Anvil and Rose 7
Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets edited by Bianca Spriggs and Jeremy Paden. University Press of Kentucky, 2017 ($25)
Half black bone, half cornpone, this wildly variable anthology is at its best ground-breaking; at its less than best, prey to the sentimental clichés of Southern Living. The Affrilachian poets burst onto the Kentucky poetry scene with a separate, Afrocentric sensibility. Frank X. Walker in particular, the loose confederation’s leading voice, has published everything from blues-jive to crystalline sonnets. Here, his sonnet “Burying Albatross,” an account of helping his laborer father knot his tie, properly shines forth as authentic, using tact and decorum to stave off folksy obviousness. Others, such as Ricardo Nazario Colón, succumb to “country boys still say howdy ma’am,” propagating the old myths. Anthologies, no matter their principle of selectivity, are ultimately about inclusiveness, which often proves to be both their strength and weakness. Fewer paeans to coal and tobacco would have been welcome. Barbara Kopple showed back in the 1970s, in her searing documentary Harlan County USA, the violent, strike-breaking depredations of Duke Power, when the UMW tried to organize a union in the aptly-named Hazard. On the other hand, Keith S. Wilson’s witty, acid “Robotto Mulatto” suggests a viable direction for Affrilachia, one encouraging a sharp tone, less ingratiating to the homeland. “I am the Halfrican Hunk / the onerous Oreo who will not let you know / where these big lips come from… / My skin separates along perfect tan seams / lifts with a hydraulic hiss / flips in on itself / and transforms cultures.” Ralph Ellison and Ishmael Reed would be proud of that tart tongue singing a different kind of hymn.
Keep this to Yourself by Kerrin McCadden. Button Poetry, 2020 ($14)
The so-called confessional poets of mid-twentieth century fell out of fashion and have been underrated ever since. At their best, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell were utterly skillful, deceptively masterful in form. As we know from Saint Augustine, confession can be illuminating and good for the soul, given proper self-awareness. It is a disappointment that this book comes across as simply raw and unmediated. Pain with no filter becomes ugly and tedious. “My brother is dead. / We try to recover what he stole and start / by making a list he can’t finish.” Even if one commits the biographical fallacy, compassion may get exhausted as quickly as open seltzer grows flat. Taken as poetry, by page 2, the verse has deadened one’s senses. “I want to tell the tiny children, be careful / but there is no time to grow to love them.” Small presses can’t afford many mistakes, bringing forth unheralded poets, competing with the poetic-industrial complex, and its usual prize-hoarding suspects. A start would be to acknowledge that private despair exists within a social nexus. Otherwise, as the title itself suggests, it’s better to keep it to yourself.
Against Expression: An Anthology Of Conceptual Writing edited By Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith. Northwestern University Press, 2011 ($34)
This monumental decade-old anthology arrived at my post box unbidden and I’m glad it did. Its compendious nature is justified, reminding us that there are many avant-gardes, and that “movements” such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry are just one more ramification of an impossibly thick, 100-year-old redwood. The selections are sometimes quirky yet ultimately sensible (isn’t this spectrum of poetry the domain of quirk?). Each author gets introduced not by biography, but by method. They include a biting interview with John Cage, poetry of Mallarmé, fictional email correspondence from Mónica de la Torre, Yedda Morrison’s rune-like “protocol,” a selection from Elizabeth S. Clark’s 1274-line poem made entirely of punctuation (take that, Gertrude Stein!), and the outlier scribblings of Andy Warhol (keep your day job). Even Dennis Diderot gets a cameo. The inclusion of such writers as Clark Coolidge and Charles Bernstein reminds us that beyond the hoo-ha, they were one more wave in a massive sea of anti-expression. American poets are notably weak as regards a true historical impulse, beyond such generalities as “William Carlos Williams had it going on.” Against Expression, falling somewhere between scholarly objectivity and celebratory impulse, also unwittingly shows, in the aggregate, how mind-numbing and repetitive some of these authors are, and how they haven’t aged well. Nonetheless, it is a palliative to piecework “collections” that usually end up running up a flag for their own small army.
Year of the Dog by Deborah Paredez. Boa Editions, 2020 ($17)
This book comes as a blast of potent politics, poetically mediated with great skill. A majority of poets fails at social expression because they get stuck in identity politics and cultural appropriation, bracketing out foe and sympathizer alike. With confidence and tact, Paredez represents for Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Angela Davis, as well as Gloria Anzaldúa, Kent State, POWs during Vietnam, and Native American tribes occupying Alcatraz, fierce, fearless and fine in approach. Paredez doesn’t forget herself, but the speaker remains mostly a keen observer, a witness to murderous history. She begins the book with a villanelle, “Wife’s Disaster Manual.” “When the forsaken city starts to burn / after the men and children have fled / stand still, silent as pray, and slowly turn / back. Behold the curse. Stay and mourn / the collapsing doorways, the unbroken bread / in the forsaken city starting to burn.” From there she moves to freer verse, then to exploded form, showing herself not only as modestly erudite, but an experimenter with verve. The centerpiece of this collection is a series of poems about Kim Phúc, the child burning naked from napalm, in the infamous Vietnam photo. Paredez, a capable researcher, mounts a sober homage to the burning and its aftermath, with muted sympathy, collage-like. From “Kim Phúc in the Special Period”: You’ve come to grow used / to special. You’ve come through / enemy fire, your scarred arms / rising now like coppiced cane.” When it comes to signifying the social, many poets have become part of the problem. Year of the Dog is part of the solution.
How To Love A Country by Richard Blanco. Penguin Random House, 2020 ($12)
“Mornings over coffee and news of the world / you catch the magic act of hummingbirds— / appearing, disappearing—the eye tricked / into seeing how the garden flowers thrive / in shared soil, drink from the same rainfall” — and so on. This latest entry in the “I’m going to talk about our country by talking about nature and myself” sweepstakes, read in the wake of our Congress being invaded by thugs, can best be described as “offensively inoffensive.” That is the plight of sensitive, warmed-over mid-20th century lyricism, in which it’s sometimes hard to tell a high school literary magazine from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry book of the year. If this book were titled How to Love THE Country, I could understand its vacuous winsomeness. Major publishers can modestly recoup their investment on the great loss-leader genre, poetry, by presenting middle of the road plaintive verse that purports to be part of a national conversation, offering “We’re a street in another town lined with royal palms, at home with a Peace Corps couple who collect African art. / We’re their dinner party talk of wines, wielded pickets sign, and burned draft cards.” Generic images out of a Rolodex of vague grievance offer a wan gesture of protest, irrelevant and pretty.