Sync with the Inefficiencies of Time

27 August 2016 By darkviolin

A review of The After Party, a poetry collection by Jana Prikryl (Tim Duggan Books | Crown, 2016).

In this poetry collection by Jana Prikryl, multiple voices strive to be heard. They include the casual (“I mean there was literally nothing I could do”), the symbolic (“Mr. Dialect”), and the winged “Parked magenta Lumina, / aluminum awning wool shoulders / of a coat shrugged on to run across the street / for milk await / the formal wear of snow, / remove from adjectives.”

What buoys this work most is ruminant abstraction, shown in “remove from adjectives.”

Such as this, from “Thirty Thousand Island,” a long poem:

Within the unflagging wringing concentration
that even a dippy vessel wants
in these waters

waits a state of mind not so much passionate
as cold in its stamina

as synced with the inefficiencies of time,
fused down into its crevices of scale,
happy in its specificities

True, there are also concrete specifics, as in this passage from “Siblings and Half Siblings”:

We sisters had the Vondörfer hair,
pink with ripples and electrodes in the right places,
wavy orange stuff environing our faces.

There’s a genealogical or genetic reference in the latter, but a paraphrase of “synced with he inefficiencies of time” would likely not be resolved by Prikryl family interviews.

Prikryl’s reflective voice shines in passages such as this from “To Tell of Bodies Changed”:

While a substance of landscape, mineral,
leaches into blood vessels
quietly steadily, meaning in this case
nothing is damaged;
extravagance of umbrella pines
propping their fingers under the bonus horizons
of the hills, redundancies
boosting the city’s resemblance to itself.

Snips from other poems: “regifting a responsibility,” and “The earth knows Andre Breton, / compiles ingenuous personalities in its fevered correspondence.”

In Dan Chiasson’s affecting review of this collection, which has much to recommend it, he writes that “Language in this enchanted book sometimes seems to have an independent intelligence.” It’s a complimentary but ultimately puzzling observation. Is this intelligence in the poem the intelligence of a unique character? Can the language be autonomous from writer and reader? A poem can take on many roles, but giving it agency is stretches autonomy too far.

In “New York New York” the poet’s intelligence is what preempts seer, scene, interpreter in the framing:

what meets me then
walking one island
or other

and in this scenario
I am half
the actor

stage and screen
whose moves
wow the well read

what meets me then
old flame
sufficiency

The sufficiency here is the sureness of the poet as framer.

Annotation or Drift

In this uncorrected proof copy, there are a few references at the end, such as to Wikipedia’s entry for “tidal locking.” But readers will have to look to English Lit for annotations of “the notebooks of STC.”

Annotation is handled well in “The Moth,” which provides a Science magazine quote or paraphrase at the outset. Poets and editors of same, take note. Hyperlinks aren’t only for the daily news. To refer to “quantum bits” with a specific analogical mapping, best to ensure that readers know this is a concept in physics (the qubit), not just a poet’s lightweight use of “bits” in a turn of phrase.

Despite the many questions these poems raise, then either leave unanswered or summon more research resources than seem feasible, there are gems to be found scattered hanging in the gallery of this collection. Whether these stanzas leave you curious or simply impressed with the intricate clockwork of Prikryl’s mind, it is a worthwhile voyage into loss, but not one will not leave you adrift without music or hope.

The book is dedicated to Ms. Prikryl’s brother Voyta, who in 1995 died suddenly, and far too young. He insinuates himself into many a stanza as more than filial fact or fate.

The Earth’s Sweet Pull: Linda Gregerson’s Concision

29 November 2015 By darkviolin

A poetry collection of work spanning nearly nearly 40 years for any living poet deserves attention, but Prodigal (Martin Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) goes beyond satisfying collector lust. Linda Gregerson’s collection represents achievements of concision, owing to her tight verse construction and prosody, but the more enduring rewards are thematic.

In “Good News,” attention is the prize:

. . . Close now, closer

than audio

enhancement, the frictionless

story that washes us clean.

Words dis-

encumbered of contingency,

of history, of doubt. God’s

wounds,

they swore, the old ones,

the believers, as now we swear by sex or shit,

God’s wounds,

which failures of attention made.

The final line lands with a finality made more dramatic by the unanticipated breaks before it.

Much of the poetry collected employs the couplet or the tercet, which Gregerson used often in earlier work. As she explained to an MIT forum:

This tercet helped me because of its asymmetry. There’s a pivot line in the middle. It gave me a resistance grid through which the syntax could move. I write into this stanza form, and for me that was absolutely essential. The stanza told me where to go. But after two books, I had to leave it because I knew the outcome too well. I had to leave it–sever myself from what had become a kind of life support.

At times,she sticks to form where others might not. In the aforementioned “Good News,” she created the line “. . .radiant flow of video conversion,” but ends the first with a hyphenated “con-” from “conversion.” In the poem “Salt,” she breaks the clause “giddy with the earth’s / sweet pull” at “earth’s.”

“Salt” also ends strongly:

But Karen would swing toward the fragrant

branches, fleshed

with laughter, giddy with the earth’s

sweet pull. Some children are like that,

I have one

myself, no wonder we never leave them alone,

we who have no talent for pleasure

nor use

for the body but after the fact.

In one of the strongest poems, “Her Argument for the Existence of God,” Gregerson permutes this pattern into a four-line structure. The poem weaves lay “. . . we are not talking nuance here” with biological “The cell wall whose electric charge forms now” diction to tackle the paradox of an emergent intelligence coming to terms with horror. In this case, it’s a child murdered by an enraged man which precipitates the rant:

. . . The reigning brilliance

of the genome and

the risen moon. The cell wall whose electric charge forms now

a channel now

a subtle barrier no modulating thought has thought

to equal. The

arachnid’s exoskeleton. The kestrel’s eye. And we who might

have been worthy but

for reasons forever withheld from us aren’t. Wouldn’t you

rather be damned

for cause?

The rest of the poem is broken outrage — or disconsolate description, depending on where readers draw the line between the “sordid corner of the morning news” and one’s “powers of foreboding”:

. . . this you have to use / your Sunday / finest to imagine, a broken back, third lumbar, which // had all / but severed the spinal cord leaving him ‘floppy’ or so / the coroner later / determined, below the waist.”

Whatever the “earth’s sweet pull,” with flaws “as wide as we are tall” (“The Selvage”), you’d rather be damned.

Preview copy provided by the publisher through Amazon Vine.

Donald Hall, Naked without Poetry

13 November 2014 By darkviolin

Donald Hall: Essays after Eighty

Essays read elsewhere delivered (“nothing but elegy”) a sense for what Hall’s life became after Jane Kenyon. I knew what I was in for. Or so I thought. Fifty four pages into the book, there’s no poetry but a snip from one of hers. There are references to a Donald Hall poetry line now and then, and sometimes a title is given out. But this essay collection – a near-autobiography — is about a life seen almost exclusively from its current vantage point.

After a puzzling bit of naturalist monologue which serves to frame the start and end of this project, Hall wastes no time before announcing that he is no longer writing poetry. He offers tips on writing, revising, on personal pronouns. He casually considers editors past. They seem to have what is now only a distant relevance.

“In my best poems and prose I’ve become steadily more naked, with a nakedness that disguises itself by wearing clothes.”

Naked or not, his antiquity screams from the cover photo. But when I read that a National Gallery of Art security guard said to him, “Did we enjoy our din-din?” the humiliation was thorough, humorless. Hall was there in 2011 to receive the National Medal of Arts. (“Wracked with antiquity” or not, at least he fared better when recognized by Philip Roth outside White House security.)

Hall gives us glimpses of other poets of his era — Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery were “classmates at Harvard.” But he dismissively mentions his year as Poet Laureate, “which allowed me more of Washington’s museums.” Poetry is as much profession as art. As he had written elsewhere, he was a freelancer, not a college professor in an MFA program. His essays never veer far from the concrete. There is a chapter on smoking. Truly. An extended riff on beardedness, and its lack.His New England residence is described in detail, the barn . . . and so on. It’s skippable description, save mention of pre-eBook four hundred feet of bookshelves.

A mostly plainspoken Hall is content to reduce poetry to “content,” and to write dispassionately about rejection slips. For him poetry sparks, but it is an obvious combustion. “Really, content is only an excuse for oral sex. The most erotic poem in English is Paradise Lost.” Hall weighs in on the reading styles of Stevens, Elliot, Moore, WC Williams, Dylan Thomas. He talks about being at the Dodge Poetry Festival, which this reviewer attends religiously. He notes with slight interest at the waning reputations of Lowell, Roethke, MacLeish. At times he does so with distressing dispassion.

This is likely intentional.

“Nothing in human life is unmixed.” The self-described antiquity, we learn a few chapters later, was a sturdy 6 foot two when he married a shy 6 foot one Kirby. He could have started with that, of course, but something of the poet remains as he arranges scenes for the reader. Finalities carry their necessary – in Hall’s case, unvarnished — burden: “I survive into my eighties, writing, and oddly cheerful, although disabled and largely alone.”

The book catalogs the frailties, inconveniences, and not only his own. “Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence.”

What about avid listeners at poetry readings? “They heard lines that resembled poetry.” Rather they had mistaken the tracings and retracings of this first poetry editor at the Paris Review who had sketched out so many versions of his New Hampshire Ragged Mountain that it became poetic.

Advance review copy provided by publisher Houghton & Amazon Vine.

Personalized Adware: Top-Tier Crime Drama set in Grippingly Realistic Cyber Future #poetry

29 May 2014 By knowlengr

Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Thomas Sweterlitsch, Berkeley 2014) explodes in a no-man’s land between technology’s shiny terrain and the unpredictable depth of desire.

I’m a dystopia skeptic. Not that terrible events aren’t in our future, not that we haven’t already spoiled this planet – perhaps irretrievably – and not that we aren’t moving ahead with blithe indifference. Rather it’s that the dystopias one encounters in fiction quickly veer wildly off from sensible trajectories in the direction of fantasy. The tide of implausibility (or simple disagreement about the forecasts) works against an author’s craft. One is asked to accept otherwise interesting characters in scenes painted with low budget Dunn-Edwards.

By contrast, the dystopia in Tomorrow and Tomorrow is well thought out. Walgreens is there selling THC cigarettes, the protagonist stays in a Bay area Econolodge and he attends a “PodCamp” session called “Generating a Realistic Income with WordPress and Affiliate Marketing.” Believability is enhanced by presenting a preponderance of the present along with the speculative. True, this is a dangerous game. Brands come and brands go, and non-U.S. readers may chafe at the references to unfamiliar names, but Sweterlitsch strikes a persuasive balance. His future technologies are commerce-ridden, under constant attack from malware, subject to bandwidth constraints and take into account where the increasingly wide Digital Divide will leave characters that inhabit less well-to-do urban areas. The heterogeneity of the imagined future is one of the novel’s strengths.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow’s tomorrow is not only about ecommerce superimposed on a Minority Report set with Facebook Likes, Twitter hash tags, Bit Torrent, alerts, “augs” (augmented reality apps), drones and omnipresent Big Data pushed into virtual reality scenes rendered by neurochemically connected devices. Its protagonist and several other characters have a literary or artistic inclination. Students of poetry will find references to William Blake, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Wallace Stevens and of course chapbooks. Derrida and Camille Paglia are there, too, along with a Kahlo restaurant.

Antihero Dominic is a curious mix of humanities intellectual, obsessive-compulsive, detective and facile – if not insightful – user of the technology that enervates this drama. To some extent, it’s a crime drama with superficially clear lines of good and evil, though a closer reading blurs those lines. His story reveals a hormone-fed, misogynistic world where true crime pornography is ever-present and full-voiced — marginal but much less than today. Coexisting with it are the usual antidotes: literalist religion and histrionic promise of salvation.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow features detailed, affectionate descriptions of Pittsburgh landmarks — the 16th St Bridge, Liberty Tunnel, 376 overpass and CMU’s Porter Hall. Those who are familiar with the city may find passages in this book deeply disturbing. But these and other contemporary references are representative anchor points in this novel, which achieves more successfully than most in its genre an intentional blurring of real and cyber life. The cyber-fusion of remembered scenes (or just sounds, smells, the sensation of clothing) with scenes constructed from VR tech was a powerful technique used often in the novel, but it pushed hard for further suspension of belief.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow (cover)

Nonetheless, the novel keeps readers wondering what’s real, what’s remembered or imagined, what’s VR, and what’s VR that’s been tampered with. It not only asks readers to examine a corruptible, if not already corrupted part of themselves, but takes graphic sexual violence to the level of a cultural force beyond the frame of a crime drama. It’s almost too powerful, at times overshadowing the love story that occupies many more pages of the novel.

In the end, I’m unsure whether Blake’s “soul of sweet delight / can never pass away” (Visions of the Daughters of Albion). The journal-keeping, long-narrative, verse-quoting heroes of this dark imagining seem passively, if not happily, ensconced on the sidelines of a future. This is a future perhaps seen as “petty” in the largesse of poetry, but is on a horizon that is anything but slow-moving.

Every literary-minded technologist should read this. Both of you.

Advance copy provided by the publisher and Amazon Vine.

Mark Underwood writes about knowledge engineering, Big Data security and privacy as @knowlengr and about music and literature as @darkviolin. Also on LinkedIn.

David Orr on Collected Poems by Louis MacNeice

29 May 2014 By darkviolin

Louis MacNeice was an early 20th century poet who was well-known in his time but is lightly read today in the U.S. David Orr makes the case for an adaptation in this perception.

Review’s Review

Book Collected Poems by Louis MacNeice (Wake Forest Press, 2013)

Read the full New York Times Book Review here . . .

Mark Underwood writes about knowledge engineering, Big Data security and privacy as @knowlengr and about music and literature as @darkviolin. Also on LinkedIn.

David Orr on “The Virtues of Poetry” by James Longenbach

24 August 2013 By knowlengr

“The audience for poetry is like a vastly reduced version of the audience for college football — superstitious, gossipy and divided into factions no less fervent for having only an occasional idea of what’s going on outside their own campuses. It’s a hard crowd to write for, and the critic who sets himself up as a color commentator inevitably struggles to find a style that can please Peter without needlessly riling up Paul. James Longenbach is one of the finest scholar-critics working today, and his method for dealing with poetry’s fractious readership is simple: He just tells all parties they’re wrong.”

Review’s Review

Commentary about poetry that can be described as “antireductionist” is worth reading if only to ascertain whether the description fits. One suspects the meaning Orr has in mind for reductionism is more lit crit than serious philosophy.

Read the full review here . . .