NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007
Microreviews
Pioneers in the Study of Motion
Susan Briante
Ahsahta Press, $16 (paper)
“I sit with my legs closed, a single woman edging a plaza in Mexico.” Susan Briante opens with a loaded situation. Yet in poems composed mostly out of uninflected, declarative sentences, the poet writes as a disembodied eye. The tone of the book is controlled, the voice of someone speaking quietly, and slightly self-consciously, into a tape recorder. Indeed, like a journalist, Briante runs through details about Third World cities, but even her typography—the first third of the book is mostly double-spaced—points to the ways in which the accumulated terms fail to cohere. “Unstable love, detached love, underperforming love, neo-liberal love,” she writes toward the end of one poem. “40 percent of retail shopping in Mexico occurs at a Wal-Mart-owned outlet.” Whether you enjoy this depends on your own mental fertility, since there aren’t enough clues here to identify an intention behind the voice. Indeed, the most enjoyment in Briante’s poems cannot be found in the larger arcs of her work, but in the unusual lines her passive observation brings forth: “11,000 handmaids swaddle an intersection,” “A 20-liter tank of natural gas rolls across courtyard tile like a lung filled with bells,” “Silt light scours the asphalt amidst the thousandness / of traffic experiments.” At their best, Briante’s poems remind one of a panorama by Sebastião Salgado. We see sharply lit clips from the margins of the globalized economy—margins that reimagine not only our garbage, but our poems as well.
—Simon DeDeo
The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century
Edited by William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi
Cracked Slab Books, $22.95 (paper)
In his staid 1968 anthology, Illinois Poets, E. Earle Stibitz observed that “a poem about Chicago today is likely to tell us less about a Chicago we can see and recognize and more about the psyche, the heart of the poet.” No doubt Stibitz would quickly lose his way in The City Visible, a gathering of work by more than fifty experimental poets, many of them younger academics fluent in the vocabularies of cultural theory and postmodern aesthetics. These writers are bent on destabilizing traditional assumptions about “psyche” and “heart” as they search for new, if transient or transitional, poetic stabilities. The collection intends to capture a local, urban poetry scene “in a high moment” of literary activity, galvanized by fledgling poetry presses, reading series, and innovation-friendly university appointments. Yet it also demonstrates that these Chicago poets—like their counterparts in Brooklyn or Boston—come from all over our digitally flattened earth, and are here united by a global sensibility and a desire, as the poet Bill Marsh puts it in the aesthetic statement accompanying his work, to represent “the limits of poetic structure, and perhaps, poetic imagination itself.” Other author commentaries range from enigmatic concision (“I believe in explanation but also in subterfuge.”) to dissertation-chapter overkill, and the poetry itself demonstrates a spectrum of methods and stances at once strategic and personal: Chris Glomski’s “autodialogues,” the spatial anxieties of Robert Archambeau, Dan Beachy-Quick’s sound-driven reverie, the oblique tracking shots of Cynthia Bond’s cinematic lyricism, Luis Urrea’s jackhammer haiku, Simone Muench’s redlined metaphors, Ed Roberson’s city eclogues, Michelle Taransky’s neo-Cubist re-formations of narrative. While some poems may try too hard to accomplish their authors’ rigorous agendas and others could try harder, The City Visible makes a strong case for Chicago’s current vitality and emerging prominence within the national poetic community.
—Fred Muratori
The Glass Age
Cole Swensen
Alice James Books, $14.95 (paper)
Swenson’s latest collection consists of three long sequences in prose and verse that reflect—yes, reflect—upon the composition and meaning of windows, glass, and the human gaze. One might wish for a topic less hermetic, less removed from the chaos of today’s news, but these poems are like grains of sand—“they say / an entire world”—dazzlingly interrupting the prosaic to dally in grammar and image: “They swept the light up from the floors and stored it in stone jars, / which by morning / What light has seen / the jars were empty / keeps no sketch / returned to quartz and so dispersed / throughout the busy afternoon.” Conversant with the ideas and language of great aesthetes, from Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin to Gilles Deleuze, Swensen’s poems have an argumentative sweep, and Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of windows are here central to her thesis: “It’s the organizing principle of all his compositions, horizontal, looking neither up nor down, but out, and pushing the world continually outward, a floodplain on which skates, fleet apothecary, the glance.” Swensen links Bonnard’s “equivalent world[s]” with inventions of glass, that “anemic ghost that lives on salt”: “With its random atomic arrangement, / like that of a liquid, say, a river stopped mid-gesture, the blink that / fixes the picture, suspending it on the surface, a permanent floating / leaf.” But Swensen’s analysis is gestural, not argumentative. Evocative flashes of perception reflect the hovering knowledge that “all seeing is seeing as / if there were enough light.” The Crystal Palace, an 18-acre greenhouse built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, becomes a metaphor for Swensen’s take on the 19th century, which for her is a ligature of glass and metal, artificially verdant and overblown. British civilization seemed to peak in 1851, when it led the world in wealth and colonial conquest, and this folly of engineering—“the extension of space by means of glass”—became a nationalist symbol. When it burned to the ground, Swensen writes, “Whole families gathered in armchairs, and read the evening papers with the lights off.” The analogy with the contemporary United States is latent here, observed, we might say, “through a glass, darkly.”
—Celia Bland
The Piercing
Christine Garren
Louisiana State University Press, $16.95 (paper)
In the tiny, unflinchingly severe poems of her third book, Christine Garren evokes a life always at the border of crisis. She is an elegist, a witness to her own slow passing, as well as a mourner for the irretrievable moments of childhood and love. Garren owes her close tracking of nature’s minutiae in part to Emily Dickinson, and she bears some resemblance to Louise Glück in her pensiveness and pessimism. At her darkest—and these poems are mostly very dark—a crushing sense of human isolation is almost forced upon nature, projecting the speaker’s psyche onto creatures and landscapes with the command of a brushfire swallowing a dry field: “we noticed a pale fish among the other / more dominant-colored ones. We could almost see / its organs through its flesh— / and as we were young we watched it carefully—and understood / its place / as outside the others.” Elsewhere, “the stab of daffodils in the middle of nowhere” is “like a chest pain.” When the speaker of these poems does find consolation, it is perceived with a similarly stunned sharpness of vision, as when, in a moment of ecstasy with a lover, “the birds were suddenly white and yet the same.” At times Garren’s uncompromising vision seems constricted rather than sharpened by this fierce affinity for the tragic, as though when she looks out of herself she does so only through a tiny aperture, so trained on darkness that she omits too much of the light: “Tell the story when your father said he felt / you should drink less /…/ when your son was born from her tiny waist / when you built your first house / when the first chest pain put it / on a tiny pinhead point.” In this way whole lives are reduced to their worst moments. That said, Garren’s poems evidence profound sensitivity to a world that many don’t see, or from which they avert their eyes, and at her best, she offers powerful empathy and an arresting rendering of humanity’s relation to nature. Her work is too little known and deserves a wider readership.
—Craig Morgan Teicher
Draft of a Letter
James Longenbach
University of Chicago Press, $16.00 (paper)
“I’m on the lookout for bone,” James Longenbach wrote in his first book of poems, Threshold, and since its publication in 1998 the poet has come closer to bone through an increasing austerity of line and language. If his remarkable second book, Fleet River, shed the dense textures of its predecessor, Draft of a Letter, Longenbach’s third and most recent collection, relentlessly whittles away at narrative to expose the purest of lyrics: spiritual inquiry. “If you say the word death / In heaven, / Nobody understands.” Rather than serving as an antidote to ornament, the spareness that rules Draft of a Letter illuminates what may be most chilling and true—in this case, a word’s utter loss of meaning in the afterlife—and Longenbach repeatedly challenges the silence that surrounds his finely cut lines with severe revelation. He accomplishes this balance of verbal paucity and connotative richness largely through a lineation that tempers blunt observation by drawing out time and inviting hesitation. Sentences thus broken and deployed acquire breathtaking tension: “What is within you // Will save you. // What is not within you— // Hair on the pillow. / Voices in the leaves.” While the struggle to determine what is and what is not “within” reflects questions about faith and mortality, the metaphor of drafting—of writing and revision, of engaging the power (and powerlessness) of the word—highlights the book’s most difficult question: to whom is this letter addressed? “Friends, whoever reads this, / Know that I am sitting on a bench / Beside the lower paddock, / Rowing against the current.” Here the speaker names and then un-names his interlocutor, verbalizing the gentle subversion his actions, “rowing against the current.” Whether “you” is the self or God, friend or stranger, Draft of a Letter deftly suggests that one must risk one’s position as speaker (“by listening // I was changed forever, / forever the same”) to reconcile life and death: “Don’t return me // To earth, a burden. / Make me smoke. / Recite an alphabet / of lamentations.”
—Jennifer Chang
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