Embedded Files
RALPH DAVIS, ZYMURGY: A QUEER CREATION MYTH (2020)
Clicking the link to Ralph's Zymurgy: A Queer Creation Myth (2020) transports the reader to the vivid reality of a small brown book, tiny in "a clean gentle hand." It is made, like its author, of skin—grown, developed, tended to, "and bound." For me, the book evokes other books made of skin—three books in the John Hay Library at Brown, the vellum leaves of Gaelic manuscripts, books bound with skin of executed men. Ralph's book is absent of cruelty—but not absent of pain. Zymurgy is a powerful manifestation of care and growth, a how-to manual in itself: "This is a guided experience, so please follow along."
People's willingness to give feedback was a strength of our class. I know Ralph would welcome response (either reply all, to mimic the zoom commentary in our class, or only to the author).
SOFIA CARRERA-BRITTEN, SORE THROATS (2020)
Hard on the heels of Eleanor's Big, Bright, Bursting Spike! and other immemorial happenings comes Sofia Carrera-Britten's Sore Throats (2020) and "Of course the eyes yearn to see / The well placed circle of plastic lawn chairs / A cigarette resting on each knee / Barbecue prayers." See how the rhythm and rhyme force you to turn "prayers" toward the verb? Sore Throats yokes together disjunction between theme and form, topic and tone, arch diction of the past and colloquial candor, gravity and admission of past and present in the Land Acknowledgement, foundational to "our mismatched fortune"—and the whole book. Between the bookends of LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT and THE AUTHOR, a set of poems (whether in sentence or line) delivering a kind of highly-charged fugitive 21st century gothic with formal distinction, laser-beam focus and nerve. A nutritive feast of words.
MARY SELLERS, LOSING LOOKING FINDING HIDING (2020)
Hello All! My apologies for skipping a day (events at the Capitol absorbed most of my bandwidth from 12:30pm on January 6th until now).
Here's Mary Sellers' Losing Looking Finding Hiding (2020), just the box of brainy wordshots to get spirits soaring again. Some favorites: "Backbone Boca," "Mother," "The Stranger" ("He told me about his Russian spy of a father / I told him about my genius pet hen"), "Last Supper," "Black Pearls," "Sundays 9AM," "How to say goodbye to the first house you fell in love in" (works even if you never fell in love in a house), "Slow Dream," "Belly Laugh," "Pap's Holy Shells," "I feel I," "Lastday," "Yes. This is Art," "To and For," "Good Riddance," "Odd/Even," "Missing My old bowling partner loud blue w/ nice Handsome bubble Hands," "Look." Touch a picture and you get a poem. A poem like a long needle inside a poem. A picture. A poem. Mary is a live thing inside a live thing: the day. Thank you Marinara Sauce, Muddy Shoe, Modest Size, Mandelbrot Set, Monty Sideline, Marsplanet Starshine, Many Surprises and srellesyram. May you always feel the laughter of a full crowd inside you.
https://srellesyram.github.io./losinglookingfindinghiding.html
CORINA DORREGO, COBIJITA PASAJERA (2020)
Corina Dorrego's cobijita pasajera has a genius for delivering poetic possibility in low-key packages. The title, cobijita pasajera, could refer to the thin blanket you get on a long distance plane but it is translated as "a small, fleeting, traveling blanket," which invests it with magical properties (for me). The dedication, in Spanish, is simple: para las playas de Venezuela, / para mi mamá, mi papá, mis hermanas, / y todos los que han tenido que naufragar. Or at least the middle of it is: to my mom, my dad, my sisters. But the most straightforward part of the dedication—the precious cargo of family—is cradled in two very exposed parentheses (in my translation): the beaches of Venezuela, and all who have endured shipwreck. The book is translated by me, traducido por mi, again somehow making the ordinary extraordinary and evoking the journey too, as "to translate" means to carry across (Latin, trans latus, carry across), which also means metaphor (Greek, metapherō, carry across). Two reds are used: bright red for the poem, whether composed in Spanish or English, and a reduced opacity red for the translation. Words also operate at different levels: singly, like pebbles, piecing together a message ("Crossword," "Spiral #8"); in lists, as in the opening poems "What To Pack" and "10 Easy Ways to Learn English"; and metaphorically, as in "Troupial," "Burial Tides," "The Sea Never Agreed With Me," and "Lost at Sea" (which is actually just one long sentence after the opening "Sometimes I think about what I would do if I was lost at sea"). These metaphorical poems chart the journey between languages, cultures, landscapes, belonging and not belonging, and from childhood to everything else. Just like the dedication, what seems most precious—the metaphorical poems—are in the center of the book, held between the more particulate cusps of lists and fragments. It's not cut-and-dried, there are crossovers between material and metaphor, like "How my mom taught me to bathe," and maybe vice versa "Troupial." Words are also used for spells and prayers. And there is more: cobijita pasajera (physical) as well as cobijita pasajera (digital). Things get more colorful. The dialogue continues.
ADRIAN OCONE, TOTALLY REAL PLANET (2020)
Adrian Ocone's Totally Real Planet (2020) begins and ends with a thank you. It also ends with a picture of a cat that looks like it swallowed a shoe box lying on what might be a velvet counterpane or patchwork of fields or unlikely salt flats at the top of a cliff or just in front of a wall in a room in a house somewhere with a scintilla of something unknown peeping out (center left) from the edge or margin (or what would be center left if the pages weren't so long but they have to be because of the cover image). In between are fourteen poems that feel like throwing a splash of cold water in your face. The book is short so you can do it twice. Or as needed. The design is bold, full frontal, emphatic. For such a provisional work it's very definitive. Almost snappy. Almost personal. Almost like Frank O'Hara: his elegance, take on his time, slight disarray. "Nov 8th 20020 4X9" could be a typo or COVID time. What's 4X9? At a time when not a lot makes sense it's great to read poems that don't exactly make sense either. But they make sense in the right, most literal, pure energy way. There's a kind of poetically useful acceptance of the problem of direction: "I genuinely could never understand how to follow through— / I can only see a million fragmented impacts / but i still have total faith in parallel lines in my life" ("Corny and Out My Window"). Please send Adrian an email later so—
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BvVU3EOCtHTp_y-u9qMvtq5cl4qMFp7b/view?usp=sharing
P**** M******'s COVID COWBOY, SALIENT REFLECTIONS PART 1 (2020)
P**** M****** / Covid Cowboy's Salient Reflections, Part 1 (2020) seems openly offered and simultaneously removed. There is something charming about this online adaptation of hiding a printed chapbook around RISD (which is something students have done, e.g., in the alcoves, vents, and cabinets of the Old Library). The gesture is a performance of the act of trust that is poetry—that the reader will find the book, accidentally / on purpose / in the present / or future. The ongoing dialogue with identity and authorship evident in its title is manifest throughout the 31-page chapbook. Many poems have three markers: their number in the 100 poems written during the semester, their date of composition, and their title. Then there's their position in these unnumbered pages, their place in the sequence, what comes before and after each, their connections, cross-references, repetitions, and relationships.
All the tension around publication and disclosure is in the poems too, poised between privacy and candor. Formally, they are carefully made, with vivid images and subtle rhymes. Often formal poetry is just that: and about nothing much. But this book is about so much: growing up, growing into one's sense of self, sexuality, identity, honesty, perspicacity, friendship, community. It's also a book about the oldest and most universal subjects of poetry: nature, landscape, time, the seasons—"Every day I run it through, mine / A forest of red pine / Looping, no destination, fine / Running to find myself, no retrieval / Wrapped in a blanket of yellow needle" (16/100, "Crooked Springs"). Through, to, looping, running to, wrapped in: the forest frames and protects the athletic body in a search that spirals in, the repetition of the triolet reinforcing these protective hasps.
This is a book to be read in the early morning, when it is just light and the day has barely begun. The book comes into the light mindfully, not in a linear way but in a careful ordering of parts, delicately handled, like a jig-saw or a mosaic. Fittingly though, it ends with verbs not nouns, in a sequence of two poems, both brilliant: one about listening, the other about things to do.
SOPHIE RYU ZHANG, π (2020)
Sophie Ruoyu Zhang's π (2020) is a book largely made of space. Notation is spiced through its abundant pages in many forms: English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, numbers, symbols, found text, notifications, bits of urls, code, even divination. Google Translate is dared to translate the mix. That's its job, right?
Of all the notation used, I think Chinese delivers the freshest, most alive, most relaxed voice—as if heard while passing through a crowd. Just as vitality and personality break through—momentarily—in Chinese, pattern and singularity break through—fleetingly—in poetry. And when "words on a keyboard" (12) aggregate, climbing like small insects into repetition, pattern and rhyme, it's most often in English: English delivers most poems. Numerals aggregate too, like the digits of π—but not into poems. There are many other competing linguistic and notational fragments, spinning and alive in the sense of David Jhave Johnston's Aesthetic Animism (2016). Sometimes elements play together as "between 我与" seems to do (69); upper case As seem about to take flight; and πs, like bright bats, are suspended.
Though pleasurable and witty, more than anything else, π (for me) is about the problem of language and the challenges of reading. What are these "crazy words?" What are alphabets, characters, and numerals? How many ways can you say 1, 2, 3? What is a page? What is a page number? What is print? What is language? When do you do this thing? When do you do that? How do you handle plurality, multiple languages, multiple disciplines, multiple cultures, multiple platforms and media, multiple identities?
This is both a very personal and very impersonal book. It is distributed yet intense. Very contemporary (in diction and divided attention) yet also (for me) evocative of 19th and 20th century Western antecedents like Mallarmé, Satie, Apollinaire, Stein, Frank O'Hara (!), and Ian Hamilton Finlay, with napa as Zhang's Saint-Just and "low, small, slow / Cabbage slices" (29) supplanting the guillotine.
https://indd.adobe.com/view/7af2fce5-31e4-495c-be52-986ab2f6657d
OZ HEWETT, (hahahAHHAHHAHAHAH [download free high quality poems]) (6) (2020)
Oz Hewett's (hahahAHHAHHAHAHAH [download free high quality poems]) (6) (2020) is the Beaubourg of chapbooks. The Centre Pompidou. Showing all its insides on its outside. The plaza hopping as the building. With many entrances. And treasures within.
It's a tease too (I'm not sure it's downloadable). And a paradox: despite all the activity and assessment around and through them, the short poems are almost monolithic and very much things—even things with walls.
(hahahAHHAHHAHAHAH) kicks you in the face with a great big smacking kiss, updated automatically every 5 minutes. The sentiment score is negative but I don't find it so. It depends how you read. I read full frontal, by a process of osmosis, no matter how busy the corners of my eyes. The most frequently used noun in this collection is "piece." And that's appropriate. What is the "collection?" Can the tools measure themselves? They're not the best readers of the blocky, quirky, deeply personal, funny, observant, deflective poems, that's for sure. They're in the plaza, the poems are in the museum. Neither would be as good without the other (or Paris). Their relationship is a stand-off. A question-mark. That's how it has to be right now.
I'd like to see (hahahAHHAHHAHAHAH) in a movie theater—where you can see everything all at once. But you don't sit in darkness in this movie theater. The audience too is showered with light. Wake up to Saturday. Here's your breakfast, with lunch, dinner and many buffets to come.
(hahahAHHAHHAHAHAH [download free high quality poems]) (6) (2020)
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