Issue #6 Spring 2008 $4

Issue #6
Spring 2008
$4
Cover photo by Melanie McKinley
1 – NOTES FROM THE FRONT:
The Abracadabra of the Mind-Fuck.
by Linda McCarriston
Poetry:
7 – Linda McCarriston, Ellaraine Lockie, John Grey,
Mitchell Metz
8 – Lyn Lifshin, Elizabeth Hurst,
Richard Moyer
9 – Gary Goude, Jim Daniels
10 – Justin Hyde, Neal Wilgus,
Michael Kriesel
11 – David Thompson, Hugh Fox,
Thomas Michael McDade
12 – Robert Cooperman, Robert Cooperman
13 – Mark Wisniewski, Sam Pierstorff
14 – Alan Catlin, Nathan Graziano
15 – Mather Schnieder, Dave Newman’
Glen Chesnut
16 — Dear FTB: An Open Letter
Regarding Horrible Small (And Not So Small)
Press Poetry Reviews by Alan Catlin
REVIEWS
18 — Gold Star Road by Richard Hoffman reviewed by Doug Holder
19—- Last Train to New Zealand and other poems by Neal Wilgus
and The Cezanne/Pissarro Poems byGerald Locklin
reviewed by Don Winter
21 —- love & death & teeth in the blood byTodd Moore reviewed by Don Winter
and Still Life by Alan Catlin reviewed by Steve Henn
22 — This I Believe About The Death Penalty: A social commentary by Oren Wagner
23 — An email from American Dissident editor G. Tod Slone
Fight These Bastards is © Platonic 3way Press with all
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Special thanks to Lydia Henn, a girl to be determined, and Gia, who put up
with our megalomaniacal plans for world domination. Special thanks also to
Eric Cox, our web guy and masthead designer. Fight These Bastards
is a product of Platonic 3way Press and is published and edited by the
unholy trinity of Oren Wagner, Steve Henn, and Don Winter.
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“be careful what you say, but be really careful
what you don’t say” – Oren in high school
“The Abracadabra of the Mind-Fuck”
Preface: In December, Vol. 11, #1/2, 1969 (pp. 198-202), Maxwell Geismar published “Reflections on Reflections on Reflections.”
In it he tried to unravel the history that eventually became Frances Stonor Saunders The C.I.A. and the Cultural Cold War. Geismar
wrote himself around in circles, in spirals, actually. The piece is unfinished. Yet I went and found the Xeroxed copy a friend had given me years ago, to refer to it as an example of the difficulty of writing one’s way out of The Box.
I have thought about the piece recently. After that young Korean student went on a rampage at Virginia Tech, and I heard his writing teachers talking about how they’d tried to get him to write about his “personal feelings,” etc., I wondered what Geismar’s piece
might have done for him, someone furious with the world he was supposed to achieve in. Someone inarticulately furious with how he
was being taught to know it, contend with it, confront it.
Geismar’s piece is anything but literary. I consider it in many ways a model for what follows, a spiraling, repetitious process of
thinking and feeling that creeps forward a quarter inch every time I return to its 7,000 words. See if you can use it.
The first thing we have to do, with our M.F.A.s and our c.v.s and our list of prizes, is change our insignia from “G.G.” (good guys) to
Big B and go stand with the bastards we allege to be fighting. You, Don. Me. Both of us staying inside the system for the sake of a
steady job that would let us write, health care, if we’re lucky, “retirement benefits.” If somehow we reach “retirement” before whatever’s left of the global economy hasn’t made its way offshore or off-planet in the pockets of the few who are believe me planning
for that right now.
We can’t not be them as long as we’re working for them UNLESS we realize and actualize the positions we hold as who we are,
really, actually, what we are: the first generation to attain the culture-making power implicit in “higher education.” Everything
works against our doing this, and works very hard at it, as we both know.
But because Tillie Olsen wrote and thought pointedly about us as that generation -- writers with a unique power to make change,
because we pursue a life of the mind straight out of working class experience – we can think of ourselves as “Tillie’s Generation.”
Who we are supposed to act as if we are, though, the generation that shuts up, makes money, pretends to be already what it prays its
kids will become: oblivious to “back there.” We are supposed to become the “Mulch Generation.” Even as writers. Especially as
writers. You know all this stuff first hand, don’t you?. Back-there’s history may be uneducated, but it is not anti-intellectual. It is in
United States classrooms that we learn to be anti-intellectuals.
We are all learning, and teaching, to “be” what we aren’t. To think as we aren’t. To write who we aren’t. It’s built into creative writing, poetry especially.
“Confessional criticism,” a legitimate mode of cultural critique, has created forums for every multicultural perspective except for that
of class. Wealth, a sense of entitlement, “family safety nets,” calm confidence, are not markers of first generation students or writers.
Your poems, and your thesis essay, which you should send out – maybe Text or Context (Australia, or University of Southern Illinois Center for Book Culture) are de facto “marginal” by foregrounding all these. Academic multiculturalism is an echo of the multiculturalism of the Bush cabinet, and as Mary Childers has noted, if you talk about “not having” all the normative experiences welloff people share, “they think you are asking them for something.” They also, she notes, “hear you louder than you hear yourself.”
It’s a truism to say that academic multiculturalism was a safe alternative to the threats made on the establishment by the radicalism
of the 60s. The irony is, of course, that this very multiculturalism by and large casts the working class in its own vicious stereotypes.
“Armed white racist” is one I’ve had visited on me, but, as in the McCarthy Era, there were others.
Let me use a little confessional criticism of the forbidden variety, i.e., identity that makes it clear I am not what I am supposed to
have become but am still what I was before I became it. More than any other single thing, my assertion of this fact, this unchanged
identity, has provoked the “troubles” of my time teaching in Alaska. I’ve refused to put on my Pyramid Scheme costume in order to
draw students out of who they are and into the promise of becoming a glitzy “new” self. I have refused to become the Poetess Action
Figure. This is a two-level problem for the Po-Biz. First, I refuse to pretend that I have been made economically and socially different than I was before, and second, I have allowed the ideas implicit in these instructions to percolate up in me and find at least rudimentary expression.
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The “identity” from which I speak therefore is not drawn from any of the Approved Generic Group bins. I’m not a good career advertisement for “us.”
“We” are 28,000 writers in four hundred colleges and universities. In principle and aspiration, “we” are the narrow end of the meaning-making wedge in literate (whatever we mean by that) U.S. today. Think of all the readings, at many levels of “achievement,” that
go on every day, every night, in this country. Each is the same: rows of barely restrained avidity surging toward that “best of breed”
position at the mic. And once at the mic, best of breed turns its back again and looks toward the next strata of readings. Of prizes,
presses.
Nobody means this to be true. The huge bequest of Ruth Lily to Poetry, which has, for instance, made the magazine a sponsor for
PBS and so presents poets now and again at the end of the News Hour, does not mean to make this true, probably. But have you
watched any of those appearances? I flap and flail on my own sofa like a bass pulled into a boat, as I listen to the poems coming
from the lips of poets who must, must, live in a world where basically everything is ok. A world that sees no reason to expect it will
not go on as it “always has.” Not bad poems. Not bad poets. But poems and poets tooled in the tradition that has allowed a “safe-inDaddy’s-drawing-room” sensibility to mean “the lyric” and lyric to mean “the poem.”
When Carol Muske more or less grudgingly acknowledges, in a review of Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris, that Gluck’s world is
“bourgeois, patriarchal, and unrelievedly Freudian,” it’s not only a rare moment of connection between U.S. poetry’s “normative
content” and politics, it’s a definition of what’s required in the U.S. to have one’s work be considered poetry. Nor, of course, is it
treated as an ideology at all – an ideology that can be called capitalist – but as mere personal circumstance.
In Cuba, poetry’s dialectic – let’s call it “public conversation” instead -- of personal and political, mythic and historical, psychological and sociological has been shut down and the social, public, collective function of art raised up as the whole of it. The “capitalist
lyric” is forbidden there. When such lyric poetry does manage to get into print, somehow the books are lost or the promised number
of copies cannot be produced. Were you in the class when the young Cuban poet visited? His father was a revolutionary, and he had
fled the country to be a “capitalist poet.” He was a tooth-gnashing lyric poet afflicted with a socialist state.
What he was unable to hear was that where Cuba’s poetry had been corralled into the bardic monologue, our poetry had likewise
been corralled, but in the lyric monologue. Neither speaking to the other, to the other’s demands as poetry. Neither cognizant of the
other as having legitimate voice. Both asserting its type as Poetry’s All and its other’s type as Non-poetry. Both poetries thereby politicized, their energies given to the defense of their indefensible and irrational claims to a throne that does not exist.
The ancient power that is poetry’s is anarchic, beyond the service of governments. Both Cuba’s and ours. Cuba’s means are heavierhanded and more overt – a smaller world, rougher machinery – but its ends are not so different from ours here in the U.S.
Most U.S. poets would take umbrage, probably, at the thought that they were “censored” in the way that Cubans are. Most U.S. poets
never want or need to connect the dots between “free speech” and poetry. Asking them-at-large to do so probably would provoke
many, if not most, to jump on capitalism’s soapbox and declare that poetry is “above” such concerns. They would not want to write
“polemical” or “didactic” or “rhetorical” poetry, they’d say, because it’s “not good.”
If, as E.P. Thompson has said, history is the propaganda of the victors, so also is literature.
What “deconstruction” and/or “theory” did or did not mean – in its variety and complexity -- to do, it surely toppled the monologue
of New Criticism’s hold on literary discourse. It forced that monologue into a discourse with analysis, with reason informed by life
outside the bubble of Lit’rature. We are back, however, especially in our M.F.A. environment, our po-biz world, into that intellectual
era before deconstruction, before theory. The Workshop, as Paul Dawson points out, never left it. The workshop is the place where
New Criticism went to hide, like a dictator driven off his island by revolution, until it could stage a come-back.
I’m not trying to convince you, Don. I know you know. You are one of the few student writers I’ve met who has combined the refusal to surrender his class identity with a grasp of that identity’s connection to “theory.” I know that you went into business and
made some money, for a time, but you did not have to go through the deep, almost genetic re-engineering in consciousness that
“creative writing” requires, in order to prosper. So you came to my workshop…sentient. I could say cognizant. Your fury at the cognitive provincialism of the work that came into AQR, and which AQR published, was immediate.
I’m trying to reach those who truly mean well, mean to write, mean to mean, those who would choose to rip the wool back off their
eyes if they recognized it was there. I believe – I know – there are many among us. And I also know that one can succeed in so doing.
Christine Byl’s award winning thesis essay, the successful farm poems that Amy G wrote in workshop, the successful lesbian poems
Liz write, and which took her, along with other work, to a Stegner. Both Liz and Amy entered those materials with trepidation, already knowing that they might spell careerism doom. Arlitia’s work, both poems and plays.
I think of Dorianne Laux and Joe Millar, and the conversation we had about Overtime. I said it was a book about the loss of working
class consciousness, the fragmentation, alienation, economic and social debilitation of workers without identity. They said, Yes, but
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course not necessarily “lyric” at all, but a constellation of constraints against acknowledging and employing the poet’s agency – to
the wide open spaces, let’s say, is very short. And it’s cognitive. Mental.
Cuba’s “Bardic Corral” stands right next to Capitalism’s “Lyric Corral,” and both perform the same work. Each has its dogma: that
its corral is superior to, more real than, the other’s. That poetry only lives in one or the other of those two corrals. Both corrals are
filled with wild horses that took the bait, or that got swept up with a bunch of others taking the bait.
I’ve been handling these terms for years, trying to figure out how to insert them into the dominant pedagogy, if it can be called that,
of our project. This summer, when I go to Alaska to teach, briefly, I’m going to unpackage the “lyric monologue” and replace it with
“the conversation.”
There is already much public, or bardic, poetry out there. The problem is that we have no way of teaching/talking about it (or writing
it) without the weight of its “second-bestness” according to what’s known as lyric aesthetics.
Here’s a poem I’ll use this summer, from Poetry Northwest’s new issue, Political Poetry, by Stephen Dunn.
Absolutely
Every public action, which is not customary,
either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous
precedent. It follows that nothing should ever
be done for the first time.
Francis Cornford, classicist
Let’s do something for the first time,
say, invent a new custom
so that it might become customary,
maybe even classic.
And though it may be dangerous,
let’s unsettle the settled by setting
a precedent, something so right
with the sweet feel of what’s wrong
it would tempt a Tory
to nod, then worry.
Let’s, for example, expose ourselves
As ourselves, become –
In other words – truly unrecognizable.
Let’s destabilize everything.
To hear what understanding and evaluating this poem is up against, listen to the Keeper of Poetic Doctrine in the U.S, Helen Vendler
(acuminously quoted by John Leonard in his recent Harper’s review of her new book on Yeats):
Poems... are hypothetical sites of speculation, not position papers. They do not exist on the same plane as actual life; they are not
votes, they are not uttered from a podium of pulpit, they are not essays. They are products of reverie.
Vintage Fulminating Vendler. Listen to all the nots: poetry is not this, cannot be that, is forbidden to the other thing. These preposterous injunctions, exclusions, mandates, dictates, prohibitions form the apodicta of the “literary-industrial complex,” the assertions
uttered as if they were irrefutable and self-evident facts of nature, assertions uttered not for the sake of discourse but in the demand
for belief. Doctrinal assertions, intellectual engagement with which is not “the life of the mind” but heresy.
Her tone is ex cathedra. One either kneels before her credo or leaves the fold. But, just literarily speaking, she’s dead wrong.
That Northrop Frye, in his famous 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, anatomized poetry – as a genre – by its two “radicals of representation” – the lyric, back turned, figuratively to the audience, and the bardic, figuratively facing one’s audience, matters to Vendler not
a whit. Nor that the issues that pour from this fact have been the very blood and guts of “theory,” of “the Culture Wars” since the
60s. Frye takes pains to point out that the radical or representation defines the two modes regardless of a poem’s style, length, content, or form. Terry Eagleton, in his recent How to Read a Poem, reminds us that it was the Victorian, Mills, who most notably reduced poetry to its lyric mode, meant to be “overheard” not “heard.”
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What a coup! Nail down one of poetry’s wings so it can’t fly. Cut off one of its two legs. Put a patch over one of its eyes. Just what
Cuba did.
Define, define, poetry by its irrelevance, its navel-gazing, its “privacy,” interiority, haplessness. Does this not seem to you, Don, to
be the point from which all the bullshit in the name of poetry arises? Silence the discourse and in the intellectual backwater that remains a veritable solar system of vacuous, self-referential, grandiose, pedantic, sanctimonious and obsequious, fatuous blather arises.
And is learned, written toward, published, in the name of wit, urbanity, superiority.
So Dunn turns around, dramatically, emphatically. “Let us.” Let’s. He identifies himself as the poet and calls upon those whose ear
he knows he has, us. Are we “overhearing” him? Hardly. He takes pains to say we are hearing not overhearing him. (Vendler, ever
poetry’s studious obverse, took pains to condemn the word “utterance” in her Article of Faith, a word I use often to speak of the public, social action of the poet. At root meaning “outer,” the word radically opposes Vendler’s “product of reverie” containment system
for the poem. When I applied for my Irish passport I noted the Irish usage, to“utter a document,” and penalties for forging such an
utterance. Vendler, who is a Hennessey, should be ashamed of herself in that regard if in no other, the very Tory of Dunn’s poem,
turning her vehemence against her blood’s tradition for the sake, I must suppose, of her “English-Litworld” advancement.)
Dunn’s audience is us, poets, readers of Poetry Northwest (who besides poets read poetry journals?), and he is deliberately addressing us. He plays on everything about literature and “theory,” the academic and the activist, history and the power of the poem. The
poet. How else to categorize, explain this poem’s meaning, than as bardic? A reader would have to turn shame-facedly away from
this poem and it’s buoyant, smart, irresistible call to arms to go back to Vendler-land, MFA-world, the careerist track that exposes
ourselves to ourselves as Our Self.
Is it not obvious to any who stay put in Vendler’s meaning for even the blink of an eye that Dunn’s is a poem of a commonly recognized type that is not lyric? This poem exists on the plane of actual life. It is uttered from a podium. It is a vote, an essay, a position
paper. As much as it is not what Vendler means by lyric, it likewise comes not from Cuba’s Bardic corral. It comes to us from the
hills beyond both corrals. Get the hell out of there, it’s saying, let’s. Let’s Do Something. Let’s Destabilize Everything.
And we can. Who can if we cannot? What is our deepest tradition? The point where language is able to liberate itself from every
bond, every debt, every indenture, every enslavement is poetry as a public act. Vendler’s assault on the principle of language as a
social act is relentless. Urgent. Historical. She is the woman with the sword, keeping gate at poetry’s power. She offers
“advancement.” Look at her court, those whose careers she has managed: Graham, Gluck, Bidart. The anti-intelligentia.
I’ll begin with this poem this summer. I’ll ask whether or not the poet may be “heard.” Whether or not this poet/poem means to be
“heard.” Whether this poet is speaking to a frank collective, of a frank social issue, in a frank call to arms. Then I’ll ask how lyric
interiority, self-referentiality, subjectivity can cope with this poem.
I will ask if the poet must withdraw from public concerns, from social discourse. I will ask if public and social concerns are “second
best.” Are “narrative lapses.” Are “rhetorical” and therefore “weaknesses.” I will ask if poetry by definition sweeps the poet out of
society, insulating him or her from collective concerns and the possibility of speaking to, for, of them.
I will ask, then, if the poet may turn back around and remain fully the poet. I will ask if the poet is or is not uniquely disabled, as a
human being and an intellectual, by being in any fathomable way forbidden to be both public and private, both historical and mythological, both social and psychological. Both Marx and Freud. Both socialist and capitalist. We won’t talk relative values here. We
won’t talk “belief.” We’ll talk quite simply about whether or not the poet may ALSO turn around.
“…expose ourselves/as ourselves, become --//in other words – truly unrecognizable.”
Suddenly what goes out the window are the identity ghettoes and false modes of genre in which, say, “narrative” is offered as the
alternative to lyric. Turning around identifies the audience as not “the top of the heap,” but the heap. It’s a short hop from accepting
that audience to returning to class-consciousness. And it immediately calls into question the current definitions of lyric that depend
upon upward identification, competition, alienation, and atomization.
The grasp of poetry, of literature, that results is ancient, radical, dangerous. That both the private and the public are necessary and
accountable to the other. That even “the lyric,” as language, must be able to discourse with its other mind.
The fact is that Vendler – and her court – do not have to answer to anyone. The implications of this are not simply political, though
they are that. They are also intellectual.
Lyric Primacy, like Cuba’s Bardic Primacy, fosters and enforces silence, an anti-intellectualism that becomes dogma. This
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“apodictic” assertion that half is whole, requires, as I said, not mind, but belief. Not inquiry but deference. Asserting the two-fold
nature of poetry, poetry’s “truth,” as Hamburger gets at it in The Truth of Poetry, sticks a pin into each of the million balloons of
poet-talk that hover above every workshop, bumping and clustering, jockeying for position. A language about something that doesn’t
exist.
Like all the language in the world about God the Father.
That’s the Prime Synecdoche. You can publish my poem, “God the Synecdoche in His Holy Land,” with this prose, if you like. It’s
been published here and there before. I’m pleased and a little surprised about that, actually, since it’s more like a “koan” than a poem. As a “deconstruction” of patriarchal monothesism, it functions as a paradigm for all the synecdoches that are its heir, including
literature’s.
The abracadabra of the mind fuck. .
All the trouble I have had at UAA, which is no different from the trouble I’d have had most anywhere in the Industry, has been the
result of insisting that the careerist givens that run our world are, in fact, anti-intellectual. Strenuously so.
But you can’t even get to the mind fuck as a subject without coming upon the flaming swords of identity blocking the way. You
can’t get to “Left.” You can’t get to “working class consciousness” as idea, not identity. As concept, not costume. As (as they say in
A.A.) principle, not personality.
The “personalizing” of academic life, or all creative writing, has made it impossible to even look for ideas in what one is writing or
reading. I tried for…years to have inserted into our program self-description something about “writer as grassroots intellectual,” and
I was time and again ridiculed into the gutter. The word meant “something snooty” I was told. Honest to God. By a well-meaning
person.
I noted recently that the self-description of the Western Association of Graduate Schools, the group that awarded Christine Byl the
thesis essay prize (which was on these very concerns), states a purpose of graduate study to be, among other, “intellectual discovery.” Could you imagine “intellectual discovery” being considered a valid outcome for creative writing? Of course not! You’d be
laughed out of the building, too, even you, in your black hats and boots.
.
What do I have to complain about? Why should I want to shake up the system? Those are hard questions for me. The system today,
though, is not what it was thirty years ago, when I got my own M.F.A. Though yes, my program was elitist. Though yes it mocked
the Dorothy Allisons and the Adrienne Richs (are there really more than one of either of these?) and ragtag Leftie poets, a larger-than
-us swell of intellectual life was pressing against our closed windows and drawn drapes, so that someone who dared step out through
the doors – their system of locks -- to look for answers could find them.
That’s not true any more. Or if I’m wrong, it’s so much less true now that the likelihood of moving to an intellectual life, in the European sense, the most vital of United States history sense, from the po-biz is miniscule. My personal history at UAA matters not a
whit except as a documentation of the ways a dialectical intellectual inquiry into U.S. poetry is suppressed, repressed, forbidden,
punished. And it’s a doozy of a history! And at every inch of its bloody path, idea can be found to be the trespass. I am a heretic to
poetry, as much as that famous Mormon feminist theologian – Margaret Toscano --who was excommunicated is. And as she points
out that excommunication includes “eternal severance even from her family.”
We both know how truly hard it is to be a heretic in the U.S. today.
So what can we do?
What must we do?
If the po-biz is the most exquisite example of atomization, the principalities of the individual, of competition, rootlessness, and transience, we must start there. We must take ourselves back from the institutions, with their carrots and their sticks, that are our only
employ. We must reclaim custody of ourselves. For me, this “self-custody” is no far-fetched metaphor. At thirty-three, just divorced
from the doctor I’d sent through medical school, and separated for the moment from the sons I bore him, I was unable to borrow
$1,000. from the bank, to continue my M.F.A. because I was identity-less, in the legal sense. The laws at that moment were being
pushed by women, but all I lived those years – including the personality corrosion of too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, happened only because, level upon level of authority, I truly did not own myself. Again, I turn to my experience because I
am and was a “sentient mote” in my time and place, trying to live, as Emma Goldman put it, “as though the revolution had already
taken place.” My Self matters not at all. The information that self has gathered, the intelligence about us, is.
We are as I was. Owned. I had a warm bed to sleep in, when he was done. I had food to give my children. I had beautiful carpet to
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vacuum. I had excellent alcohol and all of it that I could drink. We were closing in on the time when I was going to be able to buy
some clothes. “I was just about to give you your turn.”
If we could find a way to run away, I’m sure our owner would say that to us, at some point, “We were just about to give you your
turn.” And if we still kept going, “You’ll die out there without me.” These are ageless, nationality-free, class-less power scripts. The
priest says it to the altar boy. And “They won’t believe you.” The parent to the child.
You’ll die out there without me.
How can we leave? What must we leave? Can we leave?
Writers strike.
How funny, right? But not if we get at least some of our publishers to stand with us. Small presses. University presses. Sixty-two
percent of us are working class, first generation in college. Our experience as sentient motes, our intelligence, is stripped from us.
We are made to not know ourselves in order to get “in.” We are made to talk, to walk, to think, like “our betters,” who are few. And
our betters love us for our lockstep embrace of their timeless and universal human principles of asocial consciousness at best, antisocial at worst. For out willingness to flop over into any venue of the “spiritual,” but no venue at all, as Bill Knott recently put it, of
the socialist or the agnostic or atheistic.
We are the pied pipers of “belief.” Belief in the invisible, the equivalent of angels. We are the bearers of illogic. We are the frontline
in the Assault on Reason, as Al Gore has explored recently in another book – which may, like his first, take ten years to be realized
by at least those classes that read. It doesn’t matter to our betters what form of illogical belief we exercise, so long as we become
accustomed to not thinking, not analyzing or critiquing, as Curtis White points out. So long as we find a new way to use language to
thwart “the social imagination,” our heritage as poets, as writers in a democracy that rests upon not simply the right of free speech,
but the expectation that one would use it to enlighten oneself not simply to advance oneself. We advance ourselves to the degree that
we refuse enlightenment.
We are the working class, that 62% Michael Zweig finds in his “mosaic” of the working class. We are, after all, the adjuncts, the
unemployed, the underemployed. We are the just barely let in. We are in fact, once we cross our own intellectually provincial borders, for the U.S. is the most provincial of great nations, part of the Left, the working class majority worldwide, and with us, intellectually, are the “bourgeois” who like us reckon the mystification in which we live and long to pierce it.
What is happening to us is what is happening to the university as an institution. We, it are corporatized. It’s what’s happened to the
environment, corporatized. We find ourselves in the privileged position of writing the poems, the stories, the “lyric essays” out of
“what is” as though that “what is” were natural, inevitable, the only possibility. As though, in fact, history were over. But history, as
we all know, is Now. And we are, as all workers are, running faster and faster for less, moving more and more to achieve utter rootlessness as the price of a tiny 401k, health insurance. Health insurance!
‘Til the ductile anchor hold, somewhere, o my soul.” Where will it hold, our spinning of a web outward to find a speck of solid
ground on which to restore to us all our class being, our experience, knowledge?
I’m thinking out loud, as they say, Don. Bear with me.
…
And now, what, a year since I first sent this mental breakdown of a plea to you, the ductile anchor has held at precisely one point: the
poet turns around. Something that simple. Something that intellectually irresistible. The poet is the bard too, and the poet’s people
are everyone not included in the Vendleresque Court.
“Let’s destabilize everything.”
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God the Synecdoche in His Holy Land
i.m. Rachel Corrie
Around you the father gods war. This
Father. That father. The other father.
What more dangerous place could
A woman stand, upright, than on that sand, as if
She were still antiphon to that voice, the other
Mind of that power. The very idea!
Crush her back in to her mother!
Crush her. Crush her. Consensus. War.
Linda McCarriston
Time In The Laundromat
I’m reading
a two year old copy
of “Newsweek”
war hasn’t happened yet
it’s awaiting
the spin cycle
John Grey
Lines
She’s heard them all
You’re the most beautiful woman
I’ve ever met from a male poet
To Can I come over for morning coffee
from a manly neighbor a week after her divorce
To We were made for each other
from her best friend’s husband
To I like older women as the kid
servicing her car leaned into the open window
To You have sensual hands
from a man who didn’t know how to hold them
To The best sex I’ve ever had
from a past lover
To You’re my kind of woman
from a mime on a Madrid sidewalk
None of these lines pulled taut
But when an electronic letter read
We are writing to each other at the same time
Our emails brushing across the wires
She knew of course this was one
that could reel her in
Ellaraine Lockie
Animals I’ve killed on Purpose
Type
#
Weapon
bug
shitload
various
fish
mess
hook
duck
plenty
Winchester
blackbird
four’n 20
end rhyme
frog
<bunch
firecracker
chipmunk
11.0
wrist rocket
crayfish
@+/- or so
rock
bat
not enough
tennis racket
cow
pi
irony
cat
nine
curiosity
Mitchell Metz
7
Students
Aunt Jane’s Depression
Some want to kill you. It’s the old “the king is dead”
routine except for real in their dreams. I wanted to
write about the students whose poems are fresh
lemons on Kate’s tree, clumps of sun wild with
light but the others break down doors on E Mail, write
pretending to be students working on a special poem,
dying to ask me questions. One came to my house
17 years for workshops, took notes on the brand of
tea in tins on the shelf, which window had a glass
crystal and twisted whatever she could into knives but she
still comes to readings, gushes over my poems. Then she
Before I was married,
I thought depression was serious,
You went mad and tried to
jump out of a window.
Once I heard of a man
who pulled a gun from
a dusty closet shelf.
A friend of mine, a young scientist,
slashed his wrists in the bathtub.
writes more fake letters: from editors, always with
photographs of herself as a man, hot for my body. Some
students are sure we had an affair, yodel under the window,
leave a copy of Macbeth with the wrong quote, sure it comes from
there: “The lady doth protest too much: in mirror writing as
the tea kettle boils and windows are frosted. One student accused
of trying to win the Lyn Lifshin look alike contest, fiercely and
wonderfully proved she was herself. Students mail me flowers from 7
countries and tehn sometimes use up my phone tape, fill it with
threats after some treats. One bleated “take me to Emergency”
and “read what I just wrote, it’s only 72 pages. Because you talk
strangely, only you can understand me.” I’ve considered dog walking in
a Ronald Reagan mask or dressed as a vampire. One teen was sure I
stole his dreams and slandered his father. A little Teflon would help. It
is better to do critiques thru the mail so no one comes 3 hours early and
because of snow, stays a week tho once when that happened, that student
made the most delicious squash soup and never threatened to kidnap me,
take me to Canada or Alaska. “This is not acceptable,” My lover is quick
to say but I’ve never been good at such directness, leave things vague:
dates, feelings – often by mistake. I love a sign I saw yesterday that said
if you can’t say something nice, be vague. Like kittens, at first students
seem cuddly, irresistible when they first come: blind, starved for anything
you
can give them. You hold them in your palm and they curl around you – I
like
them best then, because suddenly they start to smell, mark their territory.
Like cats, they howl, wild to scratch or claw you, piss on what matters most
Lyn Lifshin
Out With The Dog
You watched while I squatted
by the side of the trail, then
sniffed at the puddle and looked
at me as though I’d finally
said something intelligent.
Elizabeth Hurst
8
Aunt Jane’s symptoms are different.
She weeps and wails;
accuses her daughter of being unloving;
calls her sons’ wives bitches;
commands her maid to
bring all her meals to her room;
then phones her psychiatrist,
orders him to ignore his other patients
and hurry to her.
When you are wealthy
depression counts.
It’s easy to cheer up;
you add a new wing to your house;
change lawyers; go to the Riviera
or build a new swimming pool
with a marble lion that squirts water
from his mouth.
Richard W. Moyer
Crazy Eddie
Eddie and I
worked the night shift
running these machines
that cut gears.
When the foreman left
at midnight
I would get in my car
and drive
to the liquor store
and get the wine
two pint bottles
of Mogan David 20/20.
Then we would shut the
machines off
and drink the wine.
We did this every night
for two years.
When Eddie drank the
wine
he would begin to laugh
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
and he’d laugh
at everything I said
and he’d laugh
at the machines
as they sat idle.
I called him Crazy
Eddie
when I drank the wine.
One night Eddie
came into work
and he’d already
been drinking
the wine
and he wasn’t wearing
a shirt
or shoes,
and he’d smeared black
shoe polish
on his face
and in his hair.
I said
“Hey Eddie, man!
Go home, get some
sleep!”
I tried to get him
out of there,
but he wouldn’t go,
he just stood there
holding a half empty
bottle of the wine
and laughing
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Then he turned on the
oil spout
from one of the
machines
and filled the wine
bottle
mixing wine and yellow
cutting
machine oil,
then shaking up the
bottle
like salad dressing
before he drank it down,
and that was when
he pulled the hunting
knife
from his belt and that
was when
the cops had had
enough
of Crazy Eddie
and they proceeded to
fill him with official .38
rounds
until Eddie
stopped
laughing.
Gary Goude
Cowboy Gets Fired
We call them cookie-cutters—
huge presses punching out steel cookies.
You stand on a platform
and feed blank discs into two presses,
running back and forth
to keep them both loaded.
Used to be a two-man job.
I worked that job one day in summer heat.
Running back and forth, sweat soaking
my coveralls, shoes, I started hating myself
up on that platform. But I needed the money
so I kept feeding, feeding
till I slipped and fell.
Old Green stopped the presses.
I ran to the bathroom and soaked
my body in water. Driving home,
I swore I’d quit
before I did that job again.
Next day when Cowboy walked off the platform
and got fired, the union didn’t do
anything—he didn’t have his 90 days in.
I wanted to quit in support
but I wiped my hands
and took his place.
Jim Daniels
9
on that score, I was straight
i spent lunch breaks
at the ryko factory
on a rusted I-beam
out back.
a cornfield
ran right up to the edge
of the gravel road
semis used
to deliver iron
and stainless.
across the cornfield
was a highway,
in those cars
were people with
loaded dice
and no hands.
beyond that,
I didn’t have
a clue.
sometimes
i’d come close
to some semblance
of an answer,
but right about then
the plant’s electronic ‘gong’
pierced through
my earplugs
into my spine.
the big japanese laser
was hungry for the
hundred pound sheets of stainless
i spent ten hours a day
sweating through five shirts
loading onto it.
and if i didn’t want to feed it
they’d get some other loser
with limited options
from the temp agency
within the hour.
Justin Hyde
I Am Not The Other Guy
I wonder if I’m being
too harsh, too cold.
Sitting in the restaurant,
waiting for the food to arrive,
I see this guy take a seat
at the next table
and recognize Pete,
a supervisor at work
whose shift overlaps
with mine for about an hour
in the morning.
Twenty years and he’s
rarely ever said hello,
doesn’t know my name,
once said, “Would you take
care of this, guy.”
At the table I decide
to ignore the son-of-a-bitch
but my softer side
urges me to turn to him
and say, “Hi, guy.”
The harsh, cold side prevails.
Next day at work,
I’m pushing some overloaded
equipment with faulty wheels
when Pete and his boss
are there before me,
blocking the way.
Seems to me they should
get the hell out
since I’m doing work
and they’re just
looking important.
But of course I have to
come to a complete stop
and wait for them to pass,
then start up again,
overloaded, wheels impaired.
Am I harsh, cold,
to refuse to acknowledge Pete
at the restaurant?
Well, my name’s not Guy.
Neal Wilgus
10
Neon Factory
Breathing life into words
a hundred times a night,
my feet hurt from standing
on concrete and running
high voltage through glass
until it glows red,
free of impurities.
I turn a valve for gas.
Neon red. Argon blue.
In summer people pass
out from the heat.
I inject mercury with a syringe
to conduct electricity.
Seal the glass tube with a torch.
Trap another comet tail,
for eternity in theory.
A neon sign lasts forever.
Just don’t drop it.
After work I stop at Weasel’s
sit by the window
with the BUD LITE sign.
I listen to it hum.
Michael Kriesel
Lighter
We sat on my bed and she told me
about her classes and her new man
and the road-trip they were planning.
She asked me if I was happy, I said
I honestly didn’t know and flicked
an empty lighter into the space between us.
I asked her what happened to the little
sparks shooting off the flint, she said
she didn’t know. We cupped our
hands around the lighter, trying to
catch a few strays, but I knew it was no use –
some things burn up to quickly
to give anyone a fair chance.
Kaveh Akbar
The Hilt Of Her Saber
My blind date turned out to be
one of those Civil War re-enactors.
She wore this Confederate Cavalry outfit
with the high gold collar, a Jeb Stuart hat
with a big red plume, a little grey skirt,
and silver spurred black leather boots.
When I kissed her goodnight, the hilt
of her saber bore into my thigh.
She said she’d love to see me again
next week; all night long I dreamed
I was shooting Abraham Lincoln
David J. Thompson
My Hero
Dead now, what, ten years, everything so
exagerrated about him, “I never spoke one
word of English to my son, david, Yiddish for
David, just Yiddish….all day Yiddish, Yiddish,
Yiddish..and guess what he does for a living? He’s
a professor of Yiddish at Oxford, no less,” huge
jaw, nose, eyes, always loud, “Lach Heim, Lach
Heim, Lach Heim/ To Life, To Life, To Life,”
all these toasts of (kosher) wine at meals, his
wife Rivka, inventing all these greasy, yogurty,
soybeanish, 100% vegetarian dishes, sometimes
her recipes actually appearing in the New York
Times, not a shred of meat in the house for
years and years, and Menke didn’t just know a
little Talmud, but any topic you might bring up,
he’d always come back with “The Talmud says…,”
he’d quote it in Hebrew, then go into his library,
take down the volume, and there it was, sex twice
a day until he was eighty-five, always wanted to die
at eighty-five, “after eighty-five everything begins
to break down, fall apart,” died at eighty-five, I
can still hear him singing, playing the mandolin, always
smiling, enthusiastic, Angel of Death, stay away, away,
away, until I invite you in.
Dentistry
I kept a concession stand stocked
with hot dogs, mustard and relish
the two springs I did
porter work at Lincoln Downs.
One of the women selling there
was a Jehovah’s Witness
a firm believer that
smoking was a filthy habit.
She’d scold me nightly as well
as her much younger co-worker
who had jet black hair and bad teeth
but her face was pretty
and her face was remarkable.
She used self-conscious hand and lip
camouflage effectively but I would
have imagined touring her
cavities with my tongue
like cigarette smoke without it.
She was always amazed that I never
missed a chance to light her Marlboro.
I hinted about a drink at the Town
Lounge some night even though
her hoodlum-looking boyfriend,
a track maintenance man,
was always appearing
when I felt I was charming
her best.
He struck me
as scarier than any needle,
drill or root canal.
My last day on the job he gave her shit
about her first day on earth.
Exactas using her birthday numbers had failed.
When he snarled why the hell she
couldn’t have been born
two days earlier she was crying but shot
me an unfettered goodbye smile anyway.
I wondered if later
he’d explained had he won
he’s have financed painless dentistry
if only to loosen her long,
concession-sturdy legs but more likely
his words curled her lips around her teeth
as she pictured herself toothless and old
lighting Marlboros on the coil of a stove
hoping for a Witness knock on the door
or me with all my caps and crowns
and Zippo well-rested.
Thomas Michael McDade
Hugh Fox
11
Gloria Dugan at the Wake of Her Husband, Ed, 1963
I feel Margaret’s icicle eyes cursing,
“You should’ve been shoved down
them stairs by that small-time hood.”
She pined for Ed since before we married:
him, the biggest stick in the world,
but I was desperate: Nick running away
faster than after a bad bank job.
I could wrap Ed around my finger
like the strands of grass we played with,
as kids, pretending they were wedding bands;
he knew I’d shoved Margaret at him
with a ticket for that Broadway play:
Nick sauntering back to town,
and me not caring it’d be quicker
than toasting two slices of whole wheat,
Ed Dugan, at His Own Wake, 1963
but hoping Ed would find the courage,
for once, to take what he really wanted,
so I could tell Nick, “Let’s leave the girls
with Margaret and Ed, who’ll raise them right.”
Only Ed didn’t really want Margaret,
just the thought of her, and her still too pure
an ex-convent girl to run off with married Ed.
But now it hits me, I’ll never again
have Ed to flaunt myself at, never watch
his sweaty forehead while I’d undress,
whispering about sex dirtier than potting soil,
me so wound up, I’d slither all around him,
just as long as he’d shut up about it, later.
Margaret sneers I’m shamming tears
for the priest and Ed’s family.
With Nick returned for good,
the silly bitch is righter than she knows.
Robert Cooperman
Christ’s truth? Dead
and in my dress uniform,
I’m mortified at the way
these women carry on:
Gloria screams she’s lost
the best husband in New York,
but she stepped out on me
whenever I pulled night patrol.
Did she never wonder why
her beaus eventually stammered,
“Glory, you’re a grand lass, but . . .”
Then there’s Margaret: silently
pining for me, ready to jump in
beside me an never let me go,
if I winked a sign: her caught
betwixt this world and the one
where Jesus stretches His hand
to good Church-going girls.
And finally, Connie, taking on
like she was the secret love
of my life, thrashing with deliriums
from abstaining, for my sake,
as if I ever cared, alive or dead.
I’d never have let Gloria go,
not for all the Bushmill’s
in every New York tavern.
Christ forgive me, I loved her,
even if she and her new man
did shove me down those stairs
in that abandoned tenement
we got the anonymous tip on.
Terrible of me, a cop,
But I pray she gets away with it.
Robert Cooperman
12
Free Money to Read
for a while there
which
almost every day he’d pull
up in his orange Corolla
as I’d walk to
the p.o. to get the mail
& ask if I wanted
he admitted after he grew
closer
hasn’t
happened
a ride
& every
time I’d tell him
no
then almost
every day he’d happen
then he said
he knew another
writer in town
& that the 3
of us should
get together
& I said
nothing
to be in the p.o.
& he considered this
ignoring me until I’d open
a SASE
when he’d corner me & say “how’s it
goin”
he has a lot
of hair for his age
tortoise-shell
glasses that don’t
keep his eyes
from boring
in &
he stands close & the largeness
of his head makes him appear
taller each time
one morning
having forced me to hide
a rejection under junk mail
then said he could get
me a grant to read at the local
library but he’d need
copies of my books
which I could
give him next time we
talked
today he is still
why I no longer
get the mail at 9:30
& why I won’t
begin a new novel
other
reasons for the latter
of course exist
but today he
leads them comfortably
he said he’d heard I was
Mark Wisniewski
a writer & that
he was
one too
& I nodded & he began
in on his novel about
an hermaphrodite &
he seemed to believe his use of
an before hermaphrodite
entitled him to publication
Playboys
We were nine. It was raining, but not so heavily
yet that our mothers kept us inside. We rode bikes
in the alley, hopped speed bumps like bunnies
and found a wet Playboy near a dumpster,
slick pages flipping themselves in the wind
and misty rain. I’m not sure who saw it first,
or who lingered longest, hesitant to drive
into the laps of those long pink ladies
in their sheer gowns and feathered boas.
It was the eighties. Turquoise and pubic hair
Were still fashionable, and we couldn’t stop staring.
We crawled under a carport, four boys circling
a magazine like campers around a fire, and we
were quiet. No pointing. Just a page turn, a long
pause, another turn, until the centerfold—
three panels rolled out like a Persian rug
and a sandy blonde with aqua eyes from head
to burgundy toes, fingernails that could carve
a pumpkin’s Halloween smile, and breasts
like footballs someone would say. We didn’t know
where to look first or how to see it all at once.
All we knew was that we had to be quick
before our mothers called us in for dinner
and the heavy rains came to wash it all away.
Sam Pierstorff
13
“So when he calls you now, you can’t refuse-----”
He fancied himself some kind
of lower east side hipster Beat
though where he came from
was more like lower east side
of Orange County, liked to play
pied piper with all the young
girls with impressionable minds
and hot bodies he craved under
silk sheets he stole from guest
bedrooms of friends from back
home telling the girls he broke
and entered, fought off guard
dogs the size of Shetland ponies,
spread uppers, downers, laughers
screamers, pills for every occasion
like the johnnie appleseed of drug
store cowboys, read poems he wrote
by candlenubs sitting on crypts in
graveyard just off-campus where
he sat full moons drinking red wine
from a plastic death head pretending
to be the last of the new wave of
Romantic poets, the newest French
avant garde, trading in his white
linen poet’s suit for salvation army
clothes he cut into strips to get closer
to the earth, closer to man’s true being,
down and out on a caviar and bubbly
budget, was some kind of latter day
Napoleon in rags and the language
that he used seduced all the bleary
eyed ladies into his modified for
maximum comfort hearse, kept his
women in thrall with high grade drugs,
kept them so stoned they wouldn’t ask
questions or violate the code of silence
about the true nature of how he lived
inside his wagon of death and every
where he went was a happening, a strobe
light special throbbing with intense
pleasures of the flesh he took advantage
of to the max as sole heir to some
Fortune 500 Company of the better
living through chemistry war machine
future, well ahead of the flow in white
guru robes, Nehru jackets, one rumored
to have been worn by the high priest
of peace, bullet holes discreetly sewn
shut, only the most discerning eyes could
see the modifications, could sense that
in thirty years he’d be a charter member
of the hair club for men, slick as only a
man in custom cut five thousand dollar
suits could be, this close to Nirvana and
a permanent Wall Street Address.
Alan Catlin
14
The Frat Boy I Was (The Idiot I Am)
Look at that asshole! Standing below a mounted speaker,
sneakers in a puddle of piss in the corner of a basement
that is “A Cask of Amontillado” dank and stinking of sweat and pheromones.
He’s being chatted up by a wobbly girl
who wants to be a famous poet and describes her own eyes
as “sapphire skipping stones” and wears a bib of keg beer
on her tight red t-shirt. Black mascara runs down both cheeks,
the trails from the stream of tears wailed while waiting
for the bathroom after spotting her on-again/off-again boyfriend
locking tongues with her roommate from the dorm.
That’s when he decided to make his move, offering her a cigarette,
then following her back to the basement and the sound assault of techno.
He half-listens as she talks into his ear about Sylvia’s Plath,
her eyes glossed over and voice dripping so much pain over Sylvia’s death
that Anne Sexton would seem as stoic as the Marlboro Man
standing next to this girl. But he nods his head and snags not-so surreptitious
looks at her breasts, which are two clenched fists
shaking at him, begging him to free them from the tyranny of the bra,
and he’s thinking, All right, so she’s talking about suicide,
but Ted Hughes was a dick, and you need to get this ball rolling.
Then, for whatever reason, he’s struck by a sense of Camus’ “absurd”
and the meaninglessness of his life (he’s twenty year-olds
likes to think there’s a larger purpose to life) and maybe it has something
to do with standing in a puddle of piss, half-listening
as this drunken wannabe poet changes the conversation and goes on and on
about how she’s contemplating becoming a deconstructionist.
But right now, all he desires is to hold those breasts and smear them
against his face, knee-jerking at some raw Freudian urge.
Suddenly! It all makes sense! His desire to use this fallible code of language
to communicate his desire for her breasts, and to act on that desire,
is—contained in itself—meaningful, and therefore worthy of pursuing
like any idiot from a Dosteovsky novel: blindly and godlessly.
But be wary, kid. Everything comes with a price, especially our successes.
Nathan Graziano
Newbie
Eric was kicked out of Hooters
for saying something
to a waitress
he’s one of our
new cab drivers
he’s dumb enough
and mean enough
for the job
if he’d start
slobbering out
the side of his mouth
he’d be perfect
Mather Schneider
Highway Crimes
He had a studio apartment in Greensburg,
and there was a map of Southwestern
Pennsylvania taped to his living room wall.
Little red thumbtacks marked convenience
stores with access to main roads or highways.
I said, “Convenience stores, you’re kidding?”
I knew he had balls but this was a bad joke.
With a beer in one hand and a smoke in the other,
he pointed at the map and said, “I’ve never
been more serious about anything in my life.”
He was a welder without credentials and
he was sick of the lousy pay. But who wasn’t?
I was driving truck then, and I knew this guy
in Florida, and he wanted me to run all this
marijuana from South Bay up to Michigan.
He named a number, and it was more than
I’d make in a year. I looked back at my friend
with his ridiculous map of convenience stores.
The map looked like it’d been folded fifty
times so some of the creases looked like roads,
and some of the roads disappeared into creases.
My friend said, “At least three hundred a store.”
Three hundred a store, right. For five years in jail.
Don’t talk to me about guns. I don’t wear disguises.
All those thumbtacks. All those pushed-in dreams.
And Florida. How they pack all that marijuana
in five-pound bags of processed sugar that look
exactly like five-pound bags of processed sugar.
Overhead in a Public Restroom
I was taking a piss the other day in a public restroom, and I
heard this man in one of the stalls talking loudly. From the
way he was talking I assumed he was talking to himself. He
sounded like one of those crazed people I see occasionally
rambling down the street delivering an angry diatribe against
the world and any and everyone in it.
“Who does that son of a bitch think he is? Yeah, that’s right,
I’m on to him. He thinks he’s got me by the balls. Hey,
when it comes to squeezin’ balls, he ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Oh, don’t worry, I’m cool, I’m cool, I’ll pick my time. But
that turd is going to answer to me, for I am one hell of a
turd-whacker. Yes, you have my permission to quote me on
that. That bastard puts out a worse stink than the shit comin’
out of my bowels right now. Yes, I’m taking a shit. And I’d
like to eat that fucker and shit him out and flush him down
like that.” And I heard the toilet flush. “You hear that? That’s
what I’m going to do. I’m going to flush that piece of shit.
Oh, man, I’m starting to feel good all over just thinkin’ about
it. They ain’t nothin’ like gettin’ even with a prick, a dirty
rotten prick.”
By this time I was washing my hands. I heard the stall door
open, and in the mirror above the washbasin I saw this guy
dressed in a dark suit walk by talking on a cell phone. As he
walked by I heard him say, “I’m on my way. Meet me
there.”
During that whole monologue it never occurred to me that he
was talking on a cell phone. This guy never missed a beat.
How did he wipe his ass, pull up his pants and put his shirt
tail in and, at the same time, keep talking on his cell phone?
This guy was smooth. I’m glad I’m not the person he was
out to get. And he looked tough, too. Hell, he didn’t even
wash his hands after taking a shit.
Glen Chesnut
Dave Newman
15
Dear FTB: An Open Letter Regarding Horrible Small (and Not So Small) Press Poetry Reviews
"Reviews don't sell books". This is the essence of the all too brief, amusing intro to horrible reviewing states. No argument there. The reviewer is charged, and rightly so, with the task of careful examination of a work under consideration for review.
The reader hopes that what the critic writes, what he will read, fulfills this duty in a meaningful way. Actually, hopes is the wrong
word, the reader trusts, that the reviewer will answer the call. But what if the reviewer does not?
I will concern myself only with the three books that I have read of the five reviewed. I will begin at the end as that reviewer also wrote the intro. Before we read the text to Nate Graziano's, Teaching Metaphors, we are confronted with an unwelcome
question casting doubt on this reviewers credibility: "$10 I think." A simple Google search of the sunnyoutside press site would
reveal the price is actually $15. If no price is listed, standard reviewing practice is to state no price listed. Small potatoes? Yes
and no. This reader becomes wary.
In the body of the text this reviewer offers us an array of epic sentences, eschewing the period and rambling on to almost
dizzying lengths. With examples from the text included these sentences can be almost too much to take in. What are we to make of
such unwieldy constructions as,
"But I do wonder why Graziano, obviously a dedicated teacher, concerned for his students, chooses to include poems in
the collection that, for the most part, highlight the wayward foolishness (or worse) of the student body, and the dysfunction of the
faculty."
The sentence, as do so many others, aches for concision. It should be mentioned that the pathos, the flawed humanity and
equally as flawed students are the heart of the collection; is what Nate's sees as the human condition as he sees it in the school he
works at. The successes this reviewer wishes for in his concluding line are all relative and rare and surely, not the stuff of this collection.
More disturbing is the main reviewers awkward groping in the dark for some kind of presumably helpful insight. (I say
main as he is responsible for four out of five of the reviews in this issue.) He begins with a truism as follows,
"It takes a considerable amount of talent to be able to successfully pull off a themed collection of poems, simple because
there are so many ways can go wrong in attempting to execute one."
Well, yes.
And, no. A random check of the shelves of poetry around this room where I type reveals: Four Quartets, 31 Letters 13
Dreams, Transformations, Dancing on the Grave of a Son of Bitch, Motorcycle Betrayal Poems..... The closer the shelves are examined, and we're talking thousands of titles here, the more one gets the sense that finding a shared theme is what publishing a collection is all about. That being so, on the most part, even mentioning it seems beside the point.
I belabor the point only because reviewer #2 does, devoting most of one paragraph, of a six paragraph review, to discussing themed collections. I won't argue that Four Quartets is an equally as successful themed collection or a more appropriate one for
discussion than Eliot's cute cats collection. But it does give you an idea of the depth of reviewer's intelligence. I trust reviewer #2
has read both of Eliot's diverse works.
All themed collections are not equal, obviously. Sexton's Transformations is a brilliant reworking of familiar stories
while her The Awful Rowing to God is well, awful as it details her suicidal thoughts of complete personal annihilation. Equally
awful, in its way, is Berryman's brilliant life work Dream Songs . Still neither of these failures, if they are failures of expression, is
because they are themed.
Reviewer #2 seems to be suggesting that the poems in Holder's collection are somehow less than what they may have been
for being collected together. I will not endeavor to argue that reviewer #2's assertion that some poems are weak and cliched, some
are, but an intelligent reader is put off before the body of the review begins by his attitude. Perhaps, he feels that the linking theme
is not worthy of a collection, that a more weighty matters are what poetry is made of. I might suggest an unpromising theme for a
linked collection: Orange. Poet Gilbert Sorrentino's book Orangery might disabuse reviewer of his thematic prejudices. Preferring
cats to meditation is not in and of itself a terrible thing either.
I will not speak about the collections I am not familiar with. A rather facile, stock dismissal of Academic poetry leads us
into the second review. The point is only worth mentioning as typical of the distracting, digressive style of reviewer #2. Digressions are not necessarily a bad trait, can, in fact, be amusing in the proper place. In a place such as this, they feel like fluff and filler.
Similarly, I am not convinced sentences one and two of the McCade review add anything to an understanding of anything.
That is presuming something of value is to be gleaned from such cumbersome writing as this,
"With perhaps the notable exception of a certain white whale, no single symbol in the history of American letters- or
American culture, for that matter- has been quite as omnipresent as the automobile. Virtually since the moment Mr Ford ushered
his first Model T off the assembly line, cars have been the quintessential American symbol for fun, freedom, escape, rebellion, romance, male bonding, and just about anything else one may want it to be symbol for."
One reads two sentences such as those and he wants to grasp his head and say, "Good Grief!" It might be amusing to devote several pages to just how bad and unnecessary those sentences are.
One example will have to do, "a certain white whale". What is wrong with saying Moby Dick? We are all meant to know
which whale he is referring to, we all do, hopefully. Reviewer has chosen to be arch, to demonstrate how clever he is possessing a
working knowledge of required high school reading.
Some of us are not amused. Some of us recall how poor Herman Melville had been maligned during his life and virtually
forgotten, totally discouraged because of that book's utter failure. It is only recently that it has been reclaimed as the classic it is.
One wonders what reviewer #2 knows of Herman's life and work beyond Moby. I suggest Pierre of the Ambiguities for further
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study of what Moby might actually mean. And, then, if he makes it through Pierre, Billy Budd.
But I digress.
I have a personal stake in spiel's book as my introduction to the collection They indicates. I do not expect the reviewer to
have familiarized himself with the body of spiel's work before attempting to say something intelligent about his work. Much as I
don't expect the first reviewer to have read Graziano's other books for a broader understanding of the one he reviews. This is the
small presses after all.
I do, however, expect reviewer to have read the whole of the book closely, at least, once. It is quite obvious, from his first observation, that reviewer #2 decided, in poem one or two of They, that this collection is a simple dynamic of Us versus Them. He devotes
the whole of the first paragraph telling us what we already know about that cliche, never once considering that spiel might be getting at something deeper. Much Deeper.
Furthermore, his obvious, inane assertion with regard to Bukowski that begins "Even Buk.....", totally misses the point of
the man's life work and should prepare us for a total misreading of spiel. Quite simply, everything that Bukowski wrote reflected
Hank against the world, me against them and was manifested by his lifestyle of whoring, boozing and so forth. To suggest otherwise is a failing of basic understanding of the man's psychology and of human motivations.
I will suggest that spiel is using the we, us, them dynamic as part of a deep, ironic, comic, and I mean comic in the sense
of Beckett's existential "I can't go on, I go on", vision of the world. The they of these poems is multi-faceted, multi-layered, at
once an inner reality and an outer one; theys who are demons, theys who are memories, fears, external forces, internal ones and so
much more. This is a nuanced work of great depth and understanding that cannot be understood by a simple desultory philippic
such as the one reviewer offers in place of a critique. It is hurtful, it is insulting, to see a work of far reaching creative ingenuity,
and I do not say this lightly but I do say it sincerely, unjustly reduced to the level of buffoonery as it is here.
Listen to poems spiel has recorded, his elegiac songs of the self on his CD, and read, really read these poems, and you will see a rich
plex, albeit, disturbing world. The challenge of these poems is for the reader to slow down and think and consider and see something remark
different. Extracting a piece, as reviewer #2 does, that seems, insipid and stupid does everyone a disservice. Most of all it demeans the artist
good is that?
Ultimately, the question is, "what are these reviews for." Obviously not to sell books. This reader suggests that the spiel review doe
suggest the presumptive superiority of a reviewer than an understanding of the poetry. I am put to mind of no less a publication than the New
Times Book Review giving Hunter S. Thompson's Great Shark Hunt to William F. Buckley to review. The result was predictable and useles
cism beyond a forum for Mr. Buckley to show off his usual verbal pyrotechnics. To be a truly democratic publication, the NYTBR should h
Mr. Thompson one of Mr. Buckley's saccharine novels to review. I for one would love to have heard Mr. Thompson's take on God and Man
As I would like to see this letter appear in FTB as a rebuttal to what has already been written. I invite a response, look forward to constructiv
criticisms in the democratic spirit of fair play and equal time for diverse points of view.
Respectfully,
Alan Catlin
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Gold Star Road. Richard Hoffman. ( Barrow Street PO BOX 1831 Murray Hill Station NY 10156) $25.
Reviewed by Doug Holder
There damn well should be a poem for a doorman, a poem that celebrates in-your-face blue-collar wisdom, and a poem that sings
for the many unsung Gold Star Roads
(Designated roads where soldiers killed in the line of duty lived and are memorialized), in far flung communities across the country.
And poet/memoirist Richard Hoffman is just the man for the job. If you read Hoffman’s acclaimed memoir “Half the House…” you
would know that he sprung from a hardscrabble working class background, and has had more than his share of sorrows over the
years. This is not some freshly scrubbed MFA churning out another unearned angst-laden collection. Hoffman has walked the walk,
and has been around the block several times. But unlike these tired clichés his work is original and evocative.
I’m no scholar and I respond to poetry on a very gut and emotional level. So a poem like “ Summer Job” speaks to me. It brings out
my sense of longing: for my youth, and that no-nonsense type of guy who befriended me and cut through all the crap and posturing
we all engage in, in this hyperactive society. In this poem “Summer Job” Hoffman remembers a grizzled boss from his early years
who proved to be an unexpected font of wisdom. The poem is so tight and cohesive it would be a disservice not to quote it in full:
SUMMER JOB
“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss
once told me, “ is that they don’t know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,”
he said, “ he gets to middle age;--and by the way,
he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy until
he’s forty, forty-five, and then give him five
more years till that craziness peters out, and now
he’s almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains
to himself that life is made of time, that time
is what’s all about. Aha! he says. And then
he either blows his brains out, gets religion,
or settles down to some major-league depression.
Make yourself useful. Hand me that three –eights
torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one.”
There is a lot of other great work to recommend this collection of course. “ Airfare” deals with a chance encounter the poet had at an
airport with a man he knew when he was young. The encounter consists of a “brittle conversation,” but the memories the meeting
evokes releases a flood of perceptions about the confusion and continuum of life:
“I wondered at how we change,
inhibit, inhabit one another;
friends, enemies, teachers lovers,
neighbors, students…
…I
was trying to find, through layers
of scratched Plexiglass and drifting
clouds, a sign of where we were
and how much farther we had to go…”
Gold Star Road is a five star collection in my book. And Hoffman is a star of a poet.
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Last Train to New Zealand and other poems. Neal Wilgus. 2007. 40 pages. No price given. Juxtopedia Press, 927 Lamino Hermosa, Corrales, New Mexico 87048.
Reviewed by Don Winter
I have said these remarks elsewhere. They are worth repeating here, in slightly different form:
The willed human life, in which an individual acts while relating to pat, present, and future, thereby expressing social action
reflectively, and taking responsibility for such action, is becoming rare, replaced by human life that is hardly voluntary or purposive,
but rather the results of external determinants.
Max Weber, German sociologist around the turn of the twentieth century, described how people in increasingly complex, industrialized societies looked for the best way to achieve a given end. While people had once been left to discover those means on
their own, using hazy, non particular direction from universal principles, people now formed ordinances and structures that predetermined best ways of making choices. In essence, while Weber praised what he came to call the Iron Cage of rationality for increasing
the human potential for speed, efficiency and optimum means to an end, he came to view it as dehumanizing (de-individualizing),
turning human beings into rationalized, commoditized robots. According to Weber, “The self was placed in confinement, its emotions controlled, its spirit subdued.”
Western individualism, that is that there is a clear distinction between myself and others, has long been seen as an eccentricity
among cultures. Still, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau assumed individuals, and individual rights pre-existed any form of society. But
sociologists such as George Ritzer posit that the pathologies that Weber describes continue today. In a society that is fast becoming
de-individualized, definitions of self such as “all statements made by a person, overtly or covertly, that include the words ‘I,’ ‘me,’
‘mine,’ and ‘myself,’ or ‘goals of persons over the in-group’ become more marginal and irrelevant. Role, structure, external facts and
processes, conditions relatively independent of present desires and future goals of acting individuals have come to dominate daily
life in the United States.
In his empirically sound study of United State’s culture, Ritzer argues that the constraints of a rationalized world allow less
and less for people to be thoughtful, skillful, creative, and well-rounded. He, like Max Weber, sees a society developing where people are “locked in a series of rational structures, their only mobility from one rationalized system to the next.” From a rationalized
education to a rationalized workplace to a rationalized home. Even the escape routes are de-individualized: TV, DVD, Play Station,
and CD.
Guidelines exist that detail how virtually everything you do is to be done in all situations. But, as William Packard asked, is
there a guideline that can help one create the powerful poetry of a Sappho or a Baudelaire or an Anne Sexton or Carl Sandburg? As
writers, we can’t be satisfied with competence; we must live the sort of tiger lives (at least intellectually) that cultivate the vision
needed to write tiger poems, singular and distinguished poems. And almost everything in our increasingly rationalized society is
against this. Thank God, or whomever, that poet Neal Wilgus in his new book Last train to New Zealand and other poems provides
us with eccentric, singular poems. Are you headed to Mickey Dees for a $5 combo? Send your $ instead to the above address, and
buy an important small press collection.
The Cezanne/Pissarro Poems. Gerald Locklin. 2007. 45 pages. $12.95. World Parade Books, 5267 Warner Avenue #191, Huntington Beach, California 92649. E-mail: worldparadebooks.com.
Reviewed by Don Winter
Underscoring the spell cast by the poems in The Cezanne/Pissarro Poems is Locklin’s choice to name things in the poems, and
to give the poems a sense of place, a sense of time. Robert Hass once said of his own poems in Field Guide: “one of the tasks I had
set out for myself in those numbing years was to try to get hold of the immediate world around me.” Most of us share with Hass in
his existential dilemma, and so we find Locklin’s poems in The Cezanne/Pissarro Poems even the more bewitching because his
speakers are biographical creatures who exist in a historical and cultural context, as in “Cezanne: Still Life with Bread and Eggs,
1865:”
Sure, we see the long loaf of bread
(longer than that line)
And the two imperfect eggs,
But where is the mention of the two onions?
Where is the mention of the knife?
What is in the pewter stein?
Onions have mystical qualities.
Everyone knows that.
Hemingway knew that.
Maybe he learned it from this painting.
I’m sure he—an admirer of Cezanne’s deep structures—
Would have viewed that pair of onions
As a nice set of balls,
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Just as the vernacular Spanish
United eggs and balls as huevos.
And notice how they are situated at the base
Of that thick, elongated stick of bread,
From which even the blade of the knife
Averts itself. Look at the crystal chalice,
About to welcome its wine/water/beer.
Bread, wine, water, onions, eggs:
What a communion, eucharist, consummation,
Everlasting lightning of conception,
Transubstantiation.
This poem and others like it in the collection suggest concrete, individual existence takes precedence over abstract, conceptual essence. Stanley Kunitz’s perceptive remarks in the forward to Hass’s Field Guide are applicable to Locklin’s collection: “[his] poetry
is permeated with the awareness of his creature self, his affinity with the animal and vegetable kingdoms, with the whole chain of
being.”
I find myself enthralled by Locklin’s discursive structures, in which he avoids the imposition of epiphany onto image, refuses
to resolve antimony with metaphor, but moves instead from “image to discourse in the language of his time,” As Hass argues, such
movement is necessary because the “perilous-ness of our individual lives makes the insight of the isolated lyric untenable.” Locklin
is educating himself (and us) by asking questions, by going to erudition rather than image, by taking into account many avenues of
learning. The passages in many of the poems oscillate fluidly between the confessional, the historical, and the analytical, just as the
forms shift between the essayistic and the lyrical:
Cezanne: The Artist’s Father
Joachim Pissarro points out
That l’evenement, the liberal rag
The artist’s dad is reading,
Is where Zola had defended
The paintings of the impressionists as works,
As the productions of “serious workers,”
In a Marxist sense,
Whose work had as much true
Economic, social, ideological,
And humane/progressive value
As the efforts of any of the other members
Of the working class.
And I would agree with the truth of that
For Cezanne and Monet and Manet and Degas
And Van Gogh and just about any of the artists
Whose names have endured long enough
To spring to mind,
But I sure know plenty of self-appointed artists
And, worse, poets, of our own time
Whose “work” is of value only to themselves…
No, wait, they may in fact just be wasting
Their entire lifetimes when they could be doing
Something, anything, that they are better at,
Just as I gave up the piano for drinking.
And I tend to agree with the steam-plant welders
Whom I used to drink with at the 49ers Tavern
Near the university:
“Locklin,” they would chorus, whenever I would
Lament essay grading or committee meetings,
Or the lack of respect accorded the contemporary poet,
“You’ve never done an honest day’s work in
Your life.”
In this poem and others in the collection, Locklin refuses to capitulate either to the lyrical moment or the abstraction, and so
his poetry exists and persists as an urgent place for utterance of consciousness. Locklin is working against the tendency of poets of
inwardization to produce decadent art, art which is abstruse, confidential, nostalgic, and private.
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love & death & teeth in the blood. Todd Moore. 2007. 52 pages. $9. Pitchfork Press, P.O. Box 146399, Chicago, Illinois 60614.
Email: pitchforkpoetryprojects.com.
Reviewed by Don Winter
What moves and enchants me upon first reading Todd Moore’s love & death & teeth in the blood is its incantatory power, underscored by the careful measuring of the voice, the dividing of the words. But the poems’ forms, as Flannery O’Connor discerns of
all important literature, are unforced, and “grow out of the material.” William Packard observed that in tiger poetry a mysterious
charge of language takes place when passions combine with consciousness to create rhythms, “the inevitable and intuitive rhythms of
the blood stream, ear and eye and voice.” For Moore, form is “experiencing in the fluidity of things a certain orderliness: footsteps, a
face, a smell of hair and tobacco, cooing syllables” (Hass in “One Body, Some Notes On Form”):
one tire
was still
spinning when
larry rolled
out it
looked funny
to see the
engine on
fire because
steel wasn’t
supposed to
burn & he
almost
laughed til
he looked
back dora
was sitting
very still be
hind
the wheel w/
something
steel thru
her & the
angle of the
sun at that
time of day
made the
wind look
red
Moore’s careful use of form becomes meaning in this poem, and others like it, and/or underscores meaning. See what I mean? His
use of enjambment increases the speed of the poem, and the tension of the syntax. Yet a sense of restrictedness is also suggested by
the tightly wrapped stanza. So the entangling of craft with meaning underscores not only the explosiveness of the situation, but also
the idea of the characters’ entrapments. The poem is a sort of rhythmic oasis, enclosing a measured movement, like a dance or a
march, and yet the rhythms in the poem are not metronomic. The poem has, as Hass found in Lowell’s poems, a “brilliance that
seems neither dictated nor wrought; it is headlong, furious and casual.”
Moore is one of the greatest poets of the past 50 years. Don’t you owe it to yourself to buy his finest works?
Still Life by Alan Catlin. 2007. 26 pgs. $5.95 + $1 p/h. Black Buzzard Press. Available from the author at 143 Furman St.
Schenectady, NY 12304.
Reviewed by Steve Henn
There’s a lot happening in this collection of poems from Alan Catlin, who has been around the small press block more than
once. A lot includes but is not limited to: 1) the rhythm and pace of the poems, and how it serves their function as still lifes. 2) the
poet’s ability to finish very well. 3) a recurring motif of death, usually disastrous, with poems set before, during, and after the end of
a life, and 4) the important role that a sense of time and place plays in many of the poems.
I asked Catlin to characterize the aesthetic behind these poems. He replied, “when I started writing them I wanted the reader to see them as a still life, as in, life frozen the way it would be in a photograph or a painting. Technically, they are not still lives,
as a still life does not have a living object in it or people. They are, however, written with a concrete image in mind which is animated through the words of the poem and then, frozen again when the reading ends.”
21
The key to Catlin’s sense of rhythm in the poems is a judicious use of enjambment. Each still life is in fact a snapshot, moving
through different parts of a particular scene. Catlin’s ability to run compressed, unawkward phrases together gives the poems a sense
of movement that prevents the snapshots from becoming too static. The middle section of one of my favorites, “A Summer Evening
With Hand Grenade, Utica, NY 1970” takes us from the interior of a “sandwich bar” to the set up for a mob hit in one long, smooth
flow of images: “Through the grimy picture windows, / the watching could see the cars lining up in rows, / parking against the bar
and grill wall, the drivers / getting out, stepping inside, where the local favorites / trade ethnic jokes and lies over Utica Club draft
beer, / smoking short cigars, chewing cheese fish and pretzel / nubs; the one who leaves early with less than half a / bag on was better off inside, strong arming a client in / the men’s room, outside, his car door has been / hotwired, he is an unsolvable murder about
to / happen . . .” Another example is the end of “Black and White Woman Admitting the Tropical Storm” a poem that didn’t hook
me until I was finally patient enough to follow its development – “rain kills her cigarette, cools the room, come / morning she’ll
wake up talking to the clouds of / insects gathered in the corners of the wall in / broken street Spanish, the sun will divide the / broken furniture into rooms, the biggest room / will be filled with sea gulls spreading their / wings, searching broken glasses, tidal pools
for / food, surrounding the forgotten boy who sees / nothing now, not even the stars inside his skin.”
The above example is one among many endings where Catlin concludes a poem with an emphatic statement that caps the
poem’s emotional emphasis. This is a quality that keeps the poems from becoming mere exercises in description. In “Death of a
Barman, Old Men Drinking Shots Without Beer Chasers, The Lark Tavern 1973” a 24 year old bartender is killed, a bystander casualty in a police chase, and the regulars at the local tavern understand it as an intimation of their own mortality and a prophesy of the
life that he would no longer lead: “his mother said, ‘24 years / old, what a way to go, he never had a chance.’ Looking / down into
the hole, everyone knew she was right, / especially the old men who saw him staring back / at them from the glass with their own,
cold, dead eyes.” In “Pilgrim State Mental Hospital Still Life” a son visits his mother at the mental hospital. The boy’s attempt to
make sense of her wild thoughts resonates as Catlin ends with “she speaks wildly of / interplanetary baseball in decompression bubbles / that burst in the ears of the stupefied child, / sitting, transfixed, by her side watching a / pennant race that transcends the interlocking stars.”
Catlin handles the shock of the death scene in a successful attempt to make literally still, often unexpectedly ended lives a
focus of Still Life. A quick count yields at least 10 of the 25 poems in the chapbook mentioning a death and often a corpse. The
bodies are often a result of unexpected events, and include a woman on Coney Island Beach unsuccessfully receiving CPR, a
“working late man in a gray summer suit” whose death is made more poignant by being “buried on page 19 of a Long Island Daily
Press,” and rows of DOAs from an Albany County airline disaster.
I’ve always been turned off by globetrotting MFA poets and/or professors who feel the need to set poems within one book
in landscapes around the world, as if maintaining a sense of place in poetry involved including as many places around the world as
possible (and also revealing distinctions of class and wealth that place the poet among a select group of worldbeaters, but perhaps
that is a distinction best reserved for other, more astute FTB editors who specialize in the working class). Catlin confirms my belief
that the poet need not venture out of, roughly speaking, his or her tri-county area for powerful material. New York state scenes figure prominently in the collection, including one poem set on the Schenectady to Albany bus, another in Utica, others in Albany or
East Rockaway. Perhaps it is just a personal preference, but I like that Catlin’s poems are localized to a particular area he knows so
well. That approach, in fact, makes this reader more willing to go with Catlin to the Hall of Fame game in Cooperstown or the Virgin Islands, where I’m confident he’s taking us because he has something worthwhile to say, not just to flex some useless cosmopolitan muscle.
I read Catlin’s selected poems, Drunk and Disorderly, before this chap, and I have to admit I liked the bar poems in that
collection the best. I was pleased, however, to read a collection by Catlin with a different focus, but that maintained a quality just as
strong or stronger than many of his great bartending poems. The really good chaps are the ones where you recognize the depth and
quality of the poems as you read and return to them, and for me, Catlin’s Still Life has done just that.
This I Believe About The Death Penalty
A social commentary by Oren Wagner
The Death Penalty. Is it a great idea, or the greatest idea? I say kill them all and let a Norse god sort em out. Really,
what has Oden done for us lately? Now, I know there will be some constitutional huggers out there who will raise the alarm that
people's civil liberties are being violated, but everybody knows that felons aren't real people. Because if felons were real people,
they'd be able to vote and receive financial aid for college. And if being civil is so important why is there a war named after it?
If you really want to deter crime, we should execute everyone for anything that falls into the felony category. So as to compromise with the Bill of Rights coddlers out there, everyone gets one "Get Out of Jail Free Pass" (Trade Mark Parker Brother's 1935)
but after the first felonious offense you're out of the frying pan and into the fire, both actually and metaphorically speaking.
It's clear to me that Western Civilization is nearing the zenith of its decline. Juxtapose our culture with the culture of Rome
during the fall of its empire. There was first and foremost a loss of civic virtue. Look at the lust for blood with the Gladiators and
live executions. Entire coliseums were filled to capacity to see the Gladiators fight to the death. We have the same lust for mindless
entertainment. The sort of diversions that serve absolutely zero purpose for bettering our society. Instead of American Idol or
America's Next Top Model, it will be "America's Next Top Executioner," or "Hobby Gallows Spectacular," brought to you in-part by
Budweiser.
I know how much you like Latin so here's one for you, gentium barbarorum auxilio indigenous, also known as Germanic barbarians. These unchristian barbarians invaded the Holy Roman Empire by the bus load, contributing only to the decay of the Romans.
I'll say it here, I've never trusted the Germans or their chocolate. All I'm saying is, if we don't tighten our borders, we could be facing
the same problem very soon. Canada, I've got my eye you.
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So I say, kill them all. Why not? We are already on the fast track to having history's worst human rights record, and for those
who still think about applying the rules of hedonistic calculus, their crimes will be controlled through fear of punishment. What's
more swift, certain, and severe than death? Not breaking the law in the first place and enjoying the freedoms that were preserved by
the hero's of the Civil War.
The following is an email from G. Tod Slone, regarding a cartoon critiquing Don Winter’s use of blurbs to sell his new chap,
among other things. Don asked to run the cartoon, and Slone offered the cartoon on the back cover of FTB as an alternative.
We accepted his offer and include his email below on the politics of blurbing — FTB Editors
Don,
Your response is noble. At first, I thought it was a sarcastic way to kill debate. Hell, I’m used to that kind of “rhetorical”
response.
Yes, I am against blurbs altogether. If the work is any good, who gives a goddamn what Galing or Lyfshin have to say
about it? In fact, blurbers often have something else as a motive for blurbing: GETTING THEIR NAMES OUT THERE OVER
AND OVER AGAIN!
Moreover, in becoming so ubiquitous, the blurb has lost any value it may have once had. Are there people who will really
buy a book (evidently, that’s what it’s all about: PURCHASE & SALE, PURCHASE & SALE) because Todd Moore says it’s
great? If so, those people make terrible citizens! When the citizenry reads, it tends to be a NY Times bestseller, which will likely
end up in the trash heap within a year’s time of its publication… or on Amazon for 50 cents. Don’t people have the ability to decide
for themselves anymore? Let me decide for myself. That’s my thought on it. Too much credence is accorded to KNOWN PERSONAGES (dubious celebrities). Instead, we ought to be wondering how such personages got known in the first place. What are
their goddamn ideas? Do they have any or do they believe, as Todd Moore believes, in just “sitting down to write another poem”?
As editor, for example, my policy has been not to include positive feedback in The American Dissident, but only negative
feedback. Clearly, this is at antipodes with what the bulk of self-congratulating magazines tend to do. If I am wrong about something, I need to stand up, admit the wrong, and get it right. If someone else is wrong, I need to prove it via logical argumentation and/
or fact. In other words, convince me blurbing is good for poetry and the lit milieu! It’s quite that simple. Regarding The AD, I did
break that policy recently, though only to give voice (and a taste of publication) to college students in front of whom I spoke as an
invited editor earlier this year (yes, rare open-minded English professors actually exist in America; that is, one or several). The policy shall resume.
As you probably know, I have observed a strong tendency of backslapping and self-congratulating in the academic and literary milieu. (Am I the only one who has observed this?) Blurbing is an evident example of self-serving you-scratch-my-back-andI’ll-scratch-yours. The phenomenon weakens the milieu’s potential as a strengthening force of democracy… to the benefit of Big
Business and oligarchy. It kills criticism. In other words, I’ll likely turn a blind eye when you act corruptly because you once helped
me sell my fuckin book with a blurb!
Literature in America has become defused, and that serves the business of publishing (SELLING!) to the detriment of poetry. Today, POETS WANT FAME. THEY DO NOT GIVE A GODDAMN ABOUT TRUTH, as in “go upright and vital, and speak
the rude truth in all ways” (Emerson), no matter what the consequences. National Poetry Month, sponsored by the censoring Academy of American Poets, doesn’t give a goddamn about truth and that’s why its monstrous efforts to push poetry in every high school
and college in the nation are hollow.
BTW, thank you for contacting the Academy, which has yet to respond to my complaint either.
If you choose to champion truth, then you choose truth over the possibility of fame and bestselling. If you choose to champion truth, then you choose not to scratch backs. If you choose to champion truth, then you will likely NEVER be nominated for a
fuckin Pushcart or state laureate or become tenured professor or poetry-contest winner or NEA-grant recipient. And that of course
bares testimony to the corrupt core of American society.
Now, for your second email, which I’ve just read. Your willingness to publish that cartoon I sketched on your boasting
manifests that you are a rare strong individual able to “take” criticism, which is why I would rather you don’t print it. I have no reason to openly criticize somebody who is sufficiently open to “listen” to criticism… and even alter his behavior due to it. Your offer
is unusual. But the following would be even more daring, for it would break with the scratch-the-back behavior expected of established-order poets: publish the attached cartoon on your blurber (back scratcher) Todd Moore, who I believe is known for having
known Bukowski. Moore, lifer English teacher, truncated discussion with me when he decided he did not like what I had to
say. Some role model, eh?!
The question remains, nonetheless: do you really, sincerely, and in your very gut want to choose TRUTH over FAME?
G. Tod
23
Linda McCarriston is the author of three collections of poetry: Talking Soft Dutch, an AWP Award Series Selection, Eva-Mary, winner of the
1991 Terrence Des Pres prize and National Book Award finalist, and Little River. She is featured in Bill Moyer’s The Language of Life: A Festival
of Poets, Linda Hogan’s Intimate Nature, and Robert McDowell’s Cowboy Poetry Matters.
John Grey is an Australian born poet, playwright and musician. He is one of the most widely published poets in the small press, including recent
appearances in Chiron Review, The Baltimore Review, Weber Studies and Confluence.
Mitchell Metz is a former All-Ivy football player, now a stay-at-home dad with four young children. In his free time, he plays hockey, with the
delusion it will somehow make him immortal. A 1999 Pushcart Nominee, Metz’s work has appeared in nearly 100 publications, including Southern
Poetry Review, Poet Lore, California Quarterly, and Wisconsin Academy Review.
Lyn Lifshin’s poems have appeared in most literary and poetry journals. She is the subject of the award winning film Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of
Glass. Before It’s Light, winner of the Patterson Poetry Prize, was published by Black Sparrow Press, following Cold Comfort in 1997. She is the
author of #1 in the Evil Genius series, She Was Found Treading Water Deep Out in the Ocean.
Elizabeth Hurst’s chapbook Barbed Wire Olympics was jointly published by Minotaur Press and Norton-Coker Press.
Richard Moyer has published numerous poems in magazines such as Mad Poets Review, Endicott Review, The Twelfth Street Review, Maelstrom,
The Pink Cadillac, Small Pond Magazine, Hazmat Review, Poetry Motel, Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Thin Coyote, Haiku Headlines, Nerve
Cowboy, Red Owl Magazine, and The Lyric. His chapbook The Cancer Center was published by Bending Tree Press in 2004.
Gary Goude, an honest, profane working class poet, was the subject of the craft interview in New York Quarterly 60. He lives in Riverside, California, and we’ve heard he has a crush on Patricia Covey.
Jim Daniels is best known as a major figure in working-class poetry in the U.S. He won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985 from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, the poet Kristin Kovacic, and their children.
Neal Wilgus was born in Jerome, Arizona, and moved to New Mexico in the early 1960’s. His latest chapbooks are The Leakoids: Newsalizing the
Nation and Rhymed and Dangerous. Neil currently resides in Corrales, New Mexico, and works the night shift with his illustrator, Filo Martinez.
Justin Hyde has artificially inseminated pigs, been a bank examiner for the federal reserve bank of Chicago, a mental health counselor, bicycle
mechanic, bicycle racer, homeless, a claims adjuster for allied insurance, had any crap temp job you can imagine and 30 - 40 other jobs he won't
mention. He now attempts to rehabilitate criminals for a living.
Mike Kriesel is a poet and reviewer whose work has appeared in Small Press Review, Library Journal, Nimrod, Rosebud, and The Progressive. He
won the 2004 Lorine Niedecker Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He’s a member of the State Poet Laureate Commission. He is the
author of #3 in the Evil Genius Chapbook Series, Soul Noir.
Kaveh Akbar is co-editor of The Quirk. He has poems currently appearing, or forthcoming, in New York Quarterly, Slipstream, Zen Baby, Poesy,
and others.
David J. Thompson, whose poems have appeared in Slipstream, Staplegun, Nerve Cowboy, Unwound and others, is the Chair of English at the
University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
Robert Cooperman’s books include A Tiny Ship Upon the Sea (March Street Press, 2007), A Killing Fever (Ghost Road Press, 2006), The Long
Black Veil (Higganum Hills Books, 2006), A Tale of the Grateful Dead (Main Street Rag Press, 2004), and Petitions For Immortality: Scenes from
the Life of John Keats (Higganum Hill Books, 2004). He’s appeared in many journals including Literary Review, Poetry East, Santa Clara Review,
Comstock Review, North American Review, and Mississippi Review.
Hugh Fox studied medicine, dog poop, & eventually got a Phd in Crystallized Bullshit from the University of Pure Nonsense in Illinois. He has
written over 300 books. Some 15% of them have been published by Books Incognito, a publisher thought to be located in the Russian arctic.
Mark Wisniewski’s book of poems One of Us One Night was winner of our 2006 Evil Genius Series Contest. His novel Confessions Of a Polish
Used Car Salesman is in its second printing, and he's won a Pushcart Prize, two Regents’ Fellowships from the University of California, the 2006
Tobias Wolff Award, and a 2006 Isherwood Foundation Fellowship. His work has appeared in more than 250 magazines.
Sam Pierstorff is currently the Poet Laureate of Modesto, Ca. He teaches English at Modesto Junior College, and is founding editor of Quercus
Review. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including Rattle, Pearl, Slipstream, and Nerve Cowboy.
Ellaraine Lockie has received eleven nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her chapbooks are Blue Ribbons at the County Fair (PWJ Publishing),
Midlife Muse (Poetry Forum), Crossing the Center Line (Sweet Annie Press), Coloring Outside the Lines (The Plowman Press), and Finishing
Lines (Snark Publishing).
Alan Catlin recently retired from his unchosen profession as a barman to write his fictional memoirs under the working title Hours of Happiness.
Dave Newman won the Andre Dubus Novella Award and the Pennsylvania Journal Poetry Prize. He has published poems and stories in numerous
small press journals around the US including 5 AM, Chiron Review, and Nerve Cowboy.
Nathan Graziano’s most recent book, Teaching Metaphors (sunnyoutside, 2007), was named Best Local Collection of Poetry by Hippo Press. His
poems and stories have graced most important small press journals, including Rattle, Nerve Cowboy, and Chiron Review.
Mather Schneider is a working class poet who never graduated from college.
Glen Chestnut’s artwork, poems, and short stories have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Pearl, Nerve Cowboy, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Iodine, and
many others. He has worked a lot of different jobs, but mostly he’s made his way as a merchant seaman.
Doug Holder is the co-founder and co-editor of the famed Ibbetson Street Press. His articles and poetry have appeared in The Boston Globe, Small
Press Review, Café Review, and many others. Er, but . . .
Don Winter, Steve Henn, and Oren Wagner are the co-editors and co-publishers of FTB. Opinions they express in reviews, commentaries, or
anything else here in are their own, and not necessarily each others’.
G. Tod Slone edits The American Dissident (www.theamericandissident.org) and is banned from participating in Academy of American Poets forums. The Concord Poetry Center, Concord Cultural Council, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Concord Chamber of Commerce and NEA all refuse
to recognize The American Dissident.
ORDER NOW FROM THE PLATONIC 3WAY PRESS CATALOG:
#1 in the Evil Genius Chapbook Series:
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so what? No poems about her cats are in this collection. Now available for only
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#2 in the Evil Genius Chapbook Series:
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#3 in the Evil Genius Chapbook Series:
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SUBMIT NOW TO THE EVIL GENIUS CHAPBOOK SERIES 2008
Competition Deadline: July 30 2008*
Entry Fee: $12
Winner gets $50 and 50 copies of the chap. All entrants receive a copy of the
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Send 16-23 pages of kickass, blow-me-down poetry
to PO BOX 844 Warsaw, IN 46581 attn: Evil Genius contest
*deadline extended due to the tardy appearance of FTB #6