Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Corrupt Press’

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‘Standard Form for Language Resentment’ by Freke Räihä

In Pamphlets on February 4, 2013 at 9:10 am

-Reviewed by Rosie Breese-

front

It’s an odd feeling to be writing a review in the knowledge that it may be later used in the construction of a poem. Reviewing is generally a one-way street; it’s rare for an author to respond to reviews, or indeed to publishers’ rejection letters. But that’s just what Freke Räihä has done with his innovative collection Standard Form for Language Resentment, in which template rejection letters, editorial feedback and reviews of the author’s work are chopped up, re-ordered, reframed and shot through with the author’s own subversive voice in order to create a highly original volume of ‘unoriginal’ writing.

There is a very conscious framing of the poems through the four or five introductory paragraphs which explain the various roles of publishing house staff, editors and mechanical translation in the production of these texts: “The translations to and sometimes back to, English was made by the machine and second-to-none language skills. Sometimes the machine won.” There is a selective relinquishing of authorial control and a hint of conflict in this statement, both of which are picked up many times within the appropriated and rearranged texts that follow.

The frequently word-for-word reproduction of submission guidelines and rejection letters makes for fairly miserable reading. The sheer volume of these texts, the tedium of their stock phrases, the desperate scanning for any kind of personal message within them —all contribute to a creeping sense of hopelessness; a despair, a sense of powerlessness in the face of this tide of polite impersonality:

‘Thanks for your request and
we wish you good luck
with finding an alternative home for this work.

Thanks for the submitted texts
and your interest in the journal.’

But there’s something else going on here. Räihä is at the production line with a Sharpie marker, doodling on the bits and pieces he assembles. From time to time, a rogue voice shows up in a piece that starts out innocuously polite, seeming to pastiche the faux-sensitivity of these mass-produced letters:

‘We appreciate your continued support and your purchase of our books.
Sorry we could not find any room for your work in this issue.
Sometimes this happens. Do not despair.
Comfort yourself with nostalgia,
remember fondly innocent, previously perverted acts in pastures.
We do.’

Sometimes, Räihä’s ‘machine’ seemingly jams on a particular word or phrase, creating lonesome monoliths of repeated text:

‘Sincerely.

Sincerely.
Sincerely.
Sincerely.
Sincerely.
Sincerely.
Sincerely.
Sincerely.’

Here, any heartfelt sincerity is drained by repetition; we’re left with a column of poignantly empty signifiers. This piece has the uncanny feel of a mechanically-created text. It’s eerie. It’s as if a computer is trying to imitate emotion and getting it tragically wrong.

But this is no mechanical error. Räihä’s manipulation and reproduction of these texts is human. It is deliberate. It is, as Goldsmith puts it, ‘creative reading’. More than this, it’s the creative reading of texts which are not usually responded to. Monologic texts are reconstructed dialogically, and herein lies the sense of conflict mentioned earlier. There is a sense of cynicism, of resentment towards the publishing ‘machine’ and the tools of its gatekeeping. There seems to be a desire to tweak and manipulate them until their absurdity leaches out of them like battery acid.

The flipside of this conflict is hope. This isn’t merely a volume of rejection letters regurgitated by an embittered author. There are, of course, acceptance notes: ‘I get hungry. But yes, yes, you can probably count on that / we want to publish you.’ And there is this gloriously comical re-imagining of the rejection note, which was worth wading through the slew of repetitive text for:

‘…This letter will not reach you. Sure, you might say that you cannot fuck a book, therefore, you can not love it. I agree, but not my wife, who does not own a single copy of you or your love. We have changed our phone numbers, address, last names, ISBN:s, place of publications and positions. You can reach us at the printers. We have changed printers. We are on holiday, we have changed holiday, we have replaced the holiday industry. We have changed hands, language, currency and/or government — which regulates the bits, bytes and the domains hexagonal source. We have no contracts, no obligation. We have only the nagging grounds in the coffee room. Unfortunately we have no way, you are one in a million. This letter will not reach you.’

Räihä seems to relish this triumph of individual creativity over the reams and reams of opinion and automated text generated by publishing’s gatekeepers. With this volume, he has exposed and exploited the malfunctioning pathos of the stock phrase and opened up a dialogue that could potentially go on forever. I will be interested to see what he does with this review.

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‘limite désir’ by Meghan McNealy

In Pamphlets on January 9, 2013 at 8:34 am

-Reviewed by Éireann Lorsung-

LIMITE DESIR - MCNEALY_Part1

Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text (my version is the 1975 Miller translation), writes that “Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so” and, a bit later on the same page, declares that from this distinction we might  find “a means of evaluating the works of our modernity: their value would proceed from their duplicity”.  What the erotic wants, he goes on to say, is “the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve [italics in original] which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss”. The more, here, now of linguistic presence, of text on a page or screen, of image in the mind couples with the no, not, almost of language’s breakdown. The limit of desire is also the site of bliss, and the bliss of the text is in its unfurling, its decontainment.

At the very beginning of her chapbook limite désir, in “Prologue” (whose tone and form—numbered paragraphs, a semi-biographical statement on the poems, a footnote—are didactic), Meghan McNealy offers the reader an exegesis of those titular words. The limit to which they refer, she writes, is “not the symbol of impassibility” but “a space in its own right” within which transformation takes place. Like Barthes, she sites possibility in the space of the liminal (at least for herself; she writes that she lives “in a universe where everything is real and anything is possible”—not everyone lives in such a universe). Playing with her own language, McNealy goes on to deform limite désir to l’imite désir—the imitation of desire, or, in her words, the story of desire which we imitate as we go about our own desiring. Thus we are given the two tenets of the chapbooks: the limit, and the desire we imitate and finally, ideally, improvise.

McNealy proposes that “by living in the moment with an awareness of the limits, we are able to create our own story of love, to open it and see what it really is” (an assertion Barthes would likely trouble, substituting an ongoing chain of seams and gaps for arrival at a point where all is revealed—the end of the striptease, as it were, which divorces the erotic flash from the now ‘merely naked’ person). What guarantees the ‘real’ of this story, of these tellings? McNealy points to “extreme awkwardness, anxiety, embarrassment, even destruction”. I presume that these feelings come from what McNealy identifies as “improvising our lines with intelligence and compassion—instead of reading them off of worn-out placards”; the ‘real’, then, as the moment of transformation between the established stories and the limit beyond which we cannot see but toward which we must go.

And ‘must’ is the word. The speaker here is not shy about telling us what to do and how to do it, beginning with the identification of what real is (and how it feels and how we will go about experiencing it) and continuing on through the footnote, in which she tells us that the poems are meant to be read aloud, performed—and informs us of the “subtle sarcasm” and “facial expression” which are important to her work and which “[change] everything”. We are informed that lines “in italics and quotation marks are meant to be sung” and that one of the poems “is performed with specific hand gestures and sounds accompanying it”. A glossary of the French terms used in the poems is provided. If only the prologue to these poems trusted its readers to be in the delicate space of the limit, where nothing is determined and we must struggle with the poems toward diffuse meaning! If only, that is, we were trusted as readers to read “with intelligence and compassion”.

Because we can read these poems, these spacious and intricate and complex and well-made poems, with intelligence and compassion. They demand it, in fact. It is definitely my own preference as a reader for texts which entrust themselves to me—for writers who can do the difficult work of allowing their texts to be read without preamble—which speaks above. In McNealy’s poems I have no trouble finding a concern for the liminal space whether or not I know precisely what the marks she has used signify. In the end, whether the mark is ‘—’ or ‘You’, its exact coordinates are lost between the maps of our readings, our knowings, and (yes) our desires. I will improvise, readerly.

But let me tell you what I very much enjoy about this book.

  • That the poems’ lines are unafraid: unafraid to be exorbitant (long, inclusive, evasive), as in “Rêverie-Flânerie”, where I find so much to like, and much pleasure in language as well—“We will begin again in a small room; the presence of a ghost is certain—/—she comes vivacious” and “In another moment I am in search of the train who can drag me on—/—the soot of the city just lying there” and “Ghost-drawn axis of trees along the sidewalk in front of the station—/—no I haven’t got a cigarette”. Unafraid to join on the page as in life the absent (unseen, inhuman) with the present (known, believed, ‘real’). Unafraid to ask questions (“do you feel weird?” —in “Au début, en fin”) that are not ‘poetic’. The dailyness of language perching beside the image of the flâneuse and her strolling, incorporating much. The daring of these poems’ forms, and their willingness—their desire–to allow their limits in make up for the occasional moment of laxity or lack of tension in them.
  • That in her poems McNealy wants to signify the joining of the body and the voice and the eye and the text; that the text is not lonely, but accompanied. That the body is acknowledged as part of what generates the text. (Not only by the presence of lines we are told have been written to be sung, or marks we are told stand for movement—which in any case do move on the page as well—but also by “breath”, by “tract” and “blood” [“Jetez je/tu”], by “tongues” and “jaw” and—better yet—“jawing” and the skin which is the most human of walls [“Reculer”] and singing and throbbing and being eaten [“Équinoxe”].)
  •  That there is play in the poems; that meaning and its representation are as slippery as the fish which appears in “Epilogue” out of the conjugations of three lines—“a lackluster finish: unstable/a lacquer-finish: un table/a lack of fish”.
  • The fragment “by now the birches ossify” (“Epilogue”).

Limite désir is true to its name. It goes on searching to the limits (which draw back and draw back): is this a poem? What is a poem? What is a sentence? What is my language? Where is my searching? Where am I bound? Who am I bound to? What do I love? Where is desire bounding off to now? We do not arrive (except at an ending: at which point we begin again/anew the life outside the book). We move toward the limit and are asked to reinvent as we go along.

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Published Poetry 2012: a Top 10

In End of year round-up on December 10, 2012 at 12:14 am

-Listed by Claire Trévien-

June

As the end of the year approaches, it is customary to attempt round-ups of sorts. Last year, I asked for people’s favourite poetry pamphlets on twitter. This year I will be taking inspiration from last year’s fiction top ten and providing links to the top ten most read published poetry reviews (from this year). If you are looking for gift inspirations or wanting to stumble on something new, you could do worse than take a look at this list.

They are:

1. Four 2011 Poetry Business Prizewinners (Smiths/Doorstop 2012). Reviewed by Sophie Mayer.

2. Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot. Reviewed by Harry Giles.

3. Human Shade by Robert Peake (Lost Horse Press). Reviewed by Martha Sprackland.

4. lapping water by Dan Flore III. Reviewed by Ian Chung.

5. ILK #1. Reviewed by John McGhee.

6. Fleck and the Bank by Rob A. Mackenzie (Salt Publishing). Reviewed by Harry Giles.

7. All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head by Tony Williams (Nine Arches Press). Reviewed by Charles Whalley.

8. Antiphon #1. Reviewed by John McGhee.

9. Poland at the Door by Evelyn Posamentier (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press). Reviewed by Ian Chung.

10. Four Rack Press pamphlets. Reviewed by Angela Topping.

Originally published in 2011, Charles Whalley’s review of Megan Fernandes’ Organ Speech (Corrupt Press) would have otherwise appeared third.

There’s a pleasing presence of webzines and self-published work on this list. Group or anthology reviews also appear to have been popular, though I suspect that the popularity of the Smith/Doorstop and Catechism reviews is in part due to their controversial natures – but if so, where is Eireann Lorsung’s thought-provoking meditation on poetic tourism in Colette Sensier’s début pamphlet How Many Camels is too Many?

So far the least viewed review of a poetry publication is Diidxadó by Víctor Terán (Poetry Translation Centre), which seems a shame considering its reviewer, Judi Sutherland, describes it as ‘Pablo Neruda in a bitter mood’, what’s not to love?

If I were to construct my own personal 2012 list free of the constraints of what has been reviewed in Sabotage, and comprising magazines, anthologies, and pamphlets, I should no doubt curse my poor short-term memory. Such a list would undoubtedly include however: Cat Conway’s Static Cling (Dancing Girl Press, being reviewed soon for Sabotage), Agenda vol. 46 no. 4, Azita Ghahreman’s Poems (Poetry Translation Centre), Kayo Chingonyi’s Some Bright Elegance (Salt Publishing), and Adelle Stripe’s Dark Corners of the Land (Blackheath Books). A couple more impose themselves, but would be ineligible since I have poems in them: Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins), Fuselit: Contraption, and Poems in Which. What would be on your list? Please do share in the comments.

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‘turn push | turn pull’ by Kit Fryatt

In Pamphlets on October 8, 2012 at 9:43 am

-Reviewed by Suzannah Evans-

Corrupt Press is a Paris-based press run by Dylan Harris, who is particularly interested in publishing poetry in English by poets for whom English is a second language. Kit Fryatt’s pamphlet collection  turn push | turn pull uses a mixture of tongues to truly take apart language as a form of expression. For example in the poem slobpaedar; ‘marbh | Tod | mort |wan’. From their own knowledge the reader has to piece their understanding together, which de-familiarises language and questions the experience of drawing meaning from the words themselves.

Dreams are used as inspiration throughout the collection. I particularly enjoyed BoHiCa which has the weird familiarity of a dream sequence and  accurately captures the feeling of waking; ‘relief I have not confessed myself / to someone I don’t fancy in awake-life’. There is humour here too and a witty turn of phrase; ‘spft | grnk says the coffee machine. It is the cartridge sort’.

Plurality is central to this collection and several of Fryatt’s poems could be read in a variety of ways; the format of the text does not always suggest an obvious reading. I’m unsure of how successful some of these poems would be in performance because of this  as the simultaneous arrangement of words and phrases seems vital to the poetry as it appears on the page.

The poem it does not exist by a play of words reads as two separate texts interwoven with each other:

‘It was an ATR 72, turboprop,
some recent research suggests maybe
twenty-some rows of seats two by two
conceptual thought is anterior to language’

The poem plays with the problem of discussing language in poetry, concluding that poems about language ‘need to be about something else too’ which, through the alternating lines of text, this poem achieves effectively, forcing the reader to search for coherence in a poem that holds together and pulls itself apart simultaneously. It can also be read as a mission statement for Fryatt’s collection, which embraces ambiguity and celebrates the plural possibilities of language.

Initially I found the ideas in this poem difficult to grasp of and it felt a little like solving a hard clue in a cryptic crossword. There are other aspects of the puzzle to be solved here; the contents page lists titles which are not printed with the poems themselves so the reader constantly turns back to the front of the book almost as if looking for the answers or clues. However there is far more than just novelty value to Fryatt’s work; what she achieves here is discursive and subtle rather than gimmicky.

There’s no denying that Fryatt’s poetry could be described as difficult and I did require access to a search engine at all times, confident as she is in  throwing in references to mythology, history and using snippets of other languages. However, when poetry is engaging it becomes necessary to do the required research. This is a collection that encourages re-reading through its beauty and strangeness.

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‘Peneloping’ by Amy Hollowell

In Pamphlets on September 17, 2012 at 10:29 am

-Reviewed by Suzannah Evans-

 Amy Hollowell‘s Peneloping is published by Corrupt Press, a small press based in Paris. For the most part they publish work in English by writers from non-Anglophone countries. Director Dylan Harris’ mission statement on the press’s website  is encouraging; ‘Those poetry sects…I don’t care for them. I do care for interesting poetry, high quality poetry, from anywhere. I do care for different poetry, doing things well I’ve not seen done before. I do care for traditional poetry, doing the same again, very well indeed. I want to be excited by poetry’.

It is fair to call Amy Hollowell’s pamphlet ‘exciting’ by any standards. Short even for a pamphlet at a mere 19 pages and delightfully produced, the contents are somewhere between Harris’s definitions of the different and the traditional, but both are achieved.

The influence of James Joyce is evident in this collection even before you begin reading. In the book’s epigraph Hollowell honours ‘the Bringer of Plurabilities’ in the words of Joyce, taken from Finnegan’s Wake. This is a book of plurabilities, if we can use such a word; the poet displays a love of wordplay and puns to rival Joyce himself. Invented words spring from these poems; ‘wildwombeness’, ‘nightdark’ ‘gentling’ all surprising and effective; Hollowell mines out language in a journey to the source of expression. She uses words as physical sensation and the effect is visceral, somewhat reminiscent of the poems of Valerie Rouzeau; the reader has no choice but to allow its strangeness to inhabit them.

Hollowell’s poem Back Window Bloom is a morning-after episode, a sequel to the Penelope chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce’s attempt to express female stream-of-consciousness includes almost no punctuation, but thankfully Hollowell sees its necessity.  The poem’s images and phrasing are among the strongest in this collection; lines such as ‘Remains a rosy condom on him, his thumb in a ripe tomato,’ and ‘Brown bird on a bare limb perching / songs it, off and on’ resound with joyful newness that is greater than mere novelty and rewards repeated reading. The expression of female sexuality here is lush and colourful, and a touch more believable than Joyce’s.

There are times when Hollowell’s unusual phrasing works better than others; the last poem in the collection, Vita Nova, lost my commitment, at times seeming overly whimsical; ‘a red alarm beepbeep beepbeep beepbeep beepbeep / bebe bebe bebe bebe/ be up be up’. The poet also makes use of some slightly over-used cultural concepts; the use of a cavewoman as an expression of female sexuality seems a bit predictable and the ‘answering back’ element is there too in Song of Herself with a nod to Walt Whitman.

With an abundance of intertextual references, this collection is quite demanding for the reader in terms of prior knowledge and I am certain that there are references within the pamphlet that I missed; I love Hollowell’s re-imagining of Molly Bloom but I’ve never attempted Finnegan’s Wake, for example, which would perhaps enrich my reading of it. However at its best this collection is daring and sexy and there is the potential to enjoy and trust its playful language without reaching for referential certainties.

 

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‘Weakdays’ by R L Raymond, and ‘At The End Of The Street’ by Jay Passer

In Pamphlets on September 15, 2012 at 11:47 am

 

 -Reviewed by Andrew Bailey-

corrupt press, the determinedly lower case publisher behind these pamphlets, declares that it exists because the founder, Dylan Harris, wanted to share the poems of interesting poets in his adopted Paris who were finding it difficult to get published – wanted “to put poetry into heads”. The short version is that these do that, leaving me grateful for the introduction to two poets previously unknown to me.

The first, Weakdays, very much aims at a comprehensible whole, based in details from the implosion of a marriage and an epigraph praising the virtues of story. Building up a narrative from the various spoken and unspoken nigglings and irritations is a neat trick, letting a reader dwell in the unpleasant pleasures of annoyance:

 
she glares at him
french vinaigrette dripping
from the mesclun
on the tines pointing down
the wrong way
 
Can’t you take anything seriously?

(from ‘Not any closer’)

This is typical in style of the nineteen poems, clean clipped language, and each line constructed around a single detail. Eschewing verbal fireworks means selecting your details well, and that’s generally true here – the sulking picked up in the decision to bend paper clips to breaking point rather than join a partner and drink wine, for example, or the wedding ring ominously smashed with a DIY hammer along with the hand that wears it in one of the earliest poems. Where I find misses, such as a joke about Occam’s razor that overbalances a poem somewhat, I’m carried past them by their companions, and by the narrative quality that brings you from poem to poem. (I’ll also note that I don’t understand why the title was chosen.)

The narrative quality also encourages links across poems, such as the echo of the smashed ring finger in the wife’s cutting her own through the ring of a bagel in a later poem – and it prevents me from talking about the last pair of poems, favourites as they are, as that would be giving out spoilers. I can say that they close off the sequence satisfyingly.

A good demonstration of the difference between Raymond and stablemate Passer can be found in the first sentences alone of their back cover biographical notes:

R L Raymond is a writer from London, Ontario.

Jay Passer, b. 1965, is a native San Franciscan, schooled in the gutter muse and service industry-bard, seen most often haunting the public house, city library and long pavement of the metropolis.

That self-mythologising note is the force that binds At the End of the Street together, in place of Raymond’s narrative. His first line is “What worries me”, his last two are “I was eleven / years of age”, and there’s an extended comparison of the poet as superhero in between.  When it works, when it compels you to take the world through the same hyperbolised senses, it’s a powerful rhetorical whirl of a force:

you lie fallen or in repose like the bum on the parkbench
it’s Spring
and the wildlife is fucking righteous again
[...]
for the last time and final a note before expiring
happy birthday world I blow out your candle.

(from ‘Candle’)

I keep coming back to this poem, and its repetitions and elastic phrasings have not palled on re-reading. The whirl, sadly, isn’t always forceful enough for that to be true of all of them; making an equivalence of the thermonuclear end of the world and the speaker not having insurance in ‘Read All About It’ flirts with bathos, for example, and the closure of ‘Ballpoint Washed Off Hand’’ being a punchline demotes the rest into a mere feed.Those noted, though, there’s much to enjoy, such as the closing poem’s convincing memory of the USA’s 200th birthday for a pre-teen, with nothing of the day’s historical importance being able to hold a candle to that of the experienced day’s poison oak and borrowed Playboy.

Some impressive titles absolutely must be noted too: ‘Sinatra Like A Bulldozer Over Paris’, say, of ‘Screaming Within The Corpuscle Of The Word’. How to resist? And the choice detail of the “delicate chiseling / of aspen against snow bank” in ‘New Mexico’ is one that will certainly stay with me, one of the several from these pamphlets that have been – in corrupt’s terms – put into the head, and are welcome.

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‘Garden (dec unit)’ by Monty Reid and ‘Ships Made of Fake Fur’ by James Jewell

In Pamphlets on September 10, 2012 at 11:20 am

-Reviewed by Seán Hewitt-

In Monty Reid’s Garden (dec unit) and James Jewell’s Ships Made of Fake Fur, Corrupt Press offer us new musings on sparseness. The pamphlets themselves are simple, paper booklets, uninspiringly yet neatly designed. But it’s what’s on the inside that counts…

Monty Reid, Garden (dec unit) (Corrupt Press, 2012)

Canadian poet Monty Reid’s Garden (dec unit) sequence is more of a ‘collection’ than Jewell’s Ships Made of Fake Fur (see below), in that it follows the months of the year and the place of the gardener (and the garden) as the seasons work themselves over the land. One might call it a modern-day attempt at the Shepheardes Calendar. Reid begins with a moonlit December scene and continues through to the following November, offering minimalistic, uncluttered observations and thoughts inspired by the garden.

When Monty Reid looks at plants, gardens, nature, he plunges straight into a world of abstracts and ungraspables. ‘It is unobservable’, and he likes it that way. This poet has settled himself nicely into the ecopoetics currently being spearheaded by writers like Alice Oswald, also a gardener. Unfortunately, Reid does not fare well from the comparison. As in the work of Oswald, nature is indifferent to the poet’s gaze, refusing to be colonised. It is alive and autonomous, and Reid grapples with this idea in the Garden sequence, trying not to impose himself on the landscape. The best example of this is, perhaps, in the seventh poem, ‘June’:

If our apprehension of the world cannot be contained
by thinking – at least not by thinking as philosophy has traditionally
conceived it – then the last thing we should do
is to try to think it again.

It’s not my garden.
I just work there.

However, it seems here, and throughout this pamphlet, that instead of applying any new philosophy to his own work, and exploring it there, Reid seems to be working out a new philosophy via poetry, which can sometimes lead to confusion or abstraction. Where Oswald might dismantle the tradition of English Romanticism in her wonderful ‘Another Westminster Bridge’, instructing Londoners to ‘go and glimpse the lovely inattentive water / discarding the glance of many a bored streetwalker’, Reid instead chooses to explicitly work with philosophies:
It is not art, but everything
splits the real world into a real world and an imaginary world.

There is little pleasure to be gleaned from a philosophy whose bones are so unceremoniously exposed. There are moments of clarity in this pamphlet, and Reid has a great sense for an ending, with lots of these poems having a great sting in the tail. However, Reid’s Garden (dec unit) often strikes as a series of jottings, of thoughts waiting to be turned into poems, somehow incomplete in their minimalism. Maybe that’s where the reader comes in.

James Jewell, Ships Made of Fake Fur (Corrupt Press, 2012)

James Jewell’s Ships Made of Fur, at a first glance, seems to take the opposite approach to Reid’s Garden (dec unit). A singer-songwriter, originally from Pennsylvania, Jewell’s poetry seems more openly conversational, comic and, in parts, verbose. The chapbook consists of prose poems, odes, observational sketches and short lyrics, and in this it is more obviously eclectic than Reid’s.

It is anchored in modern life (the ‘ships’ of the title are, in fact, people roaming a cityscape: ‘The floundering ships / made of fake fur are floating / through the coffee shops, / restaurants and cinemas of Amsterdam’), and Jewell is clearly most comfortable in the realm of the colloquial and the comic. He has the comedian’s ability to draw acute examples from the everyday, bringing out the oddities of chance encounters, making them both poignant and light-hearted by turns. The best of these little sketches is ‘Three Beards’:

Homesick,
standing in a semi circle.
Three beards of different lengths
and one without a beard,
looking at each other,
fondly,
curiously.
“My boyfriend had a beard as long as yours.”
She shows us pictures.

In these few lines, Jewell manages to pack a mass of suggestion and curiosity with an unassuming ease. There is the sense of competition between the men, brought out by the way the girl trumps the other three with her boyfriend’s superior facial hair, there is the sense of separation (the girl from her boyfriend, who is featured in the past tense; the three men from home etc.), and the small hints of friendship and kinship between the ‘three beards’. The final image of the photographs confirms this collective yearning for an elsewhere. Jewell finds the casual, everyday emotion in such encounters, skilfully working it into his verse in a way that is both unobtrusive and effective.

He spins thought-provoking tales, featuring characters as diverse as Bob Marley, Napoleon and the Cookie Monster, but always keeps the emotional core of the poem visible beneath these comic layers. Jewell’s poetry avoids abstraction by cutting close to the issue at hand without revealing it explicitly, and this is where his talent lies. He has the ability to situate his reader, he talks to them not from the poet’s ‘imagined height’ but eye-to-eye, and it is on this common ground that we are able to relate to him, and feel the humorous sentiment of his sketches.

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‘TWEET TWEET TWEET’ by Greg Santos

In Pamphlets on June 20, 2012 at 10:00 am

-Reviewed by Christopher Crawford-

Greg Santos’ Corrupt Press chapbook is named TWEET TWEET TWEET. The clue is in the title and this is a mixed bag of whimsical musings much as if the poet has used the quotidian random associations we all make to construct his lighthearted poems.

Many of the poems here refer to the fact that they are poems, which can seem playful, irritating or a massive no-no depending on your point of view.

Consider ‘To Whom It May Concern’, short enough to quote in its entirety, typical enough for the chapbook to highlight a concern about TWEET TWEET TWEET as a whole:

‘I went to the grocery store today.

I made the man at the grocery store nervous.

My mom called me.

No one cares about poetry.

Probably going to die alone.

I want to write a poem with you’.

So what? True, thoughts like these pass through this reviewer’s head regularly but only on days when I bore even myself. There is no music here, no originality or freshness. Where is the attention to the musical relationship the words form with each other? It all seems a bit flat, except for the second line which gives us a little respite from the monotonous voice.

Other poems set out from a moment of imagination only to dive bomb into the ground when their wings snap off.

‘While munching on an apple and daydreaming about hydraulic pumps, Leonardo
witnessed a falcon divebombing a smaller bird and instantly became obsessed with
flying’.

The poem goes on to speak about Leonardo speaking to family members in a bird-voice ‘Caw caw caw’, before ending:

‘“Squawk,” he said closing his eyes, stepping off the cliff, and swooping into history;
unsuccessfully testing the world’s first flying machine’.

A poem, literally, that is going nowhere or nowhere very interesting. And that is the problem with the chapbook. It is all very well being whimsical and lighthearted in approach but when all is said and done there must be a heart to sink one’s teeth into or we come away with an empty belly.

From a total of 22 poems, 10 of them mention poets or the poem itself which is being written. Who is the judge of how much is too much? I’m going to say ten poems from twenty-two is too much for me.

Santos tries to make his musings fun, no bad thing, here is ‘I am a Bird and I Love Poets’:

‘I am a bird
and I love
poets

They look
so tiny
from up
here’.

There’s something here of William Carlos Williams’ thoughtful, almost bashful phrasing from ‘This Is Just To Say’ and a nice mixing of viewpoints that seems fresh (with a little nod to ants who aren’t mentioned) although it is a pity one whole stanza (and there are only two) is a straight repetition of the title. It lends itself to the feeling Santos is struggling to find something of substance to say.

In ‘It is Snowing in Paris’ the couplets please the eye and the imagery and phrasing are married to the form. It is one of the better poems in the chapbook:

‘Charcoal roasted chestnuts glow,
Incandescent bulbs on the verge of exploding.

Wayward snowflakes
Rip through the heavens like tiny white meteors

Parisians whip their umbrellas open in a mad rush
Force-fields to keep the snowflakes at bay.

The snow is terrible but nothing like back home
Where the bitter cold squeezes your soul like a vice

I keep my soul in a fur-lined case in the boreal wastes of Canada’.

The poem starts well with unusual imagery and energy and has a thought-provoking and pleasing last line but again is let down by what seems to be a lack of full effort from the poet, especially in the fourth stanza with easy associations spoiling the effect of the weirder preceding associations. Cold…what kind of cold? Bitter. Squeezes… like a what? What about vice? Ok, why not? ‘Squeezes…like a vice’ it is. He also manages to squeeze the word ‘soul’ into the poem twice and it is a nine line poem.

Here’s the problem: if you are going to write very short poems, they should be working pretty damn hard to say something, there is little excuse for boring the reader. The poems can show how hard they’re working or hide it from view but they should lift a finger.

Poets like Philip Whalen, and Laurence Ferlinghetti (to whom Santos gives a nod in ‘A Versailles of The Mind’) have walked us through such meanderings in fresher, and behind all the fun, more serious ways.

In the age of Facebook, Twitter, fast-moving advertising and want-it-all-now-and-in an-easy-to-swallow-form, where are the serious things that need saying? Are these forms even compatible with the most important hopes and ambitions of the individual or are we diluting ourselves and each other with the mass communication of mindless frippery these social networks encourage? Must poems always deal with the most serious matters of the human condition? No, of course not but poems are perhaps the greatest means we have for exploring the great themes in ways less-or-more serious and it is easy to come away disappointed if the poet glides through his work at cruise altitude.

Greg Santos is finding his way through these questions and coming up with very mixed levels of success. Let’s see what the results of these experiments end up being in the future.

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Poetry Pamphlets: A 2011 Top Ten

In End of year round-up on December 12, 2011 at 12:11 pm

-Assembled by Claire Trevien-

Pamphlets make the perfect Christmas present or stocking filler. For one, they’re usually gorgeously produced objects, for another there’s something manageable and enticing about their small size. So, if you’re trying to convert a loved one to poetry, you could do worse than spring one of these chapbooks on them. This list is a mixture of favourite pamphlets reviewed on Sabotage, suggestions from others after issuing a call-out on twitter and facebook (democracy in action!) and my own subjective taste. You will find below pamphlets for wrestlers and nature-lovers, for burlesque dancers and do-gooders, for neuroscientists and performers, something for everyone then.

In no particular order:

  1. Megan Fernandes, Organ Speech, Corrupt Press. This ‘unnervingly good’ debut pamphlet is the perfect present for those dragons who ‘read / they were dinosaurs and became / conservative’. Technically rigorous stuff that handles neuroscience with learned ease and is still generous enough to let you in. Read the review here.
  2. Jon Mitchell, March and After: poems from Tsunami Country, Printed Matter Press. Christmas is all about giving, so what could be better than to offer a limited-edition pamphlet with proceeds going towards Peace Boat operations in Tohoku?
  3. Emily Hasler, Natural Histories, Tim Cockburn, Appearances in the Bentick Hotel, and Mark Burnhope, The Snowboy, all from the Salt Modern Voices pamphlet series. A special mention goes out to JT Welsch’s Orchids and Amy De’Ath’s Eric & Enide whose pamphlets, published in December of last year, narrowly miss out from the narrow criteria of a year-by-year list, but are also excellent. The whole series is worth investigating and I am cheating a little by mentioning so many as a single offering but this is in part because they look wonderful together (as well as separately).
  4. Sarah Dawson, Anatomically Incorrect Sketches of Marine Animals . For those people out there who can only read on their Kindle, Dawson’s short collection is the perfect present. Created especially for electronic consumption, the usual hindrances of reading poetry on a screen are avoided.
  5. Angus Sinclair, Another Use of Canvas, Gatehouse Press. Who said poetry can’t be butch? When the world of wrestling and poetry combine, the reader is treated to a glimpse into a new exciting world. Read the review here.
  6. Deborah Tyler-Bennett , Mytton…Dyer…Sweet Billy Gibson, Nine Arches Press. Nine Arches produce beautiful pamphlets too and the content of this one, with its larger than life personalities, is sure to be the perfect present. Hand it out, read it out loud and enjoy.
  7. Luke Kennard, Planet-Shaped Horse, Nine Arches Press. Many have tried to imitate Kennard’s wonderful mixture of absurdist, acerbic wit and seeming off-handedness, but very few have succeeded (a trend that’s perhaps worse than Bukowski imitations). This poem-play is a gift you should give at all times of the year. Read the review here.
  8. Kirsten Irving, What To Do, Happenstance Press. Irving needs no introduction to regular readers of Sabotage, we loved her numerous collaborative projects with Jon Stone, while this pamphlet got an excellent review from Chris Emslie here. Buy this while stocks still last because Irving is a poet to watch.
  9. James McGonigal, Cloud Pibroch, Mariscat Press. McGonigal’s pamphlet was the winner of the Michael Marks award and was also a PBS choice. Don’t let the accolades put you off, this pamphlet is a quietly impressive work that’ll make you look at nature afresh. Read the review here.
  10. Wayne Holloway-Smith, Beloved in Case You’ve Been Wondering, Donut Press. If aesthetics are your primary concerns then Donut Press should be one of your first points of call – they make thick, well-crafted objects with beautifully designed covers. Holloway-Smith’s is no exception, but the content is decadently wonderful too. Holloway-Smith gives us a world full of masks, sleeze and burlesque dancers, but of strange beauty too. It must sound like someone you know, give it to them.

A Pamphlet that I Have Not Read but Which I Am Told is Excellent

I have not read Roisin Tierney, Dream Endings (Rack Press) but it has been nominated several times so I put it forward as a Wild Card Bonus. According to the internet, it begins with the poet’s dying sister and ends with an exuberant funeral. Having read Tierney’s poetry in The Art of Wiring I can only expect this pamphlet to be an excellent & well-crafted pamphlet.

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‘Organ Speech’ by Megan Fernandes

In Pamphlets on December 7, 2011 at 10:30 am

-Reviewed by Charles Whalley-

From the Paris-based Corrupt Press, the unremarkable cover of Megan Fernandes’ Organ Speech hides a remarkable collection of poems that are mature, intelligent and bold, ranging over family, memory, desire, botany, neuroscience, Anglo-Saxon poetry, The Troubles, and Alice in Wonderland . The best description of her surreal style is perhaps (to borrow something else) ‘cognitive poetics’, as she exploits the synaesthetic and associatory possibilities of language. The best poems in Organ Speech, such as ‘Here is earnest’, are those in which language itself seems to dictate the content. It takes a poet with a very keen and free awareness of words, the “recipes for moods” – the objective correlative? – , to produce tremendous lines which seem to produce considerable effects entirely out of themselves, like “Teach me about / ghosts and abstractions, / and the caffeine of wrecked space.” (‘Here is earnest’)

For Fernandes, language and thought map on top of each other, and so in many of the poems, and in her dominant mode, she dramatises or allegorises thought to create fantastic (in the proper sense of the word) landscapes and uncanny images where language is the primary logic. So, for instance, in the opening ‘Synaptic Space’, suicide by a gun becomes a way to project “your synapses” across (or on to) the universe, making the mind a microcosm of space (or space a macrocosm of the mind) where you can “[f]ollow the scent / of your childhood pajamas, they smelled something sweet and / deranged: measles, beetles, and boxed apple juice”. The individual becomes an explorer within their own thoughts, which have been stretched out and rendered tangible or spatial. In ‘THE BRAINHOOD ADVENTURE!’, Fernandes starts this exploration by opening the poem with “Eyes turn inwards”, to use the idea that we could look at our own brains to introduce an allegory of thought, desire and memory, mixing the literal morphology of the brain with a dream-like fantasy journey; for example:

‘Beside the swing, on the spongy terrain,
I take you to meet Ida in the Cannibale café,

in the parietal northwest corner of the brain.’

We are simultaneously in the spongy brain and in Paris, and not really in either. Because the events are fantastic the reader can’t create a mental picture independent of the text, and so almost complete agency is given to language. This gives a sense of freedom and of infinite possibility.

The surreal brainhood adventures provide an effective training ground for when Fernandes attempts more concrete topics. A poet who knows that violet “makes grief / but never quaintness or purposeful”(‘Here is earnest’) can produce lines as perfect as “give me / dead lavender and raw milk”(‘Corinne on Bodies of Water’). In the sinister and unnerving ‘Queens’, for instance, which is about hijra in Mumbai, the heart of the poem is provided by a sudden flash of the surreal:

‘They stir me through female nightmares: ash-heaps, fields of limbs, everything in
twos.’

The “nightmares” give a pretext for the uncanny images that follow. (Although the more I read that line the more “stir” seems like the cleverest part of it.) In ‘Archives’ and ‘Hallways’ Fernandes writes about her family, and the mental richness that these subjects provide a landscape in which she can invigorate concrete topics with little flashes of the surreal (often, again, with the pretext of ‘imagining’ or ‘dreams’).

On the other end of this, the poems sometimes falter when they become fixed in the concrete, as is the case with ‘Grendel’, for instance, which is about a murder, and the victim’s sympathy for the culprit. (The ‘pretty murder victim’ theme is a bit LiveJournal.) Fernandes is perhaps a bit too insistent upon the strength of the reality of the moment, and doesn’t seem to want to let language get in the way. As a result, the poem is like the dragons in ‘Here is earnest’ who “read / they were dinosaurs and became / conservative”, and is somewhat dry and thin. However, we expect a pamphlet to be varied, and it’s quite possible readers other than myself will enjoy the more serious poems. (If I have been talking a lot about personal preference in this review, it is because the sort of poetry that is so dazzling in this pamphlet is the poetry most exposed to the idiolect fringes of words.)

It is exciting to discover a new poet and a new press. Megan Fernandes is a sophisticated and sensitive writer, and her poems are, by turn, surprising, vivid and affecting. Organ Speech is unnervingly good.

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