Anvil and Rose 5
An Austrian Avant-Garde by Patrick Greany and Sabine Zelger, Eds. Les Figues Press, 2020 ($20)
Is the post-avant doing its job? In Austria, maybe. Heimrad Bäcker: “9230 from Szydłowiec to Treblinka / 9233 empty train,” and so on, growing the selfsame list of exterminated anonymous children until it’s painful. The numb repetition is strategic. Elfriede Jelinek: “the masses are dead…I can’t write about anything anymore…not this way.” Peter Bürger’s idea that beyond the artist’s consciousness poetry may best exist as a critique of its institutional and social relations stays in play here for 350 taut pages. Twenty poets, fictionists, playwrights (categories are best guesses) spanning half a century, attempt to smash the limitations of individual and group sensibility through open (self) critique and cheeky, yet blistering and defiant comedy, as in Lisa Spalt’s “You Can Keep Your Good Taste!” Sometimes the best thing a U.S. press can do is to import deliberately “imperfect” post-avant poetry in translation to stir up our national, overly self-referential and dichotomous debates among in-groups. Les Figues Press has done just that with a painstaking compendium that shows us just how far we have to go.
Peluda by Melissa Lozada-Oliva. Button Poetry, 2017 ($14)
The conceit is obdurately flawed. A Rapunzel whose hairy phenotype disgusts those who are not ‘other’ must muddle through. “Imagine you are what makes white girls in a brooklyn apartment scream” (lower case deliberate). Or she is a house covered with eyelashes looking for “a man to squash.” How eyelashes squash is a mystery. Elsewhere, she’s “the perfect mustache girl twirling the mustache.” Even at rest, “ice cream is clinging to my arm hairs.” It’s head-scratching that a press that must live by its wits has the indolent luxury of publishing a book of poetry consisting mostly of a single recycled image. On a harping thematic level, keynote speakers and others insult women, and her grandmother’s swollen copy of Mandingo is responsible for systemic racism. Once in a while we are treated to imagistic relief, not purporting anything obvious: “In the peach schnapps hot / on her gums, the cigar’s bitter / rub / in his cheek.” The finest poem in this collection is “He Can’t Handle Those High, High Bitches,” in which a surrealist streak suddenly manifests, satirizing everyone in sight (and not a hair to be found). With “breasts juddering as they brine / the dead,” the poet cuts loose with full power. A responsible editor would have encouraged a principle of selection and dispensed with a title that encouraged the poet to force these pages into a mono-imagistic political agenda.
What Hurts Going Down by Nancy Lee. McClelland And Stewart, 2020 ($17)
A book that begins with a trigger warning has already lost. “A note to the reader: poems in this book include depictions of sexual and physical violence.” I hope so! Otherwise, I wouldn’t be reading literature. Or I’d read the Holy Bible or Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.” Oh, I forgot, that’s violent too: a knife, a mermaid with crippled flippers, and a drowning. Here, the first stanza of the first poem speaks of “prospects grind[ing] hope into anything blond.” Apart from the imagistic blurriness, the vaunted hurt is rather oblique. Soon after, comes “the college boy / with a hump in his jeans / who trapped you in a Sunday / school bathroom, until a mother with a stroller / pounded the door.” That image is emblematic of a book that doesn’t live up to its title. Instead, we must settle for ersatz trauma that can be found in any tired medium, abdicating the prerogatives of poetry and its special power in order to create a “safe space.” It is curious that Penguin/Random House (same difference), in this overheated, over competitive environment, would settle for such a half-hearted, overtly theme-driven book, the caution of which makes it one more in a line of undifferentiated lament, doomed by its overt gestures of solidarity. Then again, the publisher is risk averse. You don’t get Pulitzers when it really does hurt going down.
Savage Pageant by Jessica Q. Stark. Birds, LLC ($18)
The best poetry book of 2020 has been written by Vietnamese poet Jessica Q. Stark. In the vein of such brilliant concept-driven books as Tyehimba Jess’s Olio and Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal, Stark uses Jungleland, a defunct 1950’s L.A. animal attraction, as a staging ground for spiky, often underplayed, sly but acid poems about everything from numerology and the casual cruelty of an invisible sniper to senseless, lunging mammalian violence. And that means you. Like Jess, she nimbly develops a popular culture construct in which humans’ penchant for courting danger for the sake of self-display suggests deeper maladies, whether misogyny or women’s capacity for mutual evisceration. Yet there is introspection, toward an escaped panther or one’s developing fetus. “I am obsessed with hiding my own / nakedness. The body on display: / a public domain of choices made— / a needle, a drink of sugar, the sun / going down when I rise. Is it madness / to have you?” One can dip into these pages anywhere and find bursts of words tautly strung on the lines of couplets or compressed into “free” but marshalled stanzas. There is something called simply having a voice and a sharp intellect, not settling for anything less than blazing forth, with a critical eye tempered by compassion for the fact that together we make up an absurd spectacle, one that must be played out.
Late Work by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Black Square Editions, 2020 ($20)
DuPlessis’ definition of “late work” might mean, variously, “recent,” “not on time,” as in “it’s too late,” or the work of a mature poet. The latter case is apposite; the emphasis, by her own example, is that of a poet who possesses a great range and repertoire of possible poetic effects, but rather than writing a tour de force (she’s certainly done it before), subordinates language to speaking of what matters. “Our angel was once rooted in its clarity of purpose / and grew in light / but that brand of / angel declined / was withdrawn from the market / ripped from its root / wrenched out / of shifting soil and in straining winds.” Losing none of her suppleness as a philologist with a tang of the undecidable, she speaks by turn as ecologist and mystic, in couplets and triplets studded with stark questions, or lines spilling over the page, bringing a private logic to her public sentiment. There is still the shimmer of the Blau DuPlessis of an earlier (less late) era, but one now whose preoccupation with language in itself issues into clarity. “The universe / is built on a shim. / It’s made of language / stacked upon languages / codes upon holes, / microtonal twanging range, / orphic and eurydic communiqués.”
