Friday, April 17, 2020
Saturday, January 25, 2020
Review of Alejandro Albarran Polanco's, Cowboy & Other Poems (Clara B. Jones)
Cowboy
& Other Poems
Alejandro
Albarrán
Polanco
tr.
Rachel Galvin
2019
Ugly
Duckling Presse, Señal
Chapbook Series
18
pp
$7.00
Alejandro
Albarrán
Polanco's, Cowboy
& Other Poems,
Reviewed by Clara B. Jones
It is not every day that one has an
opportunity to review a poetry collection destined to become a
collector's item. However, emerging Mexican poet, Alejandro Albarrán
Polanco's, Cowboy & Other Poems, translated by Rachel
Galvin, is such a text. This handsomely-crafted chapbook is issued by
Ugly Duckling Presse, a small, non-profit publisher located in
Brooklyn, NY, committed to offering avant garde poetry and
other genres produced by a volunteer editorial “collective.” As
described online, many of the 300 titles published since
incorporation by Matvei Yankelevich, Yelena Gluzman, and Filip
Marinovich, among others, in 2002, “contain handmade elements,
calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking,” a
practice, the “codex book,” traceable back to the Roman Empire.
Cowboy & Other Poems is part of the Ugly Duckling Presse
Señal initiative, “a chapbook series for contemporary Latin
American poetry in bilingual editions.” “Señal” means “sign”
or “signal” in Spanish, and, in the present project, seems to
suggest words communicated intentionally for verbal, including,
semantic, and sensory, as well as, aesthetic, impact. As expressed on
the press' website, “we publish what we love and what cannot find a
platform elsewhere.”
Polanco, a poet, musician, editor,
director, and conceptual artist, has received several awards and
grants for his writing. Galvin, a poet, translator, and scholar at
the University of Chicago, is a co-founder of the international
creative translation collective, Outranspo. Cowboy & Other
Poems, a hybrid text, is comprised of six innovative poems,
including an image of firearm parts, and a translator's note. The
poems are beautiful in their formal features—especially, image,
rhythm, music, and lyricism—exhibiting sonorous and poignant
elements. Though, in my opinion, Polanco's “voice” is not
nihilistic, the language is “indeterminate,” as if he is saying
to us, “The situation is dire, but I do not have the answers.” In
the first, title, poem, “COWBOY,” “the world is no longer
enough” [3], and, symbolized by “a prosthesis,” the prototype
of a reckless, wandering, unmoored man travels
on this sea rubbed raw by the coast, on
a raft that
you can pull apart and with its two
parts make a cross that
flaps like a flag, like the waves of
this bilious sea, this sea
from which a sacred body's scabs
emerge, from a swell-
ing. This raft on which I float is a
stump and I'm riding
it cowboy-style, riding my stump over
the bile, people
will say they saw me mounted on a white
swan, they'll
say that they saw me, but it will be a
lie, it will be my raft,
the stump-raft I ride, and I too am a
stump... [4]
Using the signs, “stump,”
“mutilation,” and “prosthesis,” Polanco begins his book by
introducing us to the spectre of loss and erasure, a theme continued
in the second poem, “CONFUSION”—“Did he throw himself into
the river?” / “Yes, he was confused.” [5] Both poems appear in
experimental form, employing prose, unconventional lineation, and
varying use of capitalization.
The third, untitled, poem is introduced
by a two-part drawing of a gun and bullets, a foreboding image,
again, of loss and erasure—taken one step further into method.
Partially-appropriated text accompanies the image, and we are warned,
“This bullet is not a bird. Although it invents itself in the air.”
[8] Continuing themes of erasure and, now, death, poem four, “HEAD
OF A DEAD MAN,” is inspired by an ancient stone statue. This poem
appears to be entirely appropriated with erased components and
sentences situated irregularly combined with other “defamiliarized”
elements mentioned before.
Poem five, “Posthumous Instructions
for My Body,” is dedicated to Peter Handke, the controversial
co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. This piece is
crafted as a conversation between two individuals—the deceased
person's “voice” [Polanco's?] and the listener/respondent. This
poem is one that would appeal to Handke, capturing his sardonic mien:
“First of all crush // all // the bones // until they're
compacted.” // “And then?” // “Then (after you cherish them)
// char them well // until they become powder (after laughing
louder).” [10] A footnote includes information appropriated, no
doubt, from corporate advertising, about a process to transform ashes
of a loved one into “authentic diamonds,” “a one-of-a-kind way
to reencounter the intact beauty of your beloved.” [11]
The final poem, “Multitasking,” is
a 5-part prose text including dark content and “dark humor,” as
Galvin has described Polanco's sensibilities [“This party is fun,
right?” (15)]...
2
Something's coming, I know that
something is coming. Perhaps
a storm or a caste of birdmen with
cassocks, but something, a
fistful of fists, a grain of salt on
the tongue, is going to come. I don't
know what, but something is coming […]
a hurricane
of marmots, a gang of winged tigers, a
bird that vomits bombs... [12]
Polanco's Cowboy & Other Poems
left me with a bittersweet taste in my mouth combined with feelings
that, while it is important for radical poets to disrupt the status
quo, we must be wary of negativity and defeatism. On the other
hand, in her translator's note, Galvin quotes the critic, Luis Felipe
Fabre, as saying that Polanco “opposes a poetry of silence—an
aseptic, apolitical, 'pure' poetry—with the noise of the world, the
sound of the background, a brutal and ungraspable landscape quickly
glimpsed through the small window of a train in motion.” [17] In
Cowboy & Other Poems, the author's “train” is moving
very rapidly, for sure, toward, it would seem, a future not well
envisioned but, also, not wholly devoid of “epistemic virtue.” If
poets are the bearers of ethics as well as truth, we can understand
Polanco to be a messenger of the existential crises of the 21st
Century, indeed, of the Anthropocene, itself. The moral question is
whether we have the will to save ourselves from dystopian scenarios,
and, if so, how? Cowboy & Other Poems is a good place to
begin to consider the gravity of the human condition. Galvin's
sensitive and durable translation highlights a young poet who
deserves an international audience.
Sunday, January 12, 2020
Sunday, December 1, 2019
Review of The War on Christmas by Brandon Brown & J. Gordon Faylor [Clara B. Jones]
The
War on Christmas
Brandon
Brown*, J. Gordon Faylor*
December
2018
Self-published,
limited edition pamphlet [Oakland/El Cerrito, California],
“...distributed by 'word of mouth'...either given out in person or
mailed to friends/family/etc. Something of a nod to Jack Spicer who
would never distribute his books outside of the Bay Area...I have a
bunch of copies of The
War on Christmas
and can always make more as needed.” [Communication via
email to Clara B. Jones from J. Gordon Faylor, 2/8/2019]
Unpaginated
[32 pp]
A
book review in innovative sonnet form by Clara B. Jones. Lines of
poetry appearing in italics are from The
War on Christmas.
“What
is the relationship of such an 'enigma text' to the poetry of High
Modernism?” Marjorie Perloff
1
The
War on Christmas,
The War on Poverty, The War on Drugs, The War on Terror, The War on
Pleasure, The War on Childhood, The War on Western Civilization, The
War on White Males, The War on War, The War on Modernism, The War on
Truth: “The
utter tranquility of an abandoned / Wasteland, where even the hawks /
Picking apart the rotten carcass of a / Guinea pig bite in quietude.”
2
Brown
and Faylor “defamiliarize” Christmas from religious observance,
to commodified holiday, to symbolism, to metaphor. Their description
of elves is not how we imagine them, though Viktor Shklovsky would
enjoy reading this pamphlet.
3
Hard/soft
rhyming: “Come
here, little winter robin, belly so bright; / sit on Santa's stool
and tell me of your world / where kites fly high in the wind / across
the fields, gossiping daisies alight....”
4
“I
wrote about what I didn't see. The experience that eluded me somehow
intrigued me more than the one I was having....” John Ashbery
5
“Dear
J. Gordon Faylor, Dear Brandon / Brown, Dear Comrades: Thanks for /
Extinguishing the need for a Christmas. / Now every day is a goddam
candy cane. / Cheers to you all. Love, Children.”
And no one will find coal and ashes on Christmas morn ever again!
6
“I
can feel these positive fats / And complex antioxidants fortifying /
My body against illness and the sad / Passions of life.”
All well and good; but, do we still get to eat plum pudding?
7
“The
words 'expressionism' and 'expressionist' first cropped up in the art
literature around 1911, initially as blanket terms for avant-garde
art in Europe around the turn of the century.” Norbert Wolf
8
“Whenever
life unearths you / ruthless, sparks injury or ill / red devils
burgeoning under skin / to try and kill you and your soul, deliver /
thyself to the Christmas Hospital.”
[Clara vividly recalls the strange feeling in her gut when her father
drove her to the Richmond (Va) Children's Hospital on Brook Road on
Christmas Eve in 1949 to stare at the building where kids with polio
were housed.]
9
Combinations
of words and phrases seem to make sense at first; but Brown &
Faylor are playing “language games.”
10
La'Toya:
What does this stanza make you think about, Jamal?—“The
permanent fixture of the sun
/ permits
no life the absence of light
/ in
our world, as you know we scrounge,
/ and
must, like mice for the germ
/ of
a voracious reality.”**—Jamal:
'Honkies' control the banks and the media.
11
Symbolism,
a loosely organized literary and artistic movement that originated
with a group of French poets in the late 19th century, spread to
painting and the theatre, and influenced the European and American
literatures of the 20th century to varying degrees. [Retrieved from
internet, 10/7/19]
12
“And
what, you asked me, of Christmas angels? / We were sitting in the
Plaza de Janeiro / Eating a rol de guyaba, one of the world's crucial
/ Pastries. Annoying little hairless dogs / Bit at the stone feet of
the huge replica of the David / Which rises up from soil in the
middle of the park / And bares its head for the shit of birds.”
[Poetics is as useful to angels as Ornithology is to birds.]
13
“Act
so that there is no use in a centre.” Gertrude Stein
14
“To
maintain the hush of another / Christmas, barreling through the /
Long silent night to be born.”
And, who doesn't like W.B. Yeats?
“And
a very Merry Christmas / to all and to all a good night!”
*Brandon
Brown and J. Gordon Faylor are poets and editors living in El
Cerrito, and Oakland, California, respectively.
**Italics
in original
Sunday, November 3, 2019
this hall of several tortures by Reuben Woolley (Reviewed by Clara B. Jones, 10/2019)
this hall of several tortures
Reuben Woolley
2019
Knives, Forks, and Spoons [KFS] Press, UK
103 pp
10 British Pounds
Reviewed by Clara B. Jones in Entropy, October 2019
“What is the 'right' poetry game to be played today?” Marjorie Perloff
It is 9/26/2019. I am seated at home at my desk, having completed my third reading of a pre-publication document of Reuben Woolley's new poetry collection, this hall of several tortures. Because of the poems' effects on my imagination and thinking, I am compelled to write a review while the compositions are vivid in my memory. Like all of the author's works, these poems can be classified as “innovative” and “experimental,” the latter term notoriously difficult to define. In this review, I follow the Russian Formalist, Viktor Shklovsky, who wrote that experimental poetry “defamiliarizes” common speech or makes it “strange” by way of deploying a variety of “devices” or “techniques” [e.g., collage, erasure, repetition, indeterminance]. In this review, I will reference the poetry critic, Marjorie Perloff's, treatment of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical project, in part, because, Woolley, an Englishman living in Spain and a highly-regarded poet and editor, has studied linguistics and has recommended Perloff''s wide-ranging examination of Wittgenstein [University of Chicago Press, 1996]. this hall of several tortures is dedicated to poets Fran Lock, Antony Owen, and Jerome Rothenberg, and the stunning cover image by Dean Pasch portends a handsomely-produced volume.
The 68 poems in this book represent a cohesively arranged collection since they constitute a plot in the context of a “multiverse,” an “alternate reality” where we follow a young woman's dystopian experiences. As Woolley stated recently on Facebook, the concept of the “multiverse” has been central to much literature, represented in Science Fiction [e.g., Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling], as well as, “straight lit” [e.g., George Orwell, Aldous Huxley]. In the academic literature, this hall of several tortures would be classified as “impossible worlds” writing, exhibiting, in particular, according to the American critic, Marie Laure Ryan, a “dream-like reality” with “fluid images” and “a general lack of ontological stability.” In Woolley's words, “I do not care if [the “multiverse”] actually exists....This [“parallel”] world...is seen by [the young woman] as [a] dystopian planet.... The first person in the poems is not me, the poet, but her. This is fiction based on a frequently unpleasant reality.”
It is important to point out, however, that many poems in this new collection include commentary by a second party situated on the right-hand side of a given page [e.g., “she said”], commentary directed to him, the author—according to Woolley in an interview in The Wombell Rainbow [UK]—situated in a space that is unspecified. This structure is reminiscent of Greek tragedy whereby a character [in this case, the young woman] speaks to a chorus [in this case, Woolley, the poet, himself]; although, in this hall of several tortures, the poet-receiver of the “I” voice does not, apparently, influence, the young woman. That there may be communication between the young woman and the poet, leads one to suggest, however, that the relationship can be interpreted as a form of “doubling” or “twinning” whereby the persona of each performer is difficult to untangle—signaling a type of symbiosis. Following this idea, the reader might wonder whether there is, in fact, any separation at all between speaker and receiver. Are we, possibly, inhabiting a dream generated by the poet's unconscious? Is the book derived from Surrealism and that movement's promulgation of Freudian theory? Even more interesting, perhaps, is the possibility that the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan's, concept, “mirroring,” describes the relation [literary, figurative] between young woman-speaker and poet-receiver or that each is “Other” to the “Other.” Further, feminist psychoanalyst critics would explore the implied relationship between older male poet and younger female subject [Father? Mentor? Teacher? Lover?]. However the reader decodes or makes sense of Woolley's new compositions—subjectively, textually, or theoretically—the book will prove to be a rich source of interpretive material—bounded only by the collection's plot.
A single poem [p 13], below, serves to illustrate additional “devices” employed by Woolley—conventions readily recognizable throughout his oeuvre:
turn
the page over she said
the holes the holes do not come
empty.i dig through a time
a matter coincides
& we occupy the room together.who said
she could not fold a world
away & bring another
skin / another tired foundling
in our dark shells &
never speaking.oh the shit
of it all on both our sides
we scratch a putrid sore
in our reflections
& bleed a waiting speech
on the earths of undelight
the holes the holes do not come
empty.i dig through a time
a matter coincides
& we occupy the room together.who said
she could not fold a world
away & bring another
skin / another tired foundling
in our dark shells &
never speaking.oh the shit
of it all on both our sides
we scratch a putrid sore
in our reflections
& bleed a waiting speech
on the earths of undelight
Perloff goes on to point out that Wittgenstein was “obsessed not only with the 'power of ordinary words,' but with their strangeness.” One might say the same of Woolley. Throughout the hall of several tortures, the poet frequently begins common words with, “un,” as in “undelight,” in the poem above. Perloff states that Wittgenstein saw no fundamental difference between “ordinary and literary language,” a viewpoint consistent with Woolley's straightforward and unpretentious, though, not simplistic, use of syntax, including, word usage. Perloff , also, discusses Wittgenstein's perspective that “certain things cannot be said, they can only be shown: There is indeed the inexpressible.” Like Woolley's use of the word, “shit” in “turn the page over she said,” the poet often uses taboo words to express emotion in place of using literal language—rather than attempt to describe a state of being or events in the world . These taboo words may, also, symbolize or take the place of thoughts [in the present case, possibly, “I understand.” or “Yes.” or “Really?” or “OK”], in addition to a range of emotions [possibly, contentment, acceptance, protectiveness, or awe]. Importantly, Wittgenstein pointed out that, where words are repeated [repetition characterizing many experimental poems—see, especially, Stein], they must be evaluated in context; thus, the “function” of words is expected to change from location to location in a text.
Like the recently deceased, Steve Dalachinsky, Reuben Woolley might be called a “jazz poet”—influenced by the “free jazz” musical movement, and he has sometimes discussed his poetics in interviews and online. In the online literary journal, The Wombell Rainbow [UK], for example, Woolley stated, “I like to think I write Free Poetry. Any word or image can go anywhere, but only the really good poet can recognise that place and allow the word or image to go there....” Because of this poet's literary, intentional, and contextual skills, this hall of several tortures is a book that will be valuable, not only for its literary and artistic import, but, also, as a text amenable to “close reading” by academics, critics, and other readers valuing music and image combined with rich texture, as well as, innovative, “impressionistic” language and plot. As well, the collection can be entered solely for the pleasure of experiencing compelling “abstract” art —one of Woolley's major influences. His new collection is certain to attract a wide audience—well-deserved attention for a noteworthy practitioner of avant garde poetry.
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