Dean Kostos: Poet of Two Worlds

It can be argued that all poetry is a negotiation between two worlds. An interior, private jumble of imagery and sound, a chaotic montage, must find the proper words to convey meaning to the world. For a poet who has suffered from severe mental trauma, the task of creating balance and harmony in language becomes even more crucial.

Greek American poet Dean Kostos is one of these damaged negotiators. In his early books his language is playful and inventive; he is adept with forms such as ghazals, but underlying all is an uneasiness with surfaces. The discomfort is made clear in a poem called “Rampart” from his first book The Sentence That Ends With a Comma: “You never realize it, but the/ dust is the world’s gradual crumbling/ as you proceed to speak.” An increasing poignancy enters his work for the residue of lost lives, civilizations, and dreams. This is often reflected in poems that reference both ancient and modern Greek history, language, and art.

His poem “History Tilts across Your Hips,” from Rivering, is addressed to the famous Kritos Boy statue by a narrator who remembers “ravines perilous as love” in his own life and looks into the eyes of the statue with worship. But also, sadly, despair. “When your eyes speak, one talks / of arrivals, the other / of departures, each a tunnel / away, your thoughts unspooling / toward the vanishing point.”

Later on in the poem, a chiton (as remembered clothing) falls, “heart-roots snap/ from muscles memory,” and yet a divisive distance remains in the last lines. “One eye: Leave;/ the other; stay, stay.” Can this be the distance between an ancient past, idealized as more whole, and a contemporary world marked by ambivalence? Or is it an attempt to reconcile the two? As it stands, the poem is a brilliant evocation of the two worlds each lover carries within: the fight between past and present, between avoiding desire or accepting Eros.

Kostos writes about outsiders, but not as an impartial observer. He endured the violent bullying of classmates at his boarding school for being gay, and at one point was thrown down a flight of stairs. At the age of fourteen he entered a mental institution, where he stayed for two years. However as an adult he became a professor respected by his peers, won a Benjamin Saltman award for his poetry, and is the author of eight books.

In his poetic landscapes, figures move about who are damaged and marginal. A dwarf pushing a pram, Coney Island sideshow performers, Miss Havisham from Dickens, Jack and Ennis from Brokeback Mountain, even the Dauphin, the ten year old son of Marie Antoinette who perished in prison, his “mushroom-colored” heart stolen from his corpse. The poems insist that we live in two worlds: the world of commodities, appearances and structures, and another world accessible to those initiated by suffering, then understanding and compassion.

In a poem called “Creature of Two Worlds” from Last Supper of the Senses, there is a metaphor for this suffering, a description of a sycamore tree placed by a fence secured with a padlock.

Despite its growth, the tree can’t bend
to thrust out the obstacle, and so pretends

to need it, burling pulpy meat
over the metal like a punched lip eating.

The desire to be freed may not relent,
yet a saw would gut the core to cut the fence.

The preceding lines certainly have a precedent centuries ago in the Romantic movement, however Kostos, as a poet living in an age of deconstruction, creates a dialogue between what he sees as a place where truth springs from wounding, and the often false, commonplace world based on social interactions and shared assumptions.

Because Dean Kostos believes the true heroes of this struggle are outsiders, he gives us a persona poem whose narrator is the ghost of Amadou Diallo, an innocent man murdered by New York City policemen. Kostos makes readers empathize with the wounding of Matthew Shepard, another man murdered, this time for being gay. And mathematician Alan Turing’s life is also celebrated, though his untimely death is mourned. Ashile Gorky, Sylvia Plath, Hart Crane, and Frida Kahlo all appear as guides who hold the key between two worlds.

Most of his poems are also lyrical, with striking imagery. Here is a poignant description of a Coney Island sideshow performer in the beginning lines of “Scorpion Cowboy,” from This is Not a Skyscraper.

How does he tend to the body’s needs?
Clunk! His pincers thud like sand-filled shoes.
Making his mother’s body bleed

when he was a boy, he swore he’d
mask his thalidomide shame like a bruise.

In a poem called “Turkish Man With Cinnamon Eyes,” also from This Is Not a Skyscraper,the narrator speaks from historical wounds inherited from four hundred years of oppression, when Greece was under Turkish rule.

I say the world is text & we read it.
The world is history & we bleed it.

I say, I’m unable to love. Love me.We stand above the bridge, peering down,

the East River rippling below us—
hair of a deity about to breathe.

While a wish for healing may exist, Kostos is too fine a writer to present his readers with New Age homilies about self-acceptance. There may be no conclusive way to bridge a gap between two worlds, despite the clever use of an ampersand or skillful line breaks. “Wounds Wound with Poems” suggests that the creative process itself is a kind of surgery. “Perhaps all poem are bandages,/ pristine or blood-soaked.”

Kostos implies that all of us, whether or not we create art, have “sought approval from monsters who traffic shadows.” It’s fitting that that he mentions a chilling episode from The Twilight Zone television series that involves unwound bandages and approval. And poets themselves hold chisels that are “dark & dripping.” But Dean Kostos is one poet who does so with grace.

We wait in hell’s white-enamel cellar.
Plants shrivel on sills. Our hands
flicker like wings, as computer keys

clatter, carving words into luminous
screens. We try to hew our David
from all that he is not—
our chisels dark & dripping.

—“Wounds Wound with Poems,” from Pierced by Night-Colored Threads

Lucid Dreaming: Michael Rothenberg's Wake Up and Dream

Michael Rothenberg is a political organizer who herds individualistic cat-souled poets into the world’s largest poetry reading each September, who co-founded the life-saving organization, Poets in Need, and who participates tirelessly in important contemporary causes. Thus, I was surprised to read the vividly sensual and descriptive poetry, based on real flora and fauna and earth, of Wake Up and Dream. Alongside calls for skinheads to martyr themselves and the warning that Monsanto owns you, there are haiku-like, real-to-the-touch lines depicting our planet’s landforms and beings.

And as I read on, I realized: this is why Rothenberg is an environmentalist, this is why he is political – it is because of this cellular love for the concrete world around him and its people, places, and things. From “Revolt of the Donkeys”:

Only fools
plan

for a better
world

Five minutes
a day

under
the carob tree

we speak
without

fetters
But mostly

we carry
carts

of sweet
oranges . . .

The poetry, like Rothenberg, is global. Whitmanesque, the poet conjures the cities of the United States, and, like an ancient prophet, calls forth nations: Macedonia, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, China. Ancient, the deserts and mountains hold history and the poems reveal their diegesis. The land heals “cannibal” political wounds. In “Bozo the Slick,” Rothenberg juxtaposes the “baby Mussolini” world of the con man (guess who?) with his beloved Italy:

Alburni . . .
Virgil saw this mountain

There was a thunderstorm pelted
The terra cotta shingles
We shivered through the Amalfi night
In a house built in 700 AD
In a town built long before the redwoods . . .

Of course, these poems are political, if by political you mean aware, tough, punk. Rothenberg summons “Baudelaire (borderlands),” as the poet alliterates, and Henry Miller, to his aid as he makes his protest and dances with:

Exhausted senses, wild visions
Timelessness, days without dates
(Deities) . . .

Even when the poet trips with surrealism and Language riffs, the poems are wide awake; the dream in the title is never a fuzzy oneiric sleep. Through despair and exhaustion, the poems sing to what we are fighting for, what Rothenberg insists we make real in our world, what we need to preserve. It is the dream of an alive, non-GMOed, non-conned reality that stems from love for our planet and ourselves.

Medusa's Country by Larissa Shmailo

Medusa peels herself from the pages of mythology to become a denizen of New York City’s margins. There, she waltzes with Thanatos: “The dance with death? / Ah, this: as I flirt, you draw near.” When Eros shows up, he lures Medusa on a peregrination toward a broken self: “My naked heart unrobes, undressed of anguished cries.”

Shmailo adds, “Larissa’s rose is sick and is consuming me.” This alludes to William Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose,” pertaining to self-destructive sexuality. While beautiful, the rose has become infected by a worm. Addressing herself in an epistolary moment, Shmailo states, “Dear Friend of ferment / who unearths worms // that enrich this blissful human soil.”

Here lies one of many moments of transformation. The poet, though brutally honest about her bouts with mental illness, mania, and deleterious behaviors, also acknowledges the alchemy available by casting pain into language. Purged, the expectation for starting anew enriches this “human soil,” fecund with possibility and, surprisingly, hope. Here is one of the many strengths of this collection of poems—it is relentlessly honest and (therefore) resilient.

These qualities guide the poet’s exploration. Along the way, the gorgon assumes other personae, including a prostitute named Nora, a reluctant villain, not unlike Medusa herself. Once, one of Athena’s priestesses, she was raped by Poseidon. Instead of being seen as the victim, Medusa was held responsible by Athena, who turned the gorgon’s curls into snakes (Blake’s worm?) and made all who gazed upon her turn to stone. Medusa was ostracized by her own power. Shmailo avers, “His eyes transfixed by my serpents / that hardened, froze, and pleased.” Indeed, misogyny has—from antiquity to Ibsen’s era to the present—castigated women who dared to exhibit intelligence and power. Many of these poems lead the reader through histories of misogyny and sexual abuse (as in the myth itself). In a poem titled “Rapes,” Shmailo confesses:

I abandoned myself to invisible hands,
the known vice and the strong vise of my nerves and my glands.
I half-screwed and cat-moaned and imagined your stare
in the stranger, his knife slowly teasing my hair.

She unpacks her poet’s suitcase of prosody and nuanced rhymes, knowing that a poem is not only about a given topic, but also about the agency of language itself. Like a stab, she writes, “The rapist called me fat.” Again, the victim, not the perpetrator, is rebuked. Nonetheless, these poems ultimately serve a triumphant voice—a brave and audacious “I.” Convinced of her prowess, this Medusa stares into her own mirror, where she confronts distorted notions of normalcy: “You, my reflection, in pain,” and, “We live in parts.”

Despite landing on a psychiatric ward, she frees herself with sardonic wit and blade-sharp language: “Bellevue, Bellevue, where nurses’ crazy laughter / rings through the night.” The writing is so visceral, the reader feels trapped in the “locked ward,” along with the author. One can hear the howls and smell the disinfectants.

However, with verve, with chutzpah, with urgency, Shmailo’s poems become spells, freeing her, transforming stone into flesh:

I spent my whole life seeking it,
wrecking, reeking, eking it,
in hydra-headed phalluses;
in aliases & pal-louses;
in papapapapaMedusas;
in mirrors & seducers.

Ultimately, she magicks death into an affirmation of life: “I love love’s desert and its snow.” Indeed, she has led us from one extreme terrain to another—and back to the silence of the page, where we marvel at her hard-won wholeness. As we read this book, it becomes our own.

A Certain Balanced Unbalance

Books, in the mega-multitudes, have been penned about life, the great sorrows, what is redemptive, and what will never be achieved. Other books cast their nets across magic, those unexplained, underlying properties and prophecies that can light up the imagination. Thank You For Your Sperm, a story collection of quirky and unusual title, examines both life and magic. Together. For what is life if not imbued with a certain balanced unbalance the author seems to suggest as he begins with his prologue:

WHO I AM

I am among the many, most definite and most certain: me. Definite: because I know where I begin though not where I will end. Certain: because of the many that have told me that I am, some more, some less, kindly. . .

This debut collection mixes the sacred and profane, beauty and beast, the strange and the wondrous. Not necessarily in that order. Or any type of defined order other than The Serious Writer segment (and even that gives way to whimsy by including two non-serious writer stories) (though I’m sure Speh had his reasons). Rather, the stories in this book seem quarantined like hungry orphans: Read me, they appear to shout from their temporary cots, take me home and love me; or better yet make love to me. Speh’s voices are consistently on pitch, his plots and settings well defined. There is a clatter in the book similar to the way Chekhov made his stories come alive.

An excerpt from “At A Welsh Wedding”:

. . .Because of the Captain’s former legendary sexual prowess there were rumors that moved the relationship between the two families into the unchaste neighborhood of a murky, primitive mélange. . . The groom was the Captain’s spitting image: tall as a larch, large head spiked with black hair, deeply set yellow eyes the size of small oysters… The bride was petite, blonde and busty, with a broad mouth full of happy teeth, given to chatter. . . Then he saw Captain Cat sit in a corner, his eyes closed, his head trembling slightly, clutching his wedding gift, a small laced-up dusty linen bag filled with fifty pebble-sized diamonds. The Captain was now considered a human liability. Doctors from London to Lima had pronounced their diagnoses. . . manic, depressive, schizophrenic, bipolar, paranoid, cyclothymic, borderline, or a genius. . . .

As for Speh’s own particular genius, it might be found lurking behind a potted palm, in the shadow of a half open door, or perhaps slouched low at the wheel of a low slung car: wherever is less noticeable than what is going on in his stories. This book is teeming with heart. It’s funny, too. Highly recommended for all who love literature at its most vibrant.