Microreviews
Starred Wire
Ange Mlinko
Coffee House Press, $15 (paper)
In her second collection, Starred Wire, poet Ange Mlinko dreams only of America. But this America is not one a casual observer would immediately recognize, because Mlinko’s America is, like John Ashbery’s in The Tennis Court Oath, made extremely strange. It’s full of odd juxtapositions and queer semblances—summer seems like a long illness, yellow leaves double the light, California feels surprisingly European—so even the most mundane scene has an undercurrent of strangeness: “The sun was shining in its fashion, smeared across the clouds.” Starred Wire is a celebration of the everyday uncanny, owing some of its quirkiness to the diction and exacting attentiveness of Marianne Moore and some of its syntax to (again) Ashbery. Though the phrase gets bandied about too often to mean much anymore, she is truly a third- generation New York School writer, not simply because she’s Brooklyn-based and breathing the same air Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler did, but because she takes their social and ekphrastic subject matter and presents it with the formal trappings of Ashbery and Barbara Guest. Unlike some of her compeers, though, Mlinko retains an essential singularity. When one of her speakers seems to present a forthright meditation on recognizable experience, the diction implodes, swerving from MTV to Pierre Reverdy, the clouds overhead receiving off-kilter qualifiers like “radiantly placental.” This keeps everything in slippery, tricky territory, where an occasional nonsensical riff will erupt for what seems to be nothing more than the sheer joy of its expression: “The printer got a splinter, the spit of instruments became a river / and the adolescent got over Dostoevsky / so the little cloud wept into sheep.” This will make some readers swoon from giddiness as others tear their hair out in frustration. Luckily for everyone, this well-edited collection eases us into Mlinko’s exotic, exponentially weirder terrain, revealing its bizzaro America slowly and carefully, with just enough of the recognizable world to keep pulling us deeper into the dream.
—Travis Nichols
Rain
Jon Woodward
Wave Books, $14 (paper)
In the period of time recorded in Jon Woodward’s Rain, the speaker represented in the poems (ostensibly Woodward himself) makes breakfast, hangs out with his friend Patrick, fantasizes about the prophet Ezekiel, and falls in love. All of this is presented matter-of-factly, in a thrown-off manner that suggests note-taking for what might later become poems. What transforms this material into poetry now is form: all of these lyrics are cast in five-line stanzas with five words per line. Woodward’s strict adherence to a simple, easily discernible pattern reminds us that something other than the organic unfolding of a mind in thought is at play here. To take control of his thoughts Woodward imposes upon them a seemingly arbitrary physical constraint; he is writing instead of thinking, or better, he is writing as a new way of thinking. This is a deceptively self-conscious and complicated project: Woodward must make his poems look like jottings, so he omits punctuation, starts poems mid-sentence and mid-idea, starts new sentences mid-line, and ends suddenly. And, as with all thoughts, the details are a mixture of sensory experience and surmise: “these three eggs are scrambled / they probably had three parents.” The most interesting poems begin with the unexceptional and arrive at something transcendent but no less common; there are many surprising day-to-day occurrences (“he asked how is / your chowder”; “tulips start to look all / fucked up after they’ve been / open for a while”) as well as flights of poetical thinking: “he could only have / been able to see a / tiny part of the world / from where we were sitting.” Of course, a book embracing the un-noteworthy risks becoming authentically boring, and a few of these poems are. When nothing interesting happens and there are no interesting thoughts, images, or turns of phrase to light the page, Rain begins to drone. But boredom is as true a mental state as heightened awareness, perhaps truer, and not without its place.
—Craig Morgan Teicher
Daily Sonnets
Laynie Browne
Counterpath Press, $15.50 (paper)
The 151 sonnets in Laynie Browne’s collection are the products of 151 one-minute intervals that the poet eked out of her life as a mother of the two boys to whom the book is dedicated. For Browne, motherhood demands a revision of her relationship to time, and, in this way, Daily Sonnets is a descendant of Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, the epic of a mother’s single day. When Browne announces, “I’m a poet with no preparation / Only invented moments,” she might be apologizing for or justifying her practice—one that, in other hands, could blur the line between self-pity and art. Browne avoids this pitfall by opening herself to collaboration with almost anything—her children (whose voices appear in lines such as “Daddy is very friendly”), the dictionary, the news, foreign-language poets, Oulipian procedures, and chance operations. As she transmits multiple frequencies of discourse—becoming, as she outlines in the book’s closing essay, the “permeable ‘I’”—the poet becomes difficult to locate: “You might have written this / I certainly did not / but don’t let that stop you.” There is a perversity to pushing the logical restrictions of open form, and this book asks: what happens when the collaborating poet lets more and more “others” do her work? Light is the model for the permeability that Browne’s poems aspire to: “My practice is nowhere near— / yet I hold it up to light / The whole world is made / of bugs I say.” The poems titled “Love Sonnet To Light” are orienting points in a collection that resists continuity. Nearly thirty years after Bernadette Meyer, Browne claims that the poet-mother has just as much to say, and even less uninterrupted time to say it. Broken voices are forced to hold together simply by their proximity on the page. Browne wants to be mother, artist, and political activist, but her poetics grant each voice only one line in the same, short poem: “Be monster, bug, horse / I am slowness compelled to utter / With half the world’s oil.”
—Cecily Parks
Of Whiskey and Winter
Peter Conners
White Pine Press, $15 (paper)
What’s remarkable about Peter Conners’s collection of prose poems is its affection for the unbeautiful, the wonder it discovers on the margins of the natural world. The opening of “Garbage of the Glittering Sun,” for example, evokes the earthy compounds of Walt Whitman’s diction: “Gentrified dog turds are the stucco of spring. I am wealthy beyond your ken: muddy vistas are my orchards squeezing liters of salt wine per loose clump.” Conners follows consciousness moment to moment, embracing the strangeness of the physical and metaphysical landscape, the harshness concomitant with its consolation. Divided into four sections, the book moves through journeying perceptions of a calendar year and uses the seasons as a measure of vision and inner experience. Describing a lengthy stretch of north-country opaque weather in “Twenty-Six Days of Sun,” the speaker pensively reflects on mortality and literal darkness as he waits in a veterinarian’s office to euthanize his cat. Then the lines take a startling and mordant turn: “I think: Was I born here? Has my cat taken me here to die instead? If that is the case so be it: five months without sun is too much to take. My son will take me to the woods and leave me to die. It is the cycle we have unwittingly joined.” At their best, these poems do what good prose poems traditionally do: substitute interesting elements of narrative, concentrated meditation, and surrealistic parable for the conspicuous absence of line. At times, though, one wishes that Conners’s brief meditations would transcend the boundaries of plaintive personal writing. A two-sentence text like “But Not Today” feels more like a tender journal entry than a crafted poem. The poet writes about strolling with his young son, envisioning the school bus as a kind of portent: “I walk with Whitman over a bed of sad potato chips giggling at the music of mutinous early autumn. One day the yellow buses will carry us away…” Conners often proves himself capable of much richer, more visionary images than these, and so one sometimes wishes he would not allow himself to get carried away, but that he would take the wheel instead.
—Nicholas Allen Harp
The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes
Benjamin Friedlander
subpress, $16.00 (paper)
In what amounts to an “early collected poems of Benjamin Friedlander,” The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes covers a lot of territory without clearing a great deal of new ground, though it is also a welcome complement to an important body of work. This recent release from the subpress publishing collective brings together Friedlander’s work from 1984 to 1994, most of which has been unavailable for some time. Those familiar with Friedlander’s efforts as a critic and editor will find no great surprises here. Certainly, the same ingenuity and wit that made Simulcast invigorating is present in the strange, nonce technical features of these poems. Likewise, the poems’ tones are haunted by the literary materials with which Friedlander has worked so intimately, including texts by Robert Creeley, John Weiners, Larry Eigner, and—perhaps especially—Paul Celan. Still, the relationship between what Friedlander’s poems say and the way they sound is interesting in its own right. Consistently invested in the lyric, these poems are almost exclusively brief affairs, and at times the play of rhyme becomes so central as to resemble light verse: “’Twas a day, we / Pulled ourselves apart / ’Twas a lag, we / Followed from, with art.” The poem jangles even as it meditates on self-demolition. Allusions to canonical literature are also frequent. From another poet, this investment in tradition might have branded the whole as atavistic. As in Simulcast, however, Friedlander strives to breathe new (and freaky) life into styles otherwise démodé. In “Dim Sparse,” for example, he turns the gender trouble of love sonnet convention against itself, fracturing the “parts” traditionally fetishized in Petrarchan blazon so completely that they become barely recognizable: “The body’s surface seeks superficial praise, / a salvo in other accents found / farther up than I have looked.” Looking and praising remain crucial to Friedlander’s lyric project, though he aims to manage these traditional gestures in other accents. When it works, it is exciting. Even when it doesn’t, the failure feels like the noble sort inevitably produced by sincere experiment.
—Aaron McCollough
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