it would seem love.
5. After war he and Cock Roberta exchange letters, but never seem to meet again. Moldenke tries valiantly to feel again, but fails.
6. Kills two jellyheads
7. I am a little unsure about this, but I believe Bunce, a hardboiled talker who seems to control most everything in this more and more artificial world, imprisons Moldenke for the crime.
8. Bunce calls Moldenke on the phone repeatedly and threatens him. A Dr. Burnheart, who implanted the sheeps hearts in Moldenke, tells him how to escape.
9. He wants to 'go South' across 'The Bottom' to where he believes Burnheart is
10. Stops by Shelp, the weatherman's place. Learns that Bunce orders the sort of weather he wants, and Shelp is to announce it.
11. Runs into Roquette. He helps him walk across the Jelly River. They get on a boat that seems to be like a cruise ship. Cock Roberta is on the ship but they never meet up.
12. Things get really crazy: the boat seems to be, at the same time, a boat, a vehicle on a street, a vehicle in a tunnel, and so forth.
13. The end, which I won't divulge.
Let's just say that this book is about the overwhelming artificiality that threatens our very human dignity. In the end, poor, lonely Moldenke, makes a stab at reasserting his dignity. It might not work, but the attempt alone is enough: it proves that Bunce and his crew have not completely destroyed who we are.
_______________
Interview with David Ohle
Monday, March 19, 2012
Girly Man by Charles Bernstein
[This is a reprint of a 2008 post on "Experimental Fiction Poetry." Bernstein has since published other books, including a selected poems, and they will be reviewed here.]
Charles Bernstein's latest book of poems strikes me as representing a major step forward. In many of the poems, he seems to be extending his experimental forms into a broader public sphere more available to lay readers. Not only is he doing this successfully, but he does not seem to compromise his poetics in order to do so. In fact, many of the most accessible poems in this collection seem to me to exemplify Bernstein's stated poetics better than his previous work.
In the 1970's and 80's the so-called Language Poets, of which Bernstein was a central player, were frequently accused of being too esoteric. They claimed to be interested in politics, but, for some, their poetry seemed to be more concerned with linguistic structures and difficult theoretical concerns than with the polity. These accusations were often taken too far, but this collection does make me wonder if, for Bernstein at least and perhaps for other of his compatriots, the radical experimentation of the 1970's-1990's was a necessary crucible to develop a poetics that, unlike most of contemporary poetry, can truly engage the public sphere.
Indeed, no other book by Bernstein feels so relevant.
The following quotation comes from what is hardly the best poem in the book, but it does exemplify what I am driving at:
"DIRECTIONS: For each pair of sentences, circle the letter, a or b, that best
expresses your viewpoint. Make a selection from each pair. Do not omit
any items.
1. a) The body and the material things of the world are the key to any
knowledge we can possess.
b) Knowledge is only possible by means of the mind or psyche.
2. a) My life is largely controlled by luck and chance.
b) I can determine the basic course of my life."
It goes on through 14 questions (perhaps a rye nod toward the updating of the sonnet). What this poem does is decontextualize a familiar type of psychological questionnaire in order to help us see it more clearly. Bernstein does not seem to take an attitude toward the questionnaire: it lies more or less neutral before us on the page. We are left to wonder how these questionaires cause us to think. Do they encourage us to form ridiculously simple-minded and overly general philosophical positions? To what extent, if at all, are they useful? What harm might they do?
In fact, to the last question I raise, the answer is "a lot of harm." The form of and habits through which we think have effects on the public sphere. For instance, the way Power Point encourages us to think, according to a recent lecture I attended by Jay Jolton, may have been a contributing factor in the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster. It distracted scientists and engineers from something essential they needed to attend to.
Bernstein is using poetry to attend to aspects of our contemporary discourse in order to make their implications, possibilities, and limitations more visible to us.
The more complex poems in the collection, of course, draw on wider and deeper aspects of the polity than does "Questionnaire." One such success is "War Stories." Originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the poem is comprised of six pages of short prose comments, each set off by a skipped line, and each beginning "War is." Here are four consecutive comments from the middle of the poem :
"War is the reluctant foundation of justice and the unconscious guaran-
tor of liberty.
War is the broken dream of the patriot."
War is the slow death of idealism.
War is realpolitik for the old and unmitigated realism for the young."
Bernstein lists four attitudes or beliefs about war, again in a way that seems fairly neutral — except for the fourth one, about "realpolitik." Here poetry, unlike other forms of social discourse, is able to represent to us the numbing repetition of the word "war" that begins to cause us to strip from our understanding its consequences. Ideas about war come from all angles, seemingly from all political perspectives. What does it add up to? That we are intimately involved with deciding what war is, where it should take place, whether it should take place, and who should fight it. There is no running: there is no fleeing to a self-righteously idealistic place that puts oneself outside the sphere others inhabit, either by naively ignoring its occasional necessity or by claiming a particular war is simply pure and good.
I won't tell you the momentous end to this poem, because at that time we suddenly realize that these remarks have not been randomly placed together, but are working toward a specific effect.
In one section of the book, Bernstein leaves behind his experiments with poetic form. Apparently, he believed that only raw and immediate journaling could possibly do justice to the events in New York City surrounding 9-11. In the section entitled "Some of These Daze" he includes four journal entries and a letter to a Russian friend that details what he did, how he felt, and how the city responded to the attacks. I found it to be remarkable in that it did return me to the feelings I had right after the attack. It is quite apparent that Bernstein was trying, in these responses, to be rigorously honest — at one point he even confesses to hearing in his head the bouyantly happy "feelin' groovy" from Simon and Garfunkel's "59th Street Bridge Song." But in the end Bernstein, a lifetime Manhattanite, grieves for his hometown in a palpably hurt manner.
Not all of the poems in this collection display Bernstein's new turn to accessibility. Many of the poems that could be considered experimental lyrics, which he has been writing at least since 1990's The Absent Father in Dumbo, (available now only in Republics of Reality) feature puns, rhymes, odd turns of phrase and shifts, that simultaneously locate and dislocate, often in several directions at once. To read these poems is to feel as if one is subject to a sometimes discomforting action-at-a-distance. From "Pocket in the Hole":
Reverberation sways aversion —
seals still harbinger
Bent dismay in
a supposed zone
Where tampered verity
flushes conscience down
The title right away disallows any easy digestion. Where can a pocket possibly exist in a hole? What is suggested by such a baffling paradox? Perhaps the feeling of being in the inside of the inside of, uhm, something? And how can anything, even 'reverbation' with its implied repetitions, sway a visceral dislike so deep that it can be called 'aversion'?
It should be obvious by now that the sort of traditional reading that I was attempting in the above paragraph is not working. We need to approach the poem as an associative field of energy, where we do not think in terms of subject - verb - object, but in the reverberations of each word. Perhaps the noun in one line has more to do with a verb in the next one than it does with its strictly 'grammatical' verb.
Reverberation, for instance, not only rhymes with 'aversion' but sounds similar to 'harbinger'. And 'sways', 'seals', and 'still' are linked by alliteration. 'Bent' semantically connects to both 'sways' and 'tampers' because they are all verbs of movement. 'Dismay' similarly connects to 'aversion', and the latter connects to 'conscience' due to sound. This poem sounds forth its suggestions, causing us to feel unbalanced, uncertain, a sense that feelings as strong as verity and aversion and dismay are subject to change.
I do, though, want to return to what I said at the beginning of this review. What this book most succeeds at is not giving us more poems that are a quality continuation of one of Bernstein's early styles, but breaking into a new ground where poetic form can do its work in the public sphere with potency and direction.
Charles Bernstein's latest book of poems strikes me as representing a major step forward. In many of the poems, he seems to be extending his experimental forms into a broader public sphere more available to lay readers. Not only is he doing this successfully, but he does not seem to compromise his poetics in order to do so. In fact, many of the most accessible poems in this collection seem to me to exemplify Bernstein's stated poetics better than his previous work.
In the 1970's and 80's the so-called Language Poets, of which Bernstein was a central player, were frequently accused of being too esoteric. They claimed to be interested in politics, but, for some, their poetry seemed to be more concerned with linguistic structures and difficult theoretical concerns than with the polity. These accusations were often taken too far, but this collection does make me wonder if, for Bernstein at least and perhaps for other of his compatriots, the radical experimentation of the 1970's-1990's was a necessary crucible to develop a poetics that, unlike most of contemporary poetry, can truly engage the public sphere.
Indeed, no other book by Bernstein feels so relevant.
The following quotation comes from what is hardly the best poem in the book, but it does exemplify what I am driving at:
"DIRECTIONS: For each pair of sentences, circle the letter, a or b, that best
expresses your viewpoint. Make a selection from each pair. Do not omit
any items.
1. a) The body and the material things of the world are the key to any
knowledge we can possess.
b) Knowledge is only possible by means of the mind or psyche.
2. a) My life is largely controlled by luck and chance.
b) I can determine the basic course of my life."
It goes on through 14 questions (perhaps a rye nod toward the updating of the sonnet). What this poem does is decontextualize a familiar type of psychological questionnaire in order to help us see it more clearly. Bernstein does not seem to take an attitude toward the questionnaire: it lies more or less neutral before us on the page. We are left to wonder how these questionaires cause us to think. Do they encourage us to form ridiculously simple-minded and overly general philosophical positions? To what extent, if at all, are they useful? What harm might they do?
In fact, to the last question I raise, the answer is "a lot of harm." The form of and habits through which we think have effects on the public sphere. For instance, the way Power Point encourages us to think, according to a recent lecture I attended by Jay Jolton, may have been a contributing factor in the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster. It distracted scientists and engineers from something essential they needed to attend to.
Bernstein is using poetry to attend to aspects of our contemporary discourse in order to make their implications, possibilities, and limitations more visible to us.
The more complex poems in the collection, of course, draw on wider and deeper aspects of the polity than does "Questionnaire." One such success is "War Stories." Originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the poem is comprised of six pages of short prose comments, each set off by a skipped line, and each beginning "War is." Here are four consecutive comments from the middle of the poem :
"War is the reluctant foundation of justice and the unconscious guaran-
tor of liberty.
War is the broken dream of the patriot."
War is the slow death of idealism.
War is realpolitik for the old and unmitigated realism for the young."
Bernstein lists four attitudes or beliefs about war, again in a way that seems fairly neutral — except for the fourth one, about "realpolitik." Here poetry, unlike other forms of social discourse, is able to represent to us the numbing repetition of the word "war" that begins to cause us to strip from our understanding its consequences. Ideas about war come from all angles, seemingly from all political perspectives. What does it add up to? That we are intimately involved with deciding what war is, where it should take place, whether it should take place, and who should fight it. There is no running: there is no fleeing to a self-righteously idealistic place that puts oneself outside the sphere others inhabit, either by naively ignoring its occasional necessity or by claiming a particular war is simply pure and good.
I won't tell you the momentous end to this poem, because at that time we suddenly realize that these remarks have not been randomly placed together, but are working toward a specific effect.
In one section of the book, Bernstein leaves behind his experiments with poetic form. Apparently, he believed that only raw and immediate journaling could possibly do justice to the events in New York City surrounding 9-11. In the section entitled "Some of These Daze" he includes four journal entries and a letter to a Russian friend that details what he did, how he felt, and how the city responded to the attacks. I found it to be remarkable in that it did return me to the feelings I had right after the attack. It is quite apparent that Bernstein was trying, in these responses, to be rigorously honest — at one point he even confesses to hearing in his head the bouyantly happy "feelin' groovy" from Simon and Garfunkel's "59th Street Bridge Song." But in the end Bernstein, a lifetime Manhattanite, grieves for his hometown in a palpably hurt manner.
Not all of the poems in this collection display Bernstein's new turn to accessibility. Many of the poems that could be considered experimental lyrics, which he has been writing at least since 1990's The Absent Father in Dumbo, (available now only in Republics of Reality) feature puns, rhymes, odd turns of phrase and shifts, that simultaneously locate and dislocate, often in several directions at once. To read these poems is to feel as if one is subject to a sometimes discomforting action-at-a-distance. From "Pocket in the Hole":
Reverberation sways aversion —
seals still harbinger
Bent dismay in
a supposed zone
Where tampered verity
flushes conscience down
The title right away disallows any easy digestion. Where can a pocket possibly exist in a hole? What is suggested by such a baffling paradox? Perhaps the feeling of being in the inside of the inside of, uhm, something? And how can anything, even 'reverbation' with its implied repetitions, sway a visceral dislike so deep that it can be called 'aversion'?
It should be obvious by now that the sort of traditional reading that I was attempting in the above paragraph is not working. We need to approach the poem as an associative field of energy, where we do not think in terms of subject - verb - object, but in the reverberations of each word. Perhaps the noun in one line has more to do with a verb in the next one than it does with its strictly 'grammatical' verb.
Reverberation, for instance, not only rhymes with 'aversion' but sounds similar to 'harbinger'. And 'sways', 'seals', and 'still' are linked by alliteration. 'Bent' semantically connects to both 'sways' and 'tampers' because they are all verbs of movement. 'Dismay' similarly connects to 'aversion', and the latter connects to 'conscience' due to sound. This poem sounds forth its suggestions, causing us to feel unbalanced, uncertain, a sense that feelings as strong as verity and aversion and dismay are subject to change.
I do, though, want to return to what I said at the beginning of this review. What this book most succeeds at is not giving us more poems that are a quality continuation of one of Bernstein's early styles, but breaking into a new ground where poetic form can do its work in the public sphere with potency and direction.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Milwaukee Road Trip, St. Patrick's Day, 2012
6 hours from Minneapolis to Milwaukee--a hidden Midwestern gem.
Took me a half hour to find I-94 in my own hometown--after 17 years of living here, still don't know where on ramps are.
In Black River Falls, stopped at my favorite coffee house: Molly's Rude Awakenings. Marilyn Monroe pictures. Another movie star whose name escapes me. 50's soda jerk counter booths. Cinema chairs against the wall. Studied, old-hippie feel. Great patios. Poetry readings.
A guy ran a cool micropress out of Black River Falls for a while. Is it still going? Is he still there? Gotta find him if he is.
Back on the road.
Milwaukee--Woodland Pattern Book Center. My favorite bookstore by far. Huge, open room with first editions and poetry chapbooks galore. Picked up latest Nathaniel Mackey and a Maggie O'Sullivan--where else can you find her stuff?
Hook up with my buddy, a blues critic, and quickly hit a downhome Mexican spot for tacos on paper plates and margaritas mixed the way they should be: with powdered sugar.
Out to a suburban hell spot to hear a blues band: Steve Nitros. Couldn't talk to Nitros until break, but I heard it: this was one of the few cats to be extending Fenton Robinson, an obscure West Side Chicago guitarist who fell through the cracks because he was too jazzy for the bluesers and too bluesy for the jazz ers. Intricate, nuanced, laid back, and definitely grooving.
You could dance to this stuff but the crowd in their Packer sweatshirts and hats just wanted to listen.
At the break Nitros came over to talk to my buddy and he confirmed that Robinson was a major influence. How exactly I would define the way Nitros works with the openings provided by Robinson would entail some study and comparison--wish I could do it now.
Amy Ashby on bass and some cool vocals and a wild tatoo dedicated to Delta blues, Andy B. on drums, Larry Byrne on electric piano. Excellent band--Byrne worked with none other than Luther Allison.
Saturday was St. Patrick's Day in beer town USA. Hit a bar with some people we knew about 2 o'clock. Sat outside in the sun. Conversation about whether or not men should pay for dates: I held that chivalry was always, ultimately, a cover for developing entitlement. Won't pretend to get other people's ideas exactly right.
Got a little heated, but fun.
Another talk about which blues artists seemed to break through the constraints of style and wear their heart on their sleeves, at least sometimes: I held out for Howlin' Wolf and Otis Rush. Then we agreed that Jessie Mae Hemphill blows our minds, rest her soul.
A middle-aged guy wearing a green kilt, a green shirt with "Shamrock Gangsta" emblazoned on the back, and a big green clock poured out of the bar. "Hey, man" he said to me. The clock was set to the exact time a couple months earlier when he and his unit (what's the verb?) got home from three years in Iraq and Afghanistan. I told him I was very happy to have him back.
He swaggered and told me while he was gone his dad died, a house burned down, family members got diseases and I could tell it was all true. "Party up," I said, and he shook my hand and as he staggered back inside someone gave him crap about his costume. Little did they know.
I was rattled for a few minutes.
Hit a few bars in the trendy part of town that played music too loud and bored me, and then, well, heaven itself: The Dr. Chow rock band at a road house way the hell out by the airport.
Can you imagine the combination of all-out rock and roll histrionics with over-the-top theatricality? I've never seen such a thing.
The crowd--all middle-aged: hipsters, burn-outs and bikers--went nuts. They all seemed to know or be familiar with the band, as were the people I was with. They played a souped up version of a 20's Irish tune:
Cigaroes and whiskey
and wild wild women
I can't remember what came next but the lyrics described nothing good, and the music itself was catharsis itself. I sang along.
Dr. Chow leapt onto the bar, crawled its length, rose to his knees and howled like he was the Wolf himself.
The next set--all 60's garage-rock covers and my feet couldn't help myself: I asked my buddy if I could dance with his girlfriend 'cause he wasn't and we ran to the front and acted completely stupid. Her arms never came below shoulder level and I beat the hell out of the floor with my cowboy boots and the owner of the roadhouse--looked to be in his 60's--was getting down right with us. Along with a drag queen in a skin-tight dress—don't they of all us males, excuse the expression, have the most balls?
My buddy's girlfriend knew Mr. Chow and she kept flipping him the bird for the hell of it and he yelled the only proper response right back into the microphone which I won't repeat here.
It was hot and I was sweating and it was off to chow down at the Mexican restaurant again late at night. We heaved and hawed about our troubles and I touched my eye when it had hot sauce on it. The Mexican bartender was nice, gave me a glass of water and told me what to do--my friends made fun of me as I stuck my eyeball into the H2O.
Jerks. (Joke)
The night ended at a laid back punk rock club and I'm up this morning in a coffeehouse having finished some writing & editing work now writing this and it's off to Green Bay in a few to visit my parents.
I love WISCONSIN.
Took me a half hour to find I-94 in my own hometown--after 17 years of living here, still don't know where on ramps are.
In Black River Falls, stopped at my favorite coffee house: Molly's Rude Awakenings. Marilyn Monroe pictures. Another movie star whose name escapes me. 50's soda jerk counter booths. Cinema chairs against the wall. Studied, old-hippie feel. Great patios. Poetry readings.
A guy ran a cool micropress out of Black River Falls for a while. Is it still going? Is he still there? Gotta find him if he is.
Back on the road.
Milwaukee--Woodland Pattern Book Center. My favorite bookstore by far. Huge, open room with first editions and poetry chapbooks galore. Picked up latest Nathaniel Mackey and a Maggie O'Sullivan--where else can you find her stuff?
Hook up with my buddy, a blues critic, and quickly hit a downhome Mexican spot for tacos on paper plates and margaritas mixed the way they should be: with powdered sugar.
Out to a suburban hell spot to hear a blues band: Steve Nitros. Couldn't talk to Nitros until break, but I heard it: this was one of the few cats to be extending Fenton Robinson, an obscure West Side Chicago guitarist who fell through the cracks because he was too jazzy for the bluesers and too bluesy for the jazz ers. Intricate, nuanced, laid back, and definitely grooving.
You could dance to this stuff but the crowd in their Packer sweatshirts and hats just wanted to listen.
At the break Nitros came over to talk to my buddy and he confirmed that Robinson was a major influence. How exactly I would define the way Nitros works with the openings provided by Robinson would entail some study and comparison--wish I could do it now.
Amy Ashby on bass and some cool vocals and a wild tatoo dedicated to Delta blues, Andy B. on drums, Larry Byrne on electric piano. Excellent band--Byrne worked with none other than Luther Allison.
Saturday was St. Patrick's Day in beer town USA. Hit a bar with some people we knew about 2 o'clock. Sat outside in the sun. Conversation about whether or not men should pay for dates: I held that chivalry was always, ultimately, a cover for developing entitlement. Won't pretend to get other people's ideas exactly right.
Got a little heated, but fun.
Another talk about which blues artists seemed to break through the constraints of style and wear their heart on their sleeves, at least sometimes: I held out for Howlin' Wolf and Otis Rush. Then we agreed that Jessie Mae Hemphill blows our minds, rest her soul.
A middle-aged guy wearing a green kilt, a green shirt with "Shamrock Gangsta" emblazoned on the back, and a big green clock poured out of the bar. "Hey, man" he said to me. The clock was set to the exact time a couple months earlier when he and his unit (what's the verb?) got home from three years in Iraq and Afghanistan. I told him I was very happy to have him back.
He swaggered and told me while he was gone his dad died, a house burned down, family members got diseases and I could tell it was all true. "Party up," I said, and he shook my hand and as he staggered back inside someone gave him crap about his costume. Little did they know.
I was rattled for a few minutes.
Hit a few bars in the trendy part of town that played music too loud and bored me, and then, well, heaven itself: The Dr. Chow rock band at a road house way the hell out by the airport.
Can you imagine the combination of all-out rock and roll histrionics with over-the-top theatricality? I've never seen such a thing.
The crowd--all middle-aged: hipsters, burn-outs and bikers--went nuts. They all seemed to know or be familiar with the band, as were the people I was with. They played a souped up version of a 20's Irish tune:
Cigaroes and whiskey
and wild wild women
I can't remember what came next but the lyrics described nothing good, and the music itself was catharsis itself. I sang along.
Dr. Chow leapt onto the bar, crawled its length, rose to his knees and howled like he was the Wolf himself.
The next set--all 60's garage-rock covers and my feet couldn't help myself: I asked my buddy if I could dance with his girlfriend 'cause he wasn't and we ran to the front and acted completely stupid. Her arms never came below shoulder level and I beat the hell out of the floor with my cowboy boots and the owner of the roadhouse--looked to be in his 60's--was getting down right with us. Along with a drag queen in a skin-tight dress—don't they of all us males, excuse the expression, have the most balls?
My buddy's girlfriend knew Mr. Chow and she kept flipping him the bird for the hell of it and he yelled the only proper response right back into the microphone which I won't repeat here.
It was hot and I was sweating and it was off to chow down at the Mexican restaurant again late at night. We heaved and hawed about our troubles and I touched my eye when it had hot sauce on it. The Mexican bartender was nice, gave me a glass of water and told me what to do--my friends made fun of me as I stuck my eyeball into the H2O.
Jerks. (Joke)
The night ended at a laid back punk rock club and I'm up this morning in a coffeehouse having finished some writing & editing work now writing this and it's off to Green Bay in a few to visit my parents.
I love WISCONSIN.
Lily Hoang's CHANGING (Fairy Tale Review Press)
[Reprint from "Experimental Fiction Poetry Blog"]
I love this novel. Yes, I like this book and I am impressed by it, but more importantly, I love it.
I love this novel. Yes, I like this book and I am impressed by it, but more importantly, I love it.
Let me explain: this book is unique, touching, intimate. It almost feels autobiographical, but it is not. On page after page Hoang's riffs on Jack and Jill and other nursery rhymes, on romantic relationships, on cruelty and tenderness, on family, feel so intimate that to not love them would seem inhumane.
Changing, a 2009 Pen America Award Winner, is based on the ancient Chinese uber-text I-Ching or Book of Changes. The book is composed of 64 hexagrams, each one with six stacked horizontal lines. Some lines are composed of just one dash (—) and some are two (--). The unbroken lines are associated with yang, the creative principle, and the broken with yin, the receptive principle.
For our purposes, it is enough to know that these 64 hexagrams refer to combinations of concrete natural phenomena; namely earth, mountain, water, wind, thunder, fire, swamp, and heaven. For each hexagram, the first three lines refer to one of these phenomena and the second three refer to another. (This is how we get the number 64; there are 64 such possible combinations.) Water, as an example, is composed of a broken line followed by a solid line and another broken line, respectively.
To use the I-Ching for divination, you ask a question then randomly pick a number. Studying that hexagram should help you understand your question better. In an appendix at the end of the book, Lily says that she wants the book to be read that way. For all practical purposes, we can assume that the book need not be read sequentially.
Hoang's book is a new translation of the I-Ching. And it works by, for each hexagram, riffing off of its implications for two pages. (i.e. Each chapter is two pages.) A chapter is divided into six blocks of text, three on one page and three on the other. Some of these blocks are broken into two columns and others are completely solid. They correspond to the broken or solid lines in the hexagrams.
To see what Lily does with three hexagrams, go here. Note that there are six text blocks under each hexagram, and that in the book a page break takes place between the third and the fourth ones. Since it is easilly accessible on the net, I will use this excerpt as an example of what happens throughout the book. I will concentrate on the first one, "Obstruction."
The most direct discussion of the hexagram itself is in the text block that begins "This hexagram is not..." Since heaven is the ultimate creative force (with its three solid lines) and earth the ultimate receptive one (with its three broken lines), it would seem that this hexagram would be water. But it is not: it is obstruction or barricade. Hoang imagines the Princess Jill living in a castle behind a moat. Where did this come from? Throughout the book, in every discussion of a hexagram, Lily goes into Jack and Jill at one point. What's more, other nursery rhymes and fairy tales are quoted. So here, Jill is a princess, evoking all sorts of other tales. This quoting while riffing is very similar to what many jazz artists do, who, while soloing, "quote" the melodies of other songs as a playful and generative act.
This riffing and quoting occurs throughout this excerpt and throughout the book. Each chapter is composed of more than six riffs on the title coming from different imagist, allegorical, and conceptual frameworks. For an example of an allegory, look at the text block beginning "That us lovers..." The whole piece is about the narrator's inability to play chess well and, by implication, the lover's "clean" ability. This is an allegory about the narrator's difficulty with bringing intense emotional scenes (what else could the chess game suggest other than arguments, stressful decisions, an inability to be decisive?) to a conclusion. Perhaps they tend to fester.
Other text blocks under this hexagram are equally interesting. If we remember that with the bottom three lines we are dealing with ultimate receptivity, the block beginning "Impossible for the great..." becomes fascinating. It is a paean to the Taoist idea that the insignificant and nonfunctional (the traditional example is of a severely bent tree) will not be hurt. Here we see how crafty and impossible to catch are the small ones. The very nature of ultimate receptivity implies a strength, an ability to take powerful pressure and yet still remain. The total obstruction of the receptive is impossible (and this is also in keeping with the Yin Yang philosophy) no matter how hard anyone tries.
In the long text block beginning "Memory of the city..." Lily works the notion of water and rain as obstruction once again. Using conjunctions, repetition, and agrammatical structures she causes us to plunge down the text block like heavy rainwater. And it ends with the rye comment "before we're real stuck." The playfulness in this section is quite typical. There is a bouyancy to this novel in spite of its many tragic elements: cancer, growing old, homophobia, racism, breaking from family, and so on.
The playfulness, perhaps, comes from the the conception or intuition that animates the novel, the use of the I-Ching— coupled with the wildly free, agrammatical style. What's more, the play seems inexhaustible. Each chapter could be discussed for hours in terms of how Lily is riffing off of the hexagram. In the sections of the hexagram "Obstruction," she deals with memory, fear, sadness, definitions, Heaven, Earth, small vs. great, family, translating, allegory, and housing. All in two pages!
What's more, this intricately textured novel is not dense. There is so much room to breathe, so much tenderness — the mother lying next to a sick little girl and asking her to give the illness to the mother, and the little girl not wanting to get her mother sick; lovers hearing "how sounds move in groups to our ears"; & Jill walking "into a forest & there she sang with rabbits & birds & a very charming prince overheard melody. And there is tremendous pain — cancer andchemotherapy, racist comments aimed at the little girl and her parents, love affairs breaking apart, a young man almost completely rejected by his family because of being a homosexual. Each of these, returned to again and again under different hexagrams, causes us to read each text block in at least two ways: one in relation to the hexagram it is under, and the other to the other text blocks under different hexagrams that deal with the same issue.
I love this novel because of its tenderness, its playfulness, its ability to look at some of the most horrible aspects of experience yet not despair. To read this novel and inhabit its world is to feel that almost anything can happen, and it might be horrible. It also might be beautiful. But in that very randomness is the possibility for a a spaciousness and openness that is the source of endurance, perseverance, play, and good fortune.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
BURN YOUR BELONGINGS (Jaded Ibis Press) by David Hoenigman
[Reprint from my Experimental Fiction Poetry Blog]
First, a word about the publisher. Debra Di Blasi's new publishing adventure, Jaded Ibis Press, combines visual, textual, and musical art in each of its books. In addition, the press makes four different versions of each of its books: an ebook form, a black and white form, a colored form, and a fine-art form. The colored and fine art go for $49 and $8500 respectively. For this review, I read an ebook copy. The song that accompanies the book can be found on the press's web page. The art work appears in a column on the far right or far left of each page. They are by Yosutoshi Yoshida. First, I will discuss the writing, then go into the ways the artwork and sound contribute to it.
Hoenigman's book is obsessive on a number of levels: The concerns of the characters are obsessive. They are part of a highly dramatic and anxiety ridden love triangle. On another level obsessive groups of images return again and again: trains, umbrellas, rain, insomnia. On a third level is Hoenigman's determination to work this love triangle through about 200 single page, dramatic monologue variations.
And these variations are singular. I've never read anything like them. Their attention to bare concrete emotion and imagery, together with the use of pronouns with no clear antecedents, creates, paradoxically, a rather abstract reading experience. For me, I couldn't tell who was speaking in a given monologue, other than that it was one of the two men in the triangle. A close read is repaid by an experience of the intensity and destructiveness of romantic love at a fever pitch, not by a clear sense of what is "going on" between the characters in any conventional way.:
"I barely know her, someone left her on my doorstep. she appears out of thin air if I say her name. I introduce them. she only speaks when spoken to. always some distraction grabs him by the wrist. leads him to futility. grayness. wedges itself between us. I've never seen her here before. has yet to develop the grace of the others. or is she trying to deceive me. I kissed her bare shoulder. considered returning again alone. he's grown smaller and smaller. it's been months since that morning. the threatening little tremors. soon it''ll be over. a perfect opportunity for her to showcase her newly found distrust. for him to take offense. bite his tongue and await the unavoidable. downward so sharply that his ears pop. it must be warm and cozy there. I alone notice how it changes night to night ..." (101)
In this quotation we begin with the metaphor about being left on the doorway. While tired, it nonetheless works for me. The momentum created by this book allows for such tired constructions. It points to the arbitrariness of their love and, in this instance, "his" patronizing feeling toward her. But this will change. All feelings in this book are subject to radical and instantaneous change. The suggestions that she is a child continue: she only speaks when spoken to. Suddenly, we switch to the other "him" in the love triangle. What we don't get here is what we don't get throughout the book: explanations at the first or second level of abstraction which indicate how the characters are specifically related. Instead, we get these truncated, popping sentences that follow the contours of thought and feeling so closely we never come up for air. It is an extreme approach.
On my ebook, the accompanying pictures are brightly colored and usually depict cityscapes or landscapes out in the country. In addition, many depict what I can only call surrealist scenes. Disparate items are placed side by side. Collages or collage-like works contain objects in two different dimensions, such as a head too small for the body. In general, the art by Yasutoshi Yoshida seems to reflect and refract the way the text draws little distinction between "reality" and "fantasy." In this book, a fantasy has as much power, if not more, in shaping perception as simple facts do.
Finally, the song on the website, also by Yoshida, begins with an acoustic piano and a recitation of a part of the book. Then there is crashing noise. I won't spoil the end for you.
This book presents a field of perception defined by fantasy, obsessiveness, and, because of the pronouns without antecedents, a lack of clarity when it comes to fact. The music, text, and pictures combine to form an unsettling, relentless investigation into some of the least explored and most feared aspects of the perceptual and emotive world. It is a courageous book.
First, a word about the publisher. Debra Di Blasi's new publishing adventure, Jaded Ibis Press, combines visual, textual, and musical art in each of its books. In addition, the press makes four different versions of each of its books: an ebook form, a black and white form, a colored form, and a fine-art form. The colored and fine art go for $49 and $8500 respectively. For this review, I read an ebook copy. The song that accompanies the book can be found on the press's web page. The art work appears in a column on the far right or far left of each page. They are by Yosutoshi Yoshida. First, I will discuss the writing, then go into the ways the artwork and sound contribute to it.
Hoenigman's book is obsessive on a number of levels: The concerns of the characters are obsessive. They are part of a highly dramatic and anxiety ridden love triangle. On another level obsessive groups of images return again and again: trains, umbrellas, rain, insomnia. On a third level is Hoenigman's determination to work this love triangle through about 200 single page, dramatic monologue variations.
And these variations are singular. I've never read anything like them. Their attention to bare concrete emotion and imagery, together with the use of pronouns with no clear antecedents, creates, paradoxically, a rather abstract reading experience. For me, I couldn't tell who was speaking in a given monologue, other than that it was one of the two men in the triangle. A close read is repaid by an experience of the intensity and destructiveness of romantic love at a fever pitch, not by a clear sense of what is "going on" between the characters in any conventional way.:
"I barely know her, someone left her on my doorstep. she appears out of thin air if I say her name. I introduce them. she only speaks when spoken to. always some distraction grabs him by the wrist. leads him to futility. grayness. wedges itself between us. I've never seen her here before. has yet to develop the grace of the others. or is she trying to deceive me. I kissed her bare shoulder. considered returning again alone. he's grown smaller and smaller. it's been months since that morning. the threatening little tremors. soon it''ll be over. a perfect opportunity for her to showcase her newly found distrust. for him to take offense. bite his tongue and await the unavoidable. downward so sharply that his ears pop. it must be warm and cozy there. I alone notice how it changes night to night ..." (101)
In this quotation we begin with the metaphor about being left on the doorway. While tired, it nonetheless works for me. The momentum created by this book allows for such tired constructions. It points to the arbitrariness of their love and, in this instance, "his" patronizing feeling toward her. But this will change. All feelings in this book are subject to radical and instantaneous change. The suggestions that she is a child continue: she only speaks when spoken to. Suddenly, we switch to the other "him" in the love triangle. What we don't get here is what we don't get throughout the book: explanations at the first or second level of abstraction which indicate how the characters are specifically related. Instead, we get these truncated, popping sentences that follow the contours of thought and feeling so closely we never come up for air. It is an extreme approach.
On my ebook, the accompanying pictures are brightly colored and usually depict cityscapes or landscapes out in the country. In addition, many depict what I can only call surrealist scenes. Disparate items are placed side by side. Collages or collage-like works contain objects in two different dimensions, such as a head too small for the body. In general, the art by Yasutoshi Yoshida seems to reflect and refract the way the text draws little distinction between "reality" and "fantasy." In this book, a fantasy has as much power, if not more, in shaping perception as simple facts do.
Finally, the song on the website, also by Yoshida, begins with an acoustic piano and a recitation of a part of the book. Then there is crashing noise. I won't spoil the end for you.
This book presents a field of perception defined by fantasy, obsessiveness, and, because of the pronouns without antecedents, a lack of clarity when it comes to fact. The music, text, and pictures combine to form an unsettling, relentless investigation into some of the least explored and most feared aspects of the perceptual and emotive world. It is a courageous book.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Niedecker's "Wintergreen Ridge" (reprint from "Experimental Fiction Poetry Blog"
[This is a reprint of my first entry in my old blog.]
horsetails
club mosses
stayed alive
after dinosaurs
died
Found:
laurel in muskeg
linnaeus' twinflower
Andromeda
Cisandra of the bog
The poem concerns itself with what Niedecker observed as she 'climbed' Wintergreen Ridge, the third one in from the lake. Importantly, on that ridge, she found an orchid whose name is 'Grass of Parnassus.' Since Parnassus is, in Greek mythology, the home of the muses, Niedecker makes a radical claim in this poem: a small, older woman can climb a three-foot ridge in a humble nature sanctuary in Wisconsin, and still be in touch with the muses. She claims that inspiration is anywhere and everywhere, and available for everybody.
While this claim was not especially new by the time this poem was written in the late 1960's, it was unusual for an older woman from Wisconsin to make it. She takes poetry away from the urban, the male, the spectacular, and gives it to herself: the rural, the female, the humble. It is quite a move.
In one of her greatest poems, "Wintergreen Ridge," Lorine Niedecker recounts a trip she made with her husband from her Fort Atkinson home in southern Wisconsin to the Door County peninsula, which juts out into Lake Michigan in the northeastern section of the state. They visited The Ridges Sanctuary, a nonprofit nature preserve. Strangely, the so-called ridges are only about three feet high. Every year, the lake pushes soil and debris up onto the bank, then ends up retreating. This has gone on for thousands of years, creating a series of bowed ridges that move inland from the lake. This photo shows how the ridges appear from the air (scroll down).
Here are a few lines from the poem, found on page 247 of her Collected Works (U of CA Press):
Here are a few lines from the poem, found on page 247 of her Collected Works (U of CA Press):
horsetails
club mosses
stayed alive
after dinosaurs
died
Found:
laurel in muskeg
linnaeus' twinflower
Andromeda
She goes even further by giving us three different words for 'wintergreen' in quick succession: wintergreen, pipsissewa, and grass of paranassus. What's especially interesting is the second word, which is a corruption of the Algonquin. Niedecker displaces Western culture, starting from the Greeks with their Parnassus, so that it rests equally with the Algonquins and other cultures.
As a way of grounding the poem in the here and now, it seems, Niedecker names a number of flowers and orchids in its ten pages. She makes a home of the small beauties of the sanctuary. While it would be necessary to be an advanced and learned observer of nature, as Niedecker was, to inhabit this poem with some comfort, it does help to have at least an idea about the appearance of the flowers she mentions. The purpose of this post is to offer links to pictures of thos flowers.
To do so, I cross referenced pictures of the flowers on the web, (making much use of the University of Stevens Point website, among others), with the book 101 Wildflowers of the Ridges Sanctuary by Frances M. Burton and Arelia M. Stampp. They are below:
Lady's Slipper - a number of types appear in these photos
Sundew - She mentions "Drosera / of the sundews." Sundews are a large family of carnivorous plants. The type found in the Sanctuary is the drosera rotundifolia. See above.
Bishop's Cup (sic.) This may be a misspelling. There is a Bishop's Cap flower in the Sanctuary, but not a Bishop's Cup.
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More on Niedecker