ekleksographia #1

Norman Fischer
Charlotte’s Way (poetry)
Tinfish Press, 2008

Charlotte’s Way may well be the finest book of poetry that Norman Fischer, poet and Zen Buddhist priest, has written. A fluid series of poems based in the area where Norman lives, these poems move in and out of statements with grace and beauty, placing us within a world of perpetual movement, impermanence, and wonder. Perhaps these lines characterize the movement found throughout this marvelous book: “Dark clouds scudding across and seas that mount and tumble/ To recognize emotions but not create them, to open up a crack for time/ To slip in but not weave an elaborate trope upon it.” These poems, written on a dramatic cliffside overlooking the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, integrate us as readers into that weave of sea, cloud, land, and light in which poet’s and reader’s minds partake, being a kindred matter in constant flux. If you are not familiar with Tinfish Press’s designs – and each chapbook, book, and magazine from Tinfish exhibits originality, humor, and skill (at an affordable price) – then consider purchasing this book as your introduction to Tinfish. Charlotte’s Way is done in an accordion design, so the book unfolds section by section, with an accompanying left-hand margin of images and measurements. The design is so beautiful, and appropriate, that one might forgive the too small font used for the text.

 

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Lisa Jarnot
Night Scenes
Flood Editions, 2008

Creating a beautiful new music with an archaic quirkiness and a contemporary somewhat non sequiturish joy, “a tunnel of mind, an income of/ herbaceous bruise, who is/ and who is not, voracious/ braeken gone.” And there are, in Lisa Jarnot’s new book, many a gem, many an ode to o and a twisty turning pleasure in the adventurous sounding out of what might be, as in the beginning of “Diamond,” “My love is like one, a bird/ in a bow-tie stadium.” At times reminiscent of a Bernadette Meyer-like humor, from Jarnot’s Night Scenes what remains with me is an odd iambic joy, words breaking into what they might become and what perhaps they were, “in helios entechnae bray/ inrangement shaft of white-blue may” and “equatial laver brim-nosed slate,/ untended o of technic plate.” Her writing, while pure hell on spellcheck, summons us to say it, to hear the way these words can send us into song. The book begins, “O sinning skel misclape thy lock/ from frenzied felbred feefs/ and longitudes of long-tongued fuels/ unpebble-dashed decrease.” These poems do fuel us, fooling us back into the pleasures of a young child’s first forays into language, the play that is our native land, “Be jumpy/ or unhinged/ with joy.” Truly, be jumpy and unhinged with joy, so tutored by the words of the elegantly designed hinged book from Flood Editions, where the end pages echo the night sky and constellations of the book’s considerable pleasures.

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John Matthias
Kedging: New Poems
Salt Books, 2007 

Here is a poet you may not know, may never have heard about, even though John Kinsella has called Matthias “a great poet” and Robert Archembeau has concluded that Matthias writes “successfully in a wider range of styles than any other contemporary poet.” Matthias does not fit easily into any particular camp or label or school, except to say that his work, in part, derives from a Poundian sensibility – a sense that history matters and that the play of the intellect is at home in poetry. Personally, my own historical sensibility is deficient. Even so, I find many poems to admire in Kedging, including “Missing Cynouai,” with its painfully understated beginning: “My daughter hasn’t spoken to me now for years./ I don’t know why. I’m sure there’s a good reason./ She must be angry about something, but she doesn’t say./ No letters and no calls. She’s nearly thirty-three.// My mother won’t speak any more at all, but I know why.” Matthias’ “For My Last Reader” begins, “There were not many of you/ To begin with.” There should have been; there should be. If you crave passionate, intelligent writing, and poems that are never gratuitous, then head for Kedging: poems written with great integrity and care.

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The Consequences of Innovation: 21^st Century Poetics
Edited by Craig Dworkin
Roof Books, 2008 

Craig Dworkin has gathered together a group of essays that constitutes the most interesting, provocative experimental poetics of the present. With essays by Dworkin, Steve Evans, Charles Bernstein, Sianne Ngai, Kenny Goldsmith, Caroline Bergvall, Brian Kim Stefans, Marjorie Perloff, and others. The Consequences of Innovation itself addresses a key concern raised in the introduction: “those concerned with the challenging difficulty of some poetry might make it more accessible not by changing the poetry itself, but rather by changing the education of its potential readership and honing the critical discourse about poetry.” This book becomes an engaging reply to the dumbing down approach (under the guise of “accessibility” or “democracy”) that poets and public figures such Dana Gioia and Billy Collins advocate. Dworkin cites Geoffrey Hill: “that which is difficult/ preserves democracy; you pay respect/ to the intelligence of the citizen.” Offering insights from the world of marketing and market theory, Dworkin cites Chris Anderson’s observation that “many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching—a market response to inefficient distrubtion.” Check out this book to learn more about creep poetics, flarf, uncreative writing, and other new modes of writing, all of which suggest, as Charles Bernstein notes, that “we have to constantly reinvent our forms and vocabularies so that we don’t lose touch with ourselves and the world we live in.”

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Leonard Schwartz
A Message Back and Other Furors
Chax Press, 2008 

An apocalyptic symphony where hysteria or the bad joke lurks beneath each word and each phrase, Leonard Schwartz’s new book shows us a world “after the individual had become a joke, after jokes became the innermost substance of persons” and where “a giggling fit shows literary brilliance.” What is not funny is the world of deliberate warfare and ongoing killings, toward which one might muster “a giggling fit in noncomplicity with homegrown aggression.” Throughout Schwartz’s book, we run up on variations of the core-phrase “human remains remain human,” and such phrases become a kind of recurring melody, with variation, through a book rich in the politics of contradiction and multidiction. It’s a Sartrean world of no exit, where “Yes, this culture gives me its claw/ to claw it to pieces/ but I’m so implicated in the culture/ my least feint makes me afraid.” Our culturally privileged position can be summed up: “never are we less free/ than as these occupiers.” It is a world of perpetual undoing and derealization, where “The first tablet says the world is a word. The second tablet has a hole punched through the middle and leads outside.” Perhaps “Bewilderment/ Is the only ark,” or perhaps all that is to be done is to think “as if it was you was who was writing into this spiral void.” Schwartz’s book is a powerful, engaging, unexpectedly musical voyage in the changing keys of diction and contradiction, for now, our home.

Hank Lazer
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
January 2009