free classroom sets, update

We still have a few boxes left. If you would like a free classroom set of VERSE, follow the above link. We'll cover the shipping. You just need to give the magazine to your students.

Ron Padgett, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Ron Padgett

HOW TO

When people ask me
if I write with a computer
or by hand I pause,
for it’s a question
I do not find interesting
anymore. Forty years ago
I saw how Ted’s old typewriter
fit his bricklike writing one
word-brick at a time, and how
my lightweight portable with French
keyboard let me whiz along
as if halfway in another language.
Now I write with words
that never were mine nor will
they ever be. A demon inside
says I do not write at all.

VERSE now open to submissions

VERSE is now open to submissions. You can submit a chapbook's worth of material to the print magazine or a smaller contribution to the VERSE site. Follow the link above for details.

We will accept material on a rolling basis, so it's better to submit early during the submission period (especially for the print magazine, which will feature just 12-20 contributors).

Over the next couple of weeks, we will post some material from our new print issue. The 15 contributors to that issue, none of whom had appeared in VERSE before, are

Anselm Berrigan
Garrett Caples
Lidija Dimkovska
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Landis Everson
Kathleen Fraser
Pierre Joris
Gerard Mace
Nathaniel Mackey
Bernadette Mayer
Jennifer Moxley
Michael Palmer
Ron Padgett
Susan Stewart
Catherine Wagner

more free classroom sets of VERSE

We've unearthed some more boxes of VERSE, so if you requested but didn't receive a free classroom set of VERSE back in April/May, please let us know by submitting a comment below with your name and mailing address. We won't publish the comments, but will use them to send out boxes on a first-come, first-served basis. We have about a dozen boxes left.

Or if you did not request a box earlier but would like a box of VERSE for your students (free, postage paid by us), please leave your address in a comment below and we'll send you one within the week.

NEW! Poem by Michaël Vandebril

Michaël Vandebril

STARI BEOGRAD

one-stringed city that perpetually
severs my wrists

nothing to grieve about

I gorge on gluey blood

an army of young gents marches to a dogged beat
dancing across the water--fresh water dreams

like pigs drawn from the river

I look at your young breasts
while you give your mouth to another man

--like a drunken bird
its wings slithering along the bars--

you sing an ancient anthem of the city
and beograd sings softly with you

o white thighs of the balkans
on which I lay my greedy hands


Translated by Brian Doyle

NEW! Review of Baude, Ramos, Ross

The Flying House by Dawn-Michelle Baude. Parlor Press (Free Verse Editions), $14.

Please Do Not Feed the Ghost by Peter Ramos. BlazeVOX Books, $16.

Strata by Joe Ross. Dusie Books, $15.

Reviewed by Andy Frazee

In her endnotes, Dawn-Michelle Baude calls the poems of The Flying House “site-specific writing,” the core of which is “the idea that presence—of the writer, of the word, and of the subject—is intrinsic to the work of art.” She goes on to note how “the act of writing became for me an historical ‘site’ . . . Actual details, conditions and circumstances litter the poems with a story of their making.” With the exception of the staggering, fragmented prose poetry of “Postcards from Ir)Rational Lands,” the poems here are themselves “littered” (probably the better word is “positioned”) down the page; like archeological digs, these excavations work to reveal the intertwined strata of self, place, and language:

                            I was late, delayed

               by a ground fog
           a mistral, a heron
                   I found a piece
                         it was missing
             clung to the rock
the displaced plain
                     I found a number of mirrors

In the nine poems—mostly sequences—of the book, one, the “Fieldwork” series, reappears periodically throughout and serves as both structural principle and investigative model, developing the archeological-historical trope of “site-specific” in full. One is reminded of Emerson’s notion of language as “fossil poetry”—and here Baude’s use of the page, full of a syntactic tension derived from the Projectivist techniques of Olson and Duncan (Baude, in fact, studied with the latter), gives the “ruins . . . we’ve inherited” new life, as in “Fieldwork III”:

             excavated lines
         some spare misfortune at the extremity
                 of provenance          accumulations,

     signs of the imminent
             ruins      what we’ve inherited—

         meandering depictions          odd metaphors,
on the flickering screens
            of the unconscious self
                     thin and liminal

Implied in Baude’s notion of the site-specific, and in her loyalty to the historical and contextual, is a notion of witness. “The Beirut Poems” sequence in particular works to image the violence Baude saw during her time in Lebanon, deftly—through consideration of the teaching she did there—weaving in a discourse of poetry in tension with the destruction going on around her. In section V—a section beginning, “Because the wheelbarrow is red”—the poet juxtaposes the work of William Carlos Williams to the proximate turbulence, and meditates on what use poetry may have in such a world:

                 the rain glazes
       the object that’s attractive
but a friend is in excruciating pain
                   where the good doctor
         applies image to a wound
                     no medicine can ever
     heal.

While this witness isn’t completely divergent from “the poetry of witness” outlined in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting anthology and elsewhere, Baude’s witness implies an attention to the local that is always necessarily political, and is not limited to the singular, catastrophic event. In these poems, the process of the present becoming the past is itself an unending catastrophe of loss. One of the motifs of the book is that of the explosion, one both literal and metaphorical, and the history we are given is the post-detonation “history of gaps, disparity, lacunae” one must both attempt to understand and live within. While the notion of “post-detonation” may lead one to thoughts of “post-9/11,” it is important to recognize that here 9/11 is a recurrence, one catastrophe within many, if not infinitely many. Baude’s witness, thereby, is a kind of attention to the real, the present, the ongoingness of history—it is a mode of being in the world, of being responsible for what one sees and where one is, rather than a response to any particular event.

In this sense, Baude’s archeological-poetic investigation is necessarily also an investigation into the self, as we find it in the world and in language. On the page the “I” is itself figured as a kind of relic—or, more precisely, as a relic among relics; it is “a memory / (family) / (origin) / the artifact” lodged within “the context / of ages / the reliquary.” Ultimately, the book suggests, it is presence, this particular site-specificity in the world and on the page, that allows for the “I” to “orient the resonant fields of association,” thereby “constituting an artifact, its own, a document // in perpetual process and acts of formation.” Recognizing its own constitution as an artifact (though, importantly, as an artifact-in-process), the poem implies, allows the “I” a kind of awe, if not wisdom:

         to let the circle predominate

                 the fluent          the continuous

               no matter how deep

how very          high          overhead

With her concern with history, place, and formal experimentation, Baude positions herself firmly in the Pound-Williams-Olson tradition, and The Flying House extends that lineage nobly, giving us a vision not only of the world and of language, but also of our places in them—a vision not only historical but, as Baude suggests, urgent. “I detected letters in the profusion / a world of shadows // omissions,” the poet writes in “Fieldwork I.” “[H]ow else to know where we’re going // I pluck, gather, salvage what I can.”

*

In Please Do Not Feed the Ghost, Peter Ramos also performs a kind of historical investigation, though while Baude’s work feeds off that of Olson and Duncan, Ramos’s project is more in line with the Robert Lowell of Life Studies. Whatever lukewarm autobiographical verse Lowell’s work may have inadvertently unleashed on American poetry, Ramos takes up what continues to make Life Studies important: a recognition that selfhood is never self-contained, but is a performance that operates within, is even constructed by, the demands of family, desire, and national life—demands which in the work of both poets may take place years before their births.

Ramos’s subject in the most general sense is nostalgia, and the threat of the desire to indulge in it. Specifically, the book deals with the risk of not seeing the past as it needs to be seen, or in replacing the past with a myth that only serves to reinforce one’s illusions—personal or national—in the present. And in this sense the work is as much an exploration of the implications of the autobiographical or confessional mode as it is an example of it. Thus the book opens with the (aptly) quasi-autobiographical, quasi-dramatic delivery of “John Berryman in my Dreams,” where the speaker functions both as Berryman and as the poet dreaming of being Berryman:

Blacking out in some basement café, crowded
And alone in the sad mid century, I come back & go on
Hunting powder-puff angels, the pan-caked faces

Under bangs cut straight, the puckered mouths wet
With lipstick. Then do I move through night, glass
After each empty glass—am I all right?

In this mode of the late-night urban underbelly, the cover of the book, a video still, shows an update of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks—this time of two solitary figures inside a fluorescent-lit Laundromat. The window, as in the painting, puts us at a distance, in the role of voyeurs, with the figures inside like zoo animals. Ramos’s poems are filled with such ghosts of “the sad mid-century,” specters that waver between the worlds of objective presentation and the subjective “return of the repressed.” The former consideration takes into account the poet’s responsibility to the people he renders; “How will you speak for them?” the speaker of “The Put-Together Wedding Cake” asks, speaking, presumably, of his own newlywed parents:

The groom is learning the language, dull-eyed
for remembering what they said: “America the gold
and golden fleece!” The bride thinks of daffodils
which turn to kitchen gloves.

The latter consideration takes into account how those independent agents become figures in one’s own psychology, and of how one uses others in the construction of personality, if not neuroses. Not feeding the ghosts involves not transgressing the boundaries that define ghosts’ uncanny nature, lest they bring you back with them: “October, color gone from the wheat / and you straggle back,” begins the title poem,

your mouth
full of loam, jacket lined with rot, crazy
as the leaves.

Each time I try to sleep you off, hoping winter
will stamp its feet, sober you up.
But the hallways soften. You
stuff me full of mothballs.

But, as the poems indicate again and again, it is just this feeding of ghosts, this return to the sites of origination and loss, where historical and psychological understanding resides, despite the risks.

The poems here, while operating from an autobiographical center, consistently seek to enlarge the context of that core, often taking a genealogical tack in dramatizing the characters of Ramos’s family, as in “The Put-Together Wedding Cake” above. The poet further broadens the landscape in approaching various notions of “America,” as in the tarnished vision of consumerism in “Mid-Century Modern”:

They rust now in the innards,
in the plumbing’s guts. Under linoleum,
secret in dry-wall, torn paper, they
bloom beneath layers of paint.
They are jewels in pitch glue,
asleep in the bracebeams.

These concerns—the autobiographical-genealogical and the historical—come together in the long sequence “Watching Late-Night Hitchcock,” which takes cues from both Lowell and Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred, giving us a familial mini-epic of pre- and post-war Americana. In this poem, as throughout the book, the threat of a utopian nostalgia is undercut by the self-destructive grotesquery of the American underbelly—we find late-night cocktail lounges, alcoholics, and “dye-job” blondes, which in other hands may have devolved into nth-generation rehashes of Bukowski. Ramos endows these images, however, with precise description and an undeniable authority of voice—and with turns toward the disquieting and peculiar too concretely imagined to be merely surreal: “We like things clean: the boat flag / snapping in the breeze, // the platinum bee hive / sipping gin from a bird bath.”

As a worthy heir to Lowell’s undiluted project, Ramos’s quirky and often unsettling poems, far from repeating the formula of languid confessionalism, focus our attention on the particulars of the past, and how those particulars form their own kind of personal and shared mythology—one tantalizing, worthy of critique, and, in its capacity to overwhelm the self, frightening. But, the book suggests, we have no choice but to confront it, and to be responsible in understanding our role within it: “The green glass / dust between and all around us / is also too brilliant”—and, Ramos writes, “too excruciating to overlook.”

*

In his Autobiography, William Carlos Williams claims that the “difficulty” of poetry “is to catch the evasive life of the thing, to phrase the words in such a way that stereotype will yield a moment of insight.” In Joe Ross’s Strata the difficulty the poet sets for himself is less in catching the evasive thing, than in catching evasiveness itself—and the insight is in discovering that the insightful moment is always already lost. The fifty-two short poems here are, in the best sense of the phrase, hard to grasp; they pointedly enact the slipperiness, the fleetingness—not only of the moment, of the real, but of the speech that attempts to convey that moment’s actuality, “[w]hen the / knot finally slips and the world comes back,

When tomorrow correctly takes its place as today.
We began to talk but quickly chased the words away.
We put in a symbol, let it be A. It
immediately left for Not A. How to address this.

Though their true forebear (if we are to choose only one) is more probably Robert Creeley, Strata’s poems, following Stevens, “resist the intelligence almost successfully” in their attempts to capture that gap in time between the thing, its perception, and one’s speaking of it. The moment (“let it be A”) is always infinitely displaced by the discourses of the just after (“Not A”), and the just after displaced into further Not A’s. In those lost moments, the uncanny gaps between the prior to, pregnant with what is the “now,” and the now itself, already displaced, Ross situates the poem as what transcribes A’s leaving for Not A—not the thing itself, not A, but the trace of its passage.

As what populates this gap, what signifies the absent, lost moment, the poem is also what transcends or trans-verses the in-between of otherness. It is, from the point of view of the reader, that there (the recording of someone else’s saying) that is always here (present and immediate in its physical manifestation on the page). “This place, place one puts,” the poet writes in “Here,” “is now, is ever.” In this sense, in Ross’s poems, as in Baude’s, “the act of writing [becomes] an historical ‘site.’” While both poets in this way transcribe the loss of the present-tense of writing into the past-tense of the written, it is Ross who dramatizes it most fully. On each level of the book, from the sequence of the discrete, titled lyrics, to the syntax of each poem’s phrases, Ross emphasizes this displacement of moments and the loss that displacement creates:

This perfect, an act.
Resplendent palm slight of –
Gone from view, those few
we seldom thought of for fear
or its lack. A sudden not speaking
where only yesterday teased into or away
from permanence.

Ross further dramatizes this movement in the ambiguity of how we see the book as a whole. Is it as a collection of discrete lyrics, as the individual titles suggest? Or are we to see it as a poetic sequence or series? The book’s epigraph—“52 is some kind of magic number, isn’t it?”—suggests the latter, positing that these poems are to be seen in the movement of the weeks of the year, each week, and each poem, displacing the one previous, with the previous still present (printed on the page) in a palimpsest of memory and history. The ambiguity seems intentional in that we are persistently made aware of the gaps between the poems, and of our attempts to draw a continuity among them. Coupled with the content of the poems, we are drawn to what is not said, to what happens in between the poems, even as the poems are pointing outside of themselves, to the prior to, to the margin. Each section is both its own center (emphasized by the titles) and, at the same time, peripheral to all the others, and this schema extrapolates into the political: “The shallows / collapse. What was built upon mere sticks or the backs / of the lesser. The coal of civilization about to be / forgotten.” And: “To take up / arms or to reach out.”

While undeniably engaged with philosophical and theoretical discourses, these poems are—equally undeniably—poems of a lyrical moment, suggesting, intriguingly, that the instance of critical inquiry is as worthy of the heightened language of lyrical artifice as any other. In tension with the relative tonal flatness and syntactic gaps reminiscent of Language poetics we also find in the book, the poems often enact their investigations through a palpable music and an elegiac mood:

The words won’t
come, or do and not connected to
memories severed link of an attachment
to all that was, all that was once
the person on the end of bed.

These, and other pleasures generally considered “traditional”—an attention to the natural world, a hint at the loss of love, to name two—make Strata’s complex epistemological considerations an engaging, if not exhilarating, read. “Looking out / into the next break, we pause. / Frozen into stare, the eye cannot help / see itself,” Ross writes in the last poem of the book—one titled, aptly, “Beauty.”

Recent & Recommended

C.S. Giscombe, Prairie Style (Dalkey Archive)
William Pettit, Ghost Songs (Casagrande)
Jason Whitmarsh, Tomorrow's Living Room (Utah State)

contents of new issue of Verse

Anselm Berrigan (excerpts from two long poems)

Garrett Caples (poems plus part of Philip Lamantia's Tau)

Lidija Dimkovska (novel excerpt plus poems)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis (long poem)

Landis Everson (23 of his last poems)

Kathleen Fraser (nonfiction, poetry, letter, translations)

Pierre Joris (interview, poems, translations)

Gerard Mace (photographs, essay)

Nathaniel Mackey (poems)

Bernadette Mayer (poems)

Jennifer Moxley (essays)

Michael Palmer (essay)

Ron Padgett (poems)

Susan Stewart (poems)

Catherine Wagner (excerpt from verse drama)


456 pages / 15 contributors

$15 (postage paid)

Verse
English Department
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173

new Verse

Berrigan
Caples
Dimkovska
DuPlessis
Everson
Fraser
Joris
Mace
Mackey
Mayer
Moxley
Palmer
Padgett
Stewart
Wagner

456 pages

$15

Verse
English Department
University of Richmond
Richmond VA 23173

help save Salt!

http://www.saltpublishing.com/blogs/confidential.php?itemid=622

Recent & Recommended

Andrew Joron, The Sound Mirror (Flood)
Timothy Liu, Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse (Talisman)
Bernadette Mayer, Poetry State Forest (New Directions)
Jennifer Moxley, Clampdown (Flood)
Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House)
Tomaz Salamun, There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair (Counterpath)

Submissions

Verse will re-open to submissions in summer 2009. In keeping with the magazine’s new annual format (the current issue is 450 pages long, with 15 contributors), our submissions policy has changed.

You can submit to the print magazine or to the Verse site.

Submissions for the print magazine should be chapbook-length (20-40 pages), in any genre or combination of genres--poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translations, criticism, interviews, journals/notebooks, images, etc. Everything in the submission must be unpublished.

Submissions for the Verse site should consist of 3-5 poems or a book/music/film/game review.

Submission period: July 15 to November 14 (postmark).

Submissions received outside the submission period will be recycled or returned unread.

We will respond to submissions on a rolling basis, beginning in August. We plan to notify everyone within 10 weeks. (Acceptances might take slightly longer.)

Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but for submissions to the print magazine, you must withdraw your entire submission if something in your submission is accepted elsewhere. If work is withdrawn from consideration, no substitutions will be allowed. For submissions to the VERSE site, you may withdraw individual pieces.

Please include a SASE for response. If you want your work returned, include sufficient postage on the SASE.

Reading fee (for submissions to the print magazine): $10 (cash or check/money order to VERSE).

Everyone submitting work to the print magazine will receive a free copy of Verse (cover price $12-15).

All contributors to the print magazine will receive $200 (possibly more) plus two copies and a one-year subscription.

There is no reading fee for submissions to the Verse site and no payment for contributors to the Verse site.

All submissions to the print magazine will also be considered for the VERSE site, so if a portfolio isn't selected for the print magazine, individual pieces still might be accepted for the VERSE site.

Mail all submissions to:

VERSE
English Department
University of Richmond
Richmond VA 23173

Neutral Milk Hotel musical

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1485833

NEW! Review of David Lau

Virgil and the Mountain Cat by David Lau. University of California Press, $16.95.

Reviewed by Douglas Piccinnini

“[M]ost not alive, I wasn’t afraid to die,” affirms the speaker in “Civil War,” from David Lau’s first book, Virgil and the Mountain Cat. “Civil War,” like many poems in this collection, maneuvers with razored precision through contemporary and historical dramas. Lau approaches his subjects with quick, lean, gestures and offers portraits of civilization doubled over, brought on by what seems to be the effects of late Capitalism. “Civil War” begins:

I read, I write, I hate my life word after word.
Telescoping Mercury remains
a Septembrist in burglary,
eyebrows an overthrow

spring, snaky splinter
signal to another season, oppositional
turn back on the first day of the new?
The more mortal each jealous mischief/

All men are murderers the more the uneaten
fell out of charge as poems without words
(& i.e. etc. / CSPN e.g. Enron
found in the anthology of aging aleatory broadsides),

Lau’s syntactical constructions and deconstructions surprise and deliver meaning in parts equally fresh and astringent. The enjambed second line of “Civil War” carries on for six lines and, while failing the needs of more conventional grammar and syntax, this movement achieves a kind linguistic acrobatics. In the first stanza, the interplay of the repetition of “I” in the long “i” sounds found in “I read, I write, I hate my life” shifts in the second stanza to the short “i” sounds and consonance of “spring, snaky splinter / signal.” This type of craftsmanship endures throughout Virgil and the Mountain Cat, and the result is an often-jarring collection of poems that resist ah-ha! moments and succeed in their ability to enlarge the dimensions of expressive language and communicate complex and elusive swatches of reality.

In “Going Out,” a runway of visions magnifies a pre-apocalyptic age, yet the speaker does not seem to exist on the precipitous edge of doom, but instead merely accepts the dysfunctional as a surrogate for normalcy.

You say nuclear; I say nuclear.
What kind of word is together?
On Cadmium dunes we treasure our Celts.
A plane to parachute from, a city: you want the radio:
if you want the radio for free charge the living: you have to,
ladies and dental plans. Sprig of mint
on the bib ineffective against further
spread of contagion.
In pain like a blouse,
this period is a peacock
in our history: drive the continent apart:
one lung left in the window
display of the BBQ restaurant.

Despite the loaded-gun feel of “nuclear” appearing twice in the first line, Lau manages a bit of humor in homophonically translating the formal address of “ladies and gentlemen” to “ladies and dental plans” and in doing so swings the mood of the poem (though the tone never achieves lightheartedness). Beyond the casual critique of “this period is a peacock / in our history,” “Going Out” continues to scrutinize what it means to exist in the 21st century. The poem’s later mention of the “[c]ity at the growth spurts of a city” and “your interior tangle of wires” suggests an imbalance between internal and external features of existence.

Perhaps, the burden of generation after generation of artists and writers is to feel as if civilization is at its most critical moment, a world wanting to snap off the orbital grid shot perilously into space. And though the end is perpetually near, Lau seems all too familiar with this burden, and successfully shrugs off the what-happens-after features of human egotism and instead navigates the ceaseless traumas of existence.

The book’s penultimate and title poem, “Virgil and the Mountain Cat,” points toward an empire at its twilight, flickering in however long its dusk may last,

I was thinking I would like to own this house. Then I fell. Under
hat, stone, cent, moss. Cranberry season into black smoke
season. Plus a knife in the branchy flophouse.

She was coming at certain daytime, with interest. We were getting
ready. Carried dishes that smelled like a hoax candle in the
empty room. Nighttime followed the switch the guards used to
guard everywhere it went on the mountain. As she, this changed.

And:

Knew. Knew alert. Those alarums her boy had bargained to us.
The glow would lightbulb around his head as the sun banged
down the western slope. The newspaper headline reported foreign
container ships’ rust flakes profuse in the harbor. So we were
telling. It hadn’t happened yet.

As the shore sounded.

The portentous feeling, which lurks throughout “Virgil and the Mountain Cat,” is delayed in its fruition as the speaker notes, “It hadn’t happened yet.” However the final poem, “Jellyfish,” formally address the ostensible source of this feeling, and begins “Dear XX century,” and goes on to condemn the spineless 20th Century as an age that has burned in a kind of hellfire. “Jellyfish” continues,

no one can darken skies like,

have you even been in meaning?

the forest on fire grows and glows
with sediment gorges hauled by

the clinking antiquated chain gaff:
words are worms more than what it’s not:

“The Unnamable” “The H Age”

a fucking sick hello, hymeneal subjoinder
from the whole fire and the sick

Colorfully dense, Virgil and the Mountain Cat is a rewarding book that demands rigorous attention as Lau constructs and deconstructs his subjects. Much like an Abstract Expressionist painter, Lau uses a kind of mark-making to engage with the materiality of language, and explores the semantic and sonic possibilities of verbal and ideological expression, while avoiding non-representational babble.

A detail of Cy Twombly’s Tiznit (1953) aptly adorns the cover of Virgil and the Mountain Cat, and subsequent images of Tiznit act as gateways to the book’s three sections. In a rare, published statement, Cy Twombly once proclaimed, “one must desire the ultimate essence even if it is ‘contaminated.’” Lau neither insists on nor resists presenting “contaminated” or dystopic visions in his poems. The presence of Twombly’s visual cues reminds a reader of Virgil and the Mountain Cat of not only the gestural intimacy and immediacy of art but also its ability to provoke and disturb. Twombly’s graffiti-like scratches on the canvas convey the limits of the application of his materials. The effect in Tiznit is that of raw (though intentional) rakes of color, which question not only the formal elements of painting as a medium, but the medium itself. And Lau, like Twombly, achieves a heightened connection to his subjects in an almost violent application/presentation of his materials. And for both Twombly and Lau, this complicates their authorial connection to creation, as the act of creation involves a condemnation and/or a potential dismantling of their subjects, the medium and its history.

NEW! Review of Jennifer Moss

Beast, to Be Your Friend by Jennifer Moss. New Michigan Press, $8.

Reviewed by Sara Lockery

Jennifer Moss’ Beast, to Be Your Friend is a collection of dense, kaleidoscopic poems whose dynamic energy propels the reader through a world in which trapdoors hallucinate, clouds are “arranged by pain,” and “smoke rises like seraphim.” Sharp, burnished, and fiercely original, Moss’ poetic voice animates the static and grants precision to the most intangible and abstract of concepts. In fact, the atmosphere is oftentimes just as (if not more) alive than the poem’s subject. Skies “noose” horses and “rush over startled skins,” sentences and voices “uncoil over the square acres,” “fasten down the land,” and “twist in the air.” Tension and contrast are alive, not only in the form, which fluctuates between narrative past and the lyrical present, but also in style and tone, which alter from mythological and detached to distinct and personalized.

One staple of Moss’ poetry is the ambiguity of the speaker’s attitude toward her subject. For example, in “Ducking in and out of Shadows,” the goat is initially portrayed in a sympathetic, humane manner. “I felt a debt to the goat,” the speaker confesses, her “womanish head bobbed up and down, one yellow eye turned toward the sun.” However, the tone darkens as the speaker almost immediately goes on to describe the unsightly gash in the side of the goat, which she then hits “with a switch.” Similarly, in “Beasts Framed the Field IV,” the speaker gallantly declares, “Beast to be your friend I’d gather the clouds swarming / over the river,” after which she goes on to threaten/propose, “I’d like to feed you…the suffering inborn / disease of my blood.” In each case, the tonal transition occurs in such a way that it almost suggests manipulation on the part of the speaker. By initially personifying the animal subject, a sense of connection with and sympathy for the animal is established. Therefore, when the animal is ostensibly hurt or threatened by the speaker, the reader almost feels deceived. At once menacing and inviting, coolly detached and warmly humane, Moss has generated a daunting atmosphere of unpredictability in which the reader is left susceptible to her whims.

Throughout the book there looms a general sense of interconnectedness. In “Making the Centaur,” the will of the horse is “fiercely tangled” with our own. “Portrait” creates a similar situation, in which the speaker unites the isolated man waiting atop a building to commit suicide with every other living thing with the statement, “You know he is going to die sometime…everything does.” “The Storm” displays signs of cerebral interconnectivity in its opening statement, “Where one mind stops, another begins,” as well as in the speaker’s portrayal of the sky as a giant, cohesive spider web in which “the dead bees of memory” of all living beings are housed. Related to a sense of multiplicity and interdependence is the recurring phenomenon of projection; internal emotions are often transferred into external entities. “I fill his body with my mind / to give my thought a shape,” the speaker informs us of the zebra in her poem “In Mammal Hall.” Such cohesiveness and interaction between subjects not only blurs the line between individual humans and all other humans, but also between humans and animals, calling forth a surreal landscape in which animals take on human characteristics; beasts and centaurs speak, and octopi are depicted as “aristocratic.”

Moss’ stylistic treatment is equally as compelling. Throughout the book, the speaker intentionally universalizes, or lends abstraction to, a particular image. For example, in “Making the Centaur,” the atmosphere is portrayed as “earth’s symbols.” All elements of nature, presumably sun, sky, and other natural manifestations, are grouped together under a single blanket term, thus blurring distinctions between them. Likewise, in “Beasts Framed the Field II,” the speaker equates the beast’s act of digging a hole to digging back in time to his “red and black birth.” Moss’ generalization of these images establishes an atmosphere of mystery, opening up limitless possibilities as to the precise visual representation they will form in the reader’s mind. Additionally, the act of symbolizing grants these poems the weight and feel of legend. The use of the phrase “earth’s symbols” harks back to ancient Greek and Roman mythology, and the act of digging has become a universal emblem for reaching an earlier, more primordial state.

Furthermore, the use of such generalized language provides a counterpoint to Moss’ equally consistent use of precise, pared down imagery. In fact, the same objects Moss lends abstraction to are elsewhere sculpted into sharp, specific images. Several lines up, the same beast who is portrayed as a distant figure of mythology, “digging back to [his] red and black birth,” is perceived so clearly by the speaker that she can “see the vein jump in [his] neck / and the salt shimmering over his lip.” Likewise, at the end of the poem, the same horse who is situated in the legendary position of being chased by the “earth’s symbols” is so real that the “foam smeared over his flanks” is visible and the “tingle in his nerves” can be sensed. This sense of clarity and immediacy directly contradicts the formerly vague, allegorical treatment of these subjects. The effect of this is twofold; by pairing mythology side by side with realism, each acts as a foil to the other, emphasizing their differences. At the same time, however, portraying the subject of the poem in manifold ways blurs the distinction between them and suggests the possibility of their interrelatedness.

Beast, to Be Your Friend masterfully balances surrealism with minimalism, violence with humanity, and past tense narrative with the first person lyrical. Just like the “silver thread blowing in and out of visibility” in “Fields,” the seamless movement of Moss’ poems explores the discrepancies as well as the connections between these disparate elements, reflecting the larger theme of an underlying connectivity and multiplicity. “The signs sit in everything / They are true, but untranslatable,” the speaker tells us. Indeed, delivered in a detached, elusive voice and peppered with furtive allusions, one could say the same of Moss’ poems themselves.

NEW! Review of Katy Lederer

The Heaven-Sent Leaf by Katy Lederer. BOA Editions, $16.

Reviewed by Sara Lockery

Katy Lederer’s The Heaven-Sent Leaf probes the conflicting yet interrelated concepts of art and commerce, establishing a fruitful tension between the technical and the emotional in contemporary society. At the heart of this tension lies the startling observation that the spirit of money occupies the core of such timeless institutions as poetry and love. “There is, in the heart,” Lederer reminds us, “the hard-rendering profit.” Likewise, the threat of art continually rebels against the order of city life, voicing a recurring plea for its emancipation from the doldrums of industry. Behind every facade of society, we are told, the artist is “waiting, like an animal, / for poetry.” The dynamic quality of Lederer’s language further exemplifies this tension; alternating between observational narrative and lyrical rhapsody, it is at once detached and intimate, tentative and insistent.

One of the most apparent themes in The Heaven-Sent Leaf is the interaction of the external world of business (money, capital, trade) with the internal, primal state of passion (love, art, nature). Such association becomes evident in the second “Brainworker” poem, in which the narrator begins by expressing the need to “keep drear managerial impulse away from the animal mind.” Located along the borders of logic within the mind, however, is a “silky white cat. / Howling,” an image soon interrupted by the narrator’s anxiety over her “year-end review.” The poem finally closes with “The moon… settl[ing] into its shadow” and the narrator “howling.” The reference to the cat howling within the “mind’s little prison” gives the impression of entrapment and suppressed desire, which reflects Lederer’s recurring assertion that the expression of the artist is stifled by the monotony of the business world. Additionally, the perpetual oscillation from the dreariness of office life to the unruliness of the creative intellect establishes a tumultuous dialogue between these two opposing forces, exemplifying the state of constant flux that pervades much of the book.

Another way in which Lederer creates tension between opposites is by structuring her poems as quasi-sonnets that simultaneously transcend and adhere to form. Such experimentation with the sonnet is evident in “Heavenly Body.” For example, in the second to last line, the formerly detailed depiction of vast distances (“Between these mountains runs a pass blasted through by the / movements of water and indebted plateaus. / Imagine it widening, eternally, as the owl will fly or flower bloom”) is solidified into “Long silences between us.” Likewise, the previously elaborate reference to the serenity of the moon* is compacted into “Imagine, Love, the patience of the moon.” In clear, sparse language, the ending thus operates as a kind of condensed summary of the fundamental elements of the poem, a technique characteristic of the sonnet. And by breaking the poem into thirteen lines, Lederer roughly recalls the sonnet form. But the odd number of lines defeats the possibility of consistent couplets and the poems do not regularly follow iambic pentameter, thus distinguishing Lederer's work from the sonnet by upsetting its symmetry. In this way, the structure of Lederer’s poems provides an additional example of the interaction between order and chaos.

Aside from the continual fluctuation of subject and style, Lederer’s technique is further distinguished by her ability to grant physical, tangible properties to the abstract. For example, in “The Rose, The Ring,” thoughts are depicted as diamonds falling to the floor. The genius of this portrayal lies in the fact that something as theoretical and intangible as thought is successfully embodied in the distinct, concrete form of a jewel. Furthermore, such characterization resonates with the larger theme of commerce; the narrator has in effect transformed the act of thinking into a commodity: “We sweep them up, the little jewels,/ The little bastard trinkets.” By illustrating human thought as a token of sorts, Lederer has raised the possibility that anything of value, even ideological value, has the potential to be channeled into a form of capital and used to obtain power. The seeming disparity between the timeless, psychological value usually associated with mental reasoning and the temporary, mechanical value Lederer assigns to it reflects the general atmosphere of tension that characterizes her work.

An additional trademark of Lederer’s technique includes a distinctive kind of repetition that involves a refocusing or development of particular concepts. Take, for example, these lines from “Heaven-Sent Leaf”: “To imagine oneself as a river. / To imagine oneself as a stretch of cool water, / Pouring into basin or brain.” The repetition here is both linguistic (the reusing of the phrase “to imagine oneself”) and conceptual (the recurrence of the idea of water). However, in the first line the tone is dry, fragmentary, and abstract, whereas in the following lines it is lyrical, rhythmic and precise. The idea of a river has thus been extended and developed into something entirely different. The effect of this particular kind of repetition at once ties the images together through shared wording and conceptual grounding and isolates them by splitting them up into two tonally and stylistically separate contexts. The interaction between the opposing ideas of variation and repetition and between unification and differentiation reflects Lederer’s larger theme of the interrelation of conflicting concepts (money and love, business and nature).

Lederer’s adeptness of execution, including the way in which rhythm, alliteration, and repetition perpetuate the mood of the concept at hand, further demonstrates the strengths of The Heaven-Sent Leaf. The phrase “The legs are mimetic of the mind’s locomotion” is a particularly effective instance of such cohesion between style and content. The aural similarity between “legs” and “mimetic,” as well as the alliteration established by the words “mimetic” and “mind,” suggest the repetition and circularity involved in the act of imitation. Moreover, the gradual widening exemplified by the transition of sound (‘eh’—‘eye’—‘oh’) mimics the regulated motion that characterizes the functioning of machinery. Together, these linguistic factors both aurally and mentally enhance the motion and circularity inherent in the concept of moving legs, cycling machinery, and imitation. The fusion of the technical and conceptual aspects of writing amplifies the impact and intricacy of Lederer’s poems by generating an alternate layer of complexity and cohesion.

With panoramic scope and fluidity, The Heaven-Sent Leaf depicts contemporary society in a way that at once criticizes and embraces its materialistic impulses, artfully balancing the conflicting extremes of art and office life. The title itself effectively embodies the core tension of Lederer’s poetry: a symbol of nature as well as materialism, of temptation as well as salvation, the heaven-sent leaf can take the shape of either a leaf from a tree or a paper money to be used for barter. The perpetual flux of its tone mimics the natural rhythm of human thought, and the conceptual variation of the collection as a whole masterfully articulates the dual nature of reality.



* The sarcasm inherent in the lines, “Is she angry? Is she edified? / Does the moon crawl into bed at night, drunk and restless as any kept woman…?” suggests the outrageousness of the moon acting in such a way, thus intimating, by reverse logic, that the moon is normally associated with calmness and serenity.

NEW! Review of L.S. Klatt

Interloper by L.S. Klatt. University of Massachusetts Press, $15.

Reviewed by Daniel Shoemaker

Interloper begins with the inscription (attributed to Walt Whitman) “The day wore on, and the sun went down in the west; still the interloper, gloomy and taciturn, made no signs of departing.” Klatt, like his hero Whitman, is the interloper, the poet. He is the unsolicited prompter of questions. His voice is deliberate and wise, making no dogmatic claims, preferring to elicit meditations on the “indefinite. Infinite,” though rarely succumbing to it, as his poem “The Ominous Cross” suggests.

“Provincetown,” the book’s opening poem, establishes many of the motifs and stylistic trademarks that Klatt returns to throughout Interloper. It is a characteristically brief poem (none is more than a page long) about a model glider. In it, the innocence and ignorance of a child is undermined by the implicit violence of his war fantasies:

Yokefellow, how steep our swoop,
what coastline what distance?

As if we travel well,
as if potentate

The hinge of the engine-less rudder

Solarized
It sing-songs

A plane alone does not know what to do, or towards what shore to fly. It, like Klatt’s poetry, needs a helmsman, someone to interpret the scenes and posit advice.

“What can be salvaged?” “How then do we prophesy?” If Klatt asks, it is because he does not know. His poetry is steeped with humility before the vastness of space and the harshness of reality. Klatt invokes Jesus, Darwin and the purple of the cosmos to situate civilization as near a microscopic molecule in some greater eternal body. All his questions do not speak to such sanctuaries of thought. Klatt also asks, “when do these canned meats expire?” His subtle humor carries the book from beginning to end in one sitting, and linguistic cocktails like “forlornographic” make palatable the self-pleasure of misery.

As in “Provincetown,” the relationship between innocence and violence is explored in great depth throughout Interloper. Children’s toys and games often become vehicles of dominance and contention. In “I Swallowed a Deck of Cards” spades and clubs act out racial tensions, despite their common origins, culminating in a reenactment of the horrific 1998 lynching of James Byrd. “International Orange” describes a model F16, destined for “moonlight immolation” and piloted by a stick figure who plays “Aces & pick-up sticks.” The poem “Fetus in Orbit” entertains imagery from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s indictment of technology and man’s penchant for violence. The movie’s final image of a human fetus floating through space becomes that of an unborn cow, a playmate and a wonder for the narrator, who later unwillingly encounters the violence innate and pervasive in the pursuit of survival,

I was told I would eat a thousand cows,

I lay there, disbeliever, like a figure 8 in milk

As much as Klatt may seek direction, he concedes to the futility of intention: he “[has] no more use for a steering wheel than an 8 ball.” Klatt’s questions spin back upon and bisect themselves, his imagery does “loop-the-loops & figure-8s.” The recurrent use of this reoriented infinity is a mathematic and pictorial tool. Klatt employs both throughout Interloper, balancing his existential inquiries with data and numbers, graphs and graphics. Symbols and charts become non-verbal poetry. A head without a body swings from an un-played game of hangman. The circle that sways from the minimally rendered gallows may also be metronome mid-beat or a hypnotist’s tool or perhaps some lever in the machine the narrator is forced to kiss.

As much as some of the poems in Interloper are verbally irreproducible, many are driven by their percussive cadence. Music is used as a second native language. Its symbols become words and ideas that scope beyond written language. There are “musical rules for the apocalypse” and a “siss-boom skitter beat” for love. Words tumble together into a symphony of images, often correlated only by their context. Together the sounds and their meanings paint a large sonic canvas peppered with explosions of life and stasis, an image to be read over ages.

The poems in Interloper belong to no one time. They contain pork that expired in March 2009 and domestic relics like a washboard. There is a strain of post-industrial mistrust that loosely situates, and runs parallel through, most of these poems. They often chart the evolution of humans away from humanity and leave foreboding hints towards their mutual demise. In a collection of poetry so kinetic and transitory, using literal vehicles as metaphorical vehicles, scenes of atom bombs and the apocalypse offer possible limits to the telescoping path of humanity. In “Body: Rhapsody” a smashed car is a crumpled Coca-Cola can. U.S. recklessness and consumerism collide. There is a distinctly American tone to Klatt’s work: from paranoia to pride, the American ethos is called into constant question.

Interloper is a cohesive body, indicative of many years honing. Its vibrant images of memory and doubt, despite their ambiguous cohesion, foster a common ground between author and reader. Existence is portrayed as equally uninviting and inevitable.

Recent & Recommended

Sandra Simonds, Warsaw Bikini (Bloof)
Lytton Smith, The All-Purpose Magical Tent (Nightboat)

submissions update

We've just wrapped up a 450-page issue and have finally cleared the decks.

Verse will open to submissions again this summer.

The submissions process will be different than before.

Verse is now paying contributors, ~ $200 per contributor.

Stay tuned for details.

Recent & Recommended

Bill Berkson, Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House)
Fanny Howe, The Winter Sun (Graywolf)
G.C. Waldrep, Archicembalo (Tupelo)

free classroom sets of Verse

UPDATE May 6: We've just sent out over 30 boxes (1000 copies) of Verse and have pretty much depleted our stocks. Thanks to everyone for their interest and for putting the magazine into students' hands.

UPDATE May 2: We're currently sorting through boxes and sending them out. We have more than a dozen requests outstanding, and we'll proceed to fulfilling those as soon as we've caught up. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE Wednesday: If you requested a classroom set but didn't leave an email address or mailing address, please submit another comment and leave an address. We have 20+ boxes going out, and are looking through the stacks to see what's left. There are another 10 or so requests outstanding, and we hope to accommodate those.

[UPDATE (9pm Monday): We still have a couple of boxes of the issues listed below. When we run out of these issues, we will offer more classroom sets of different issues in the near future. In the meantime, if you are a high school teacher and are not looking for a particular issue, we definitely can send you something. We've been especially delighted by the response from high school teachers around the country, though we're also delighted to send copies to college courses. When you comment, please include an email address or mailing address so we don't have to publish your comment to get in touch with you. ]

We need to clear out some storage space, so we're offering free classroom sets (entire boxes) of Verse to the first 20 instructors (of literature and/or creative writing, at any level, in any setting) who request them. While we cannot guarantee specific issues, we'll try to meet any special requests. Verse will cover shipping costs, too. We just ask that you put the magazine into students' hands, gratis.

Here's a list of what's available:

1) The Sequence Issue II (Rosmarie Waldrop, Gillian Conoley, Laynie Browne, Jenny Boully, Rusty Morrison, David Wojahn, Marianne Boruch, Corinne Lee, Richard Kenney, Kate Fagan, John Matthias, John Kinsella, Guy Bennet, Anthony Hawley, Barbara Hamby, Thorpe Moeckel, Daniel Coudriet, Sean McDonnell, Rusty Morrison interview, Theodore Enslin interview, plus book reviews) [1 box available]

2) The Sequence Issue (Theodore Enslin, Inger Christensen, Standard Schaefer, Susan Wheeler, Kathleen Ossip, Paul Hoover, Mary Jo Bang, Kevin Hart, Michael Burkard, Dawn-Michelle Baude, Leonard Schwartz, Craig Coyle, Maxine Chernoff, Christine Hume, plus Marjorie Perloff essay on Zukofsky, Ashley David essay on Ben Lerner) [1 box available]

3) The Prose Issue II (Rene Char, Helene Cixous, Diane Williams, Elke Erb, Clayton Eshleman, Craig Dworkin, Matthew Cooperman, John Kinsella, Michael Heller, Douglas Messerli, Petter Lindgren, Kevin Prufer, Noah E Gordon, Karla Kelsey, Rita Rich, Joshua Harmon, Susan Maxwell, Joy Katz, Peter Boyle, Michael Dietz, Paul Maliszewski, Fred Muratori, Gregory Brooker, Kevin Craft, Michelle Noteboom, Paul Killebrew, Carol Quinn, Andrew Morgan, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, David Roderick, Michael Fagenblat essay on Jean-Luc Marion, Brad Flis essay on Tessa Rumsey, Timothy Donnelly essay on Don Paterson, Michael Theune essay on Yusef Komunyakaa, Chris McDermott essay on George Oppen, Reginald Shepherd interview, Kevin Hart interview, Don Paterson interview, Dara Wier interview, Charles North interview, Gustaf Sobin interview, Ed Dorn interview, plus book reviews) [1 box available]

4) Vol 23, #s1-3:

CONTENTS

Ethan Paquin / Hampton

Beth Anderson / five poems

Landis Everson / four poems

Pam Brown / five poems

Chris Pusateri / on Ted Berrigan’s Collected Poems

Erica Kaufman / on Joshua Beckman’s Shake

Thomas Fink / on Shanna Compton’s Down Spooky

John Findura / on Jennifer L. Knox’s A Gringo Like Me

Victoria Boynton / TV Lover

Maxine Chernoff / He Picked up his Pen in her Defense

Peter Rose / two poems

Heather Christle / three poems

G.C. Waldrep / What Lived in our Mouths

Jeffery Bahr / two poems

Jonathan Thirkfield / The Mourners (44:44)

Hadara Bar-Nadav / two poems

Carrie Etter / on Ted Mathys’ Forge

Ezekiel Black / on Corinne Lee’s Pyx

Katherine Hollander / on Timothy Liu’s For Dust Thou Art

Timothy Liu / Umbilical

Crystal Curry / Tu Quoque

Jenny Boully / Loy Krathong

Julie Carr / three poems

Ray DiPalma / three poems

Priscilla Becker / two poems

Judith Bishop / Interval

Mary Crow / Meantime: Blizzards

Paul McCormick / A Few Ways Forests Can Change Over Time

Erika Howsare / islands

Henry Hart / on George Witte’s The Apparitioners

Joshua Corey / on Gustaf Sobin’s The Places as Preludes

Chris McDermott / on Alice Fulton’s Cascade Experiment

Dawn-Michelle Baude / Luberon Dialogue, Field #3

Samuel Amadon / The Meadows

John Gallaher / four poems

Chad Sweeney / eight poems

Sarah Riggs / Cretan Monologues

Peter Markus / We Make Mud

Chris Green / Fertility Woes

Michael Earl Craig / The Accomplished Hand

Craig Sherborne / Stablehand

Gordon Meade / two poems

Jennifer Mackenzie / Real Time

Simeon Berry / Screed, 2D

Seth Abramson / Come in, Radio Ceylon

Michael Hansen / Sonnet for a Picture

Chris Wallace-Crabbe / It’s Like Reading Smoke

Lytton Smith / Scarecrow Work

Mike White / two poems

Schirin Nowrousian / concrete

Brandon Shimoda / on Sawako Nakayasu’s nothing fictional but . . .

Thomas Fink / on John Yau’s Ing Grish

Cathy Park Hong / two poems

Jessica Olin / two poems

Sarah Mangold / Life as the Emperor

Bruce Covey / three poems

James Shea / three poems

Catie Rosemurgy / three poems

Christopher Salerno / two poems

Sandra Miller / Girls.

Emma Bolden / Epistle IV

Ed Davis / three poems

Stan Mir / two poems

Jerry Harp / The Creature Remembers

Joshua Corey / on John Kinsella’s The New Arcadia

Richard Scheiwe / on Thomas Heise’s Horror Vacui

Paula Koneazny / on Ethan Paquin’s The Violence

Morgan Lucas Schuldt / from Inamorata

Brian Teare / Dead House Sonnet

Emily Wilson / two poems

Sarah Goldstein / three poems

Chris Tonelli / three poems

Kevin McFadden / I.e.

Barbara Hamby / A Birdman to You, Baby

Natasha Kochicheril Moni / In the end it is always the books,

Lesley Jenike / two poems

Roy Seeger / The Beginnings of Human Expression

Peter Ramos / two poems

Jesse Lichtenstein / three poems

Lucy Ives / on Muriel Rukeyser’s Collected Poems

Ethan Paquin / on Thomas Merton’s In the Dark Before Dawn

[1 box available]


To request a classroom set, submit a comment below (it won't be published, but we'll record the request) or email Brian.