An Ongoingness too Reliable to Conclude

Crass. Delicate. Geometric. Spare. Ammons’ work ties up our ways of knowing the world in a textile, one that reaches beyond the view of the eye when held up at arm’s reach. It is crass because it understands the world is profane in its abundance. It is delicate because it intimately knows the bluejays, pebbly sluices, orange juice, broken bones, and the after-effects of spring rains on earth worms’ chances of survival.

The Chicago Review keeps this substance in its rawest form, displaying copies of unpublished, typewritten, hand-edited drafts. (It even has the scroll of Ammons’ long poem Tape copied on its spine.) And the volume also provides sufficient analytical footwork, via four well-crafted essays, to catch the reader up to speed on the major readings of Ammons’ premier poems.

Early on we’re introduced to Ammons’s philosophical drive – “the plenitude of nothingness,” – and given two competing perspectives on how his work fulfills, or does not, Kantian notions of self-contained works of art. These are integral discussions, which Ammons’ invites in his notes, lectures, and the discursive moments of his verse, and they pay-off when the reader arrives at the heart of this volume, the unpublished drafts.

Of course, these unpublished poems lack the completeness one might desire in a thoroughly revised, mature group of poems, but even in his published volumes, Ammons mode was to resist or exclude revision, as he does in Tape for the Turn of the Year, which catalogs a year’s worth of quotidian on a two-inch-wide adding machine tape. That whole 300-plus-day effort is drafted under the pretenses of a whim:

today I
decided to write
a long
thin
poem…

 …it was natural for
me…
… to contemplate
this roll of
adding-machine tape.

Ammons’ is clearly comfortable in the bathos-laced, short-line free verse that has many different manifestations in contemporary poetics, but what I enjoy in this volume (Tapeis only quoted) is the quatrain-constructed “Scarcities,” whose narrative and artistic reach has shades of Bishop, suggesting the preeminence of “a long, / long poem… // an ongoingness too reliable to /conclude;” the serial evasiveness from “How to Find Wisdom in Writing and Painting” – whose most direct advice is, “don’t force ice / it can burst shingles / crack rocks:…;” and the oddity of Canto 57 – whose most parse-able lines are surrounded by phalanxes of capital X’s and constellations of question marks offsetting the tautology,

the meaning of life consists in
not being dead

In sum, this is a compilation of impressive scope: the essays illuminate a body of poems, photos, and correspondences that bring this major poet to life, and at 272 pages, this volume contains only a few moments of over-reaching and just enough room for some well-framed verse that make the life and art of Ammons’ seem aptly described as “an ongoingness too reliable to conclude.” This is a fitting review for Ammons – in that it is expansive, intelligent, and empathetic, but also aware of its finite existence, its “untidy edges,” that happen to be where the person of the poet can be most fully seen.

Stereotypes Are Questioned, Dreams Are Broken

There are three things I like about Sightings, BJ Hollars’s debut short story collection: it’s simple, funny, and insightful.

Sightings aptly begins with a quote from Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree:

“It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn’t so much wilderness around you couldn’t see the town. But on the other hand there wasn’t so much town you couldn’t see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness.”

Like Bradbury, Hollars manages to invoke the sights, sounds, and smells of small town America through the eyes of his teenage heroes — and with as much ease. A small town. A small river. A small lake. Bradbury’s writing seems too easy, too simple. But it works so well. As it does in Hollars’s work.

Here’s an example. “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” one of ten stories in Sightings, introduces us to a mother with a wooden leg, and a father who is an expert leg-maker. The mother has a problem with her leg. The father bends to fix it. The son tells us, “From where I stood, it looked sort of stupid, like he was trying to shine a baseball bat or polish a rifle. But after a while it started looking less stupid, like maybe he was just trying to push a little life into a dead thing.” Here we are handed a child’s take on life, one that skims the surface, and then leaves us with a splash. Sightings is a collection of coming-of-age stories where naïve language comes out complicated, where moments of purity intersperse the comedy of pre-pubescent boys.

Here’s what I mean about the comedy of prepubescent boys. “Indian Village,” my favorite story in the collection — and the first — sets up the landscape as follows:

“Ever since school let out, we’d fallen into a routine of baseball in the mornings and pool in the afternoons, a schedule that allowed us ample opportunity to show off the scraped knees we’d earned from our heroics on the field. For several sweltering afternoons, we took turns parading past Georgia Ambler’s peripheral vision (our farmer tans in full bloom), waiting patiently for her to acknowledge our existence.”

We find in this passage the Bradbury-esque, Indiana charm of a young boy’s playing field, but also a suggestion of the somewhat un-charming fascinations of boys that trickle in and out of Hollars’ stories. A more blatant example of this would be the opening sentence to “Loose Lips Sink Ships”:

“I asked the Eskimo if he’d ever seen a vagina before.”

Or there’s Couch Housen’s huddle-up speech in “Line of Scrimmage”:

“Okay, all together, now. Whip dicks on three. . . .”

And the comedy doesn’t stop with boyhood erection discoveries; it seeps into the characters’ very makeup — there’s an Oregon Trail fanatic father, a prom-date-ready Sasquatch, and a twentieth-century Confederate whose wife can time travel. Hollars’s writing sets you up for a nice bike ride around the neighborhood, and before you know it, you’ve tipped over in the grass laughing out loud — then you wonder if you should be.

Here’s what I mean by that. Remember the wooden leg that the father was shining like a baseball bat? Polishing like a rifle? Then, suddenly, the whole scene changed? The thing about Hollars’s writing is that you’re running along, full-throttle, enjoying the scenery, chuckling here and there — and then you get to the end of a sentence and realize what just happened. There’s a sadness at the end of Hollars’s stories. Sasquatch may look ridiculous in a suit and bowtie, and it’s funny all the different ways Hollars manages to both humanize and make fun of him, but at the end, you’re sad that the big monster’s become an alcoholic. You’re sad the clowns can’t find a job. You’re sad because a father is no longer loony for Oregon Trail. And it’s not only that. There are bigger issues at play. A father deserts his child, a child dies, stereotypes are questioned, dreams are broken.

These small splashes create a lasting rippling effect, which will make you go back and read the stories all over again.

Stay Horny for Art: A Review of theNewerYork

theNewerYork wants me to “Stay horny for art.” It’s right there on the back cover. Right there on the front cover, a pink-skinned mop-topped nude with rosy cheeks sits open-legged, the subject’s mouth obscured by a stark, black exclamation point which stretches down between the ample breasts and settles betwixt said open legs, barely obscuring whatever genitalia the androgynous figure might possess.

Yes, I am horny for art.

This is “Book 0” of the magazine, and it’s a great way to kick things off. It’s ballsy. Its contents are as androgynous as its cover image. They may be poems, and they may be short stories. They may be accurate quotations from Richard Simmons, or they may be outright lies. Who the hell cares?  theNewerYork is less concerned with category, and more concerned with touching its readers inappropriately.

I don’t think that there is a radical idea circulating around the literary community to galvanize a definable and legitimately new avant-garde. The cynic in me might extrapolate from this observation to conclude that there is nothing “new” to be done in the making of literature. With the turn of every page of this Book 0, I am excited by the new stuff I get on every page.

Between these horny bindings, there is a Craigslist “free items” thread about the meaning of life. There are very many upside-down pages. There are instructions on stargazing, diagrams of atoms, God, boogers, badly-defined jellyfish, and bluesy loving no one wants. The remarkable thing is that each page, whether it is Annabel’s letter from Danny or a full-color glossy of a man in an uncomfortable chair, compels this reader forward.

A disclaimer on page one cautions readers to temper their expectations: “You won’t like some of this work.” I disagree; you’ll like all of it, but it’s likely to make you feel just a little dirty.  In an afterward, editor JSR admits the work is “all over the place,” which is true to an extent. The magazine is disjointed by design, but all of these weird little literary gems share a common impulse. They’re all exciting, they’re all challenging, and some of them are even beautiful.

theNewerYork is a hell of a project. Issue #2 is out, and I’m pumped for #3. Book 0 was new, and I have every confidence that Issue #3 will be even newer.

If You Take the 'e' Out of Dead, You Get Dad: A Review of Michael Kimball's Big Ray

In some ways, Michael Kimball’s Big Ray felt like I was reading from a dirge, a long melancholy hymn fractured into broken pieces, unified by Kimball’s troubled melody. There were too many parallels I identified with, too many details I understood too well to read this without a conflicted sense of empathy. Kimball bares all through his narrator, Daniel Todd Carrier, who recounts the life of his father, the eponymous Big Ray.

The book starts with the death of his father and while outwardly, it’s a biography revealing strips from Big Ray’s life, it evolves into an autopsy of their relationship, a dissection of sundered identity. Anecdotes, vignettes, and observations give us glimpses of who Big Ray is, though it reads less like a novel and more like a candid conversation with a good friend over drinks. In fact, the prose is so natural and free-flowing, it almost vanishes into the backdrop. Physical traits become character sketches as in the case of his father who is “morbidly obese” and suffers sleep apnea.

The snoring it caused was turbulent, violent, and full of animal sounds. The snoring was also part of why my mother divorced my father. She couldn’t get any good sleep either. Plus, my father took up most of the bed. There was just enough room for my mother to lie there and not move.

That paralysis his mother suffers becomes emblematic of their relationship that eventually leads to its fissure.

Daniel tries to find a map to navigate his father’s life, but contradictions abound, from his early military career that was mostly non-existent, to the quirky, almost accidental way his parents met (yelling at each other on the street). His father gambles, argues with his mom about everything, and scoops up all the leftover food at the dinner table. I was always waiting for a moral climax, the moment where the son would gain some insight into his father that would help the two bond. It was refreshingly authentic, then, that so much was left unresolved. The dysfunctional family never finds itself and there’s a morbid beauty in their disastrous interactions which is part of the allure of Big Ray.

The narrative jumps from the present to the past, but the transitions aren’t jarring and are handled as branching conversations that segue into different areas including a whole lot of fat jokes. Like most people, Big Ray is full of dichotomies that the narrator struggles with. Daniel seeks answers, not just for the sake of resolution, but his curiosity too. For example, his father has an argument with his mother because she sets out slices of bread rather than dinner rolls. It seems extremely petty until we’re told:

For my father, good bread was an important distinction between the poor farm family he grew up in and the middle-class family he expected us to be. That is why we had family dinners on Sunday. That is why we ate so many pot roasts.

The grossest memory of his father was when he’d make breakfast and he’d “stand over a frying pan wearing nothing but tight, stretchy, red bikini briefs. His underwear was always too small for him, so the crack of his butt stuck out above the waistband. . . He liked his eggs greasy and over easy. He fried his bacon until it was burnt. . . Even today, the smell of greasy eggs still makes me feel queasy.” The father makes for a ridiculous figure in the tight briefs, but he’s intent on cooking his bacon to crisp because that happens to be the way he likes it. The son endures the oily mornings because he has no choice, although he resists his father’s will by leaving before finishing the breakfast. Scenes like this form a thematic link throughout illustrating their conflict and hint at the bigger issues rotting their connection.

I went through a stage where I would walk into whatever room my father was in and turn the lights off. I never told anybody why, but I was trying to make him disappear.

Daniel is still turning off the lights paragraph by paragraph. Part of his anger comes from the abuse, both physical and mental, that is inflicted by his father on both him and his sister. It’s uncomfortable to read and there’s a final revelation near the end that left me feeling both depressed and ill. To the book’s credit, the scene is handled with brutal honesty but never feels like exploitation or a pity-seeking confessional.

It’s a gutsy truth to share with strangers (us the readers) and I know it’s a delicate balance to render this painful experience without coming across as sensational. I felt like Daniel was performing a mental baptism to exorcise that past trauma through this recounting and the loose structure of the book becomes more poignant as we realize it’s his attempt at finding answers in the nuances and details that comprise the jumbled mass of his memories.

In the end, there’s an interesting cycle revolving around weight that weaves an organic analogy for the cycle of the book. When Big Ray was born, he was six pounds. He ballooned up to 500 pounds, which “is also the size of the largest kind of lion, a full-grown male.” But as Daniel notes after his father is cremated, “My dad’s ashes weighed just over six pounds, which means he lost around 500 pounds after he died.” His dad went right back to where he started, and there’s an ambivalence and yearning that haunts the book from beginning to end originating from that lack of resolution. “If you take the e out of dead, you get dad.” Likewise, strip out the ‘Big’ from Big Ray, and all you have left is Ray.

Squarely in the Realm of the Transgressive, Where True Desire Abides

First published in France in 1938 and introduced to me by the wonderful Rikki Ducornet, the stories in Marguerite Yourcenar’s Oriental Tales do more than just confront the power of desire, they promote it to immense and terrifying dimensions.

In Kali Beheaded, the gorgeous virgin goddess Kali is massacred by jealous fellow gods, who re-attach her head to the body of a whore, and she roams the world in furious confusion, seducing and destroying everyone she encounters with vengeful innocence — a unity Yourcenar may have invented — the slave of her own craving to connect with other beings. Yourcenar writes, “. . . the liquefied fortunes of men clung to her hands like strands of honey.” For Kali, now goddess of sex and death, desire and destruction are the same, and she is just as much a prisoner of this binary as everyone else.

In Our-Lady-of-the-Swallows, a priest becomes convinced that nymphs are living in a cave and seducing his parishioners, so he blocks the cave’s small mouth and tries to starve them. But as he celebrates their death-song, the reader learns the nymphs are really swallows, who, indeed, are really starving.

In Aphrodissia, the Widow, the widow of a minister in what probably is Greece — a Greece abandoned by the gods, but not the passion that made them necessary—mourns the death of her illicit lover Kostis, a thief who terrorized a village full of hypocrites and cowards. Aphrodissia’s love for Kostis is both skeptical of love as social custom, and deeply, almost violently tender, and places love itself outside convention and squarely in the realm of the transgressive, where true desire abides in Yourcenar’s work.

Yourcenar sees the social realm as stifling and criminally banal; her characters are desperate for a vehement divorce from their communities and a union with the rage of their emotion. Aphrodissia rescues her lover’s head from the top of a spear and tries to run away with it, but she is chased, and, in a scene that is unbelievably moving, she slips into a canyon, where she dies.

*

If Oriental Tales has a flaw — beyond the way it uses an exoticized and mythical Far East as an environment for stories that transcend the banal, in an “everyone is crazy over there” kind of way — it’s the way her stories veer too easily into the fabulous. Wealthy servants give away their fortunes to benefit their masters, murder victims come back from the dead, imprisoned artists paint a flood and then a lifeboat to escape with, and all that from just one story: How Wang-Fo Was Saved, which Yourcenar adapted from an ancient Taoist fable.

Literary fairy tales have to find a way to navigate the pitfalls of facile magic. Italo Calvino does it by writing prose that slyly critiques the reader; Angela Carter does it by violently exploring latent assumptions about gender. When Yourcenar fails, her stories seem too formulaic or have no sense of the hassle of reality. Their endings read like punch lines.

In a way, Yourcenar is one of her own characters: a zealot on a fool’s quest to embody, in a story, that which cannot be contained. At her best, she’s like a physicist who briefly but revealingly controls the ineffable unseen before the operation blows up her collider. She writes as if she knows the edict from Blanchot that says that to toil with the elements in the only true realism.

Most of us grow out of the idea that life is either death by boredom or immolation in desire, but every now and then, as we look drearily out the window, we remember all our deepest loves and hates, all of the desires we’ve left unacted. Oriental Tales is for these moments, when the loss we keep repressed comes rupturing unbearably through our lives.

Fluid and Logical but Certainly Not Predictable: A Review of Timothy Stobierski's Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer

I think it is natural when a publisher accepts a book of yours for publication to become curious about who else they have published. The other books they have published tells you something, if nothing else something about your work. That’s what originally got me interested in Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer by Timothy Stobierski, River Otter Press had accepted my book, Bones Buried in the Dirt, for publication in January . . . but Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer was the first book River Otter Press ever published.

Now, the first thing I would like to say is that I really ended up enjoying this book of poems. I found the writing to be very approachable. That may not be a big deal for some of you, but I’m not exactly a poetry scholar. I like reading poetry, but I haven’t devoted the same kind of rigor to its study that I have to fiction. Really, I just like being able to pick it up and enjoy.  And, though the poems in this collection are skillfully composed, they still just let me sit back and enjoy.

When he was a young boy,
there was one promise he made
to himself, the same promise
that you made, that I made, that she made.

(from “Remembering”)

One aspect I enjoyed about this collection was the variety. Some of the poems possess simple and straightforward, honest emotion. This can be seen in this selection from “In the Maternity Ward”:

He can’t help it,
sniffs the newborn’s head;
there’s a slight smell of sweet musk—
fresh peached in spring.
His lips graze the child’s scalp,
nuzzle the vernal pelt.
How soft the flesh,
so prone to bruising;
it must be cradled,
tended with care—
but he’s a big man,
and the child is so small.

Others have such surprising twists and turns that it is delightful just to follow the flow of Stobierski’s mind. It’s an interesting mind, fluid and logical but certainly not predictable, as this bit from “Gastronomica” illustrates:

My girlfriend puts her heart and soul
into everything she cooks,
and it’s nice to know she loves me enough
to tear out those essentials and share—
don’t get me wrong—
but I don’t think she realizes just how chewy valves can be,
or how difficult it is to eat a waffled soul,
however much syrup is applied.

Some of the poems have humor, and some are softly dark. Some are strange, but some have a resonating simplicity. All together, these poems span an impressive range. Whatever you are looking for, it’s probably here. And, more importantly, along the way you will likely find things you should have been looking for without knowing that you should have.

Now, I do admit that poetry isn’t my first love. In fact, I often read it in secret so I can just enjoy the poems and not let anyone know that I’m not an expert. Regardless, I do read it and I do read enough to know what I like. That’s all I really needed to know for Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer, and that’s all I need to know to know that I like it.

Materializing the Promise of Change: A Review of Toni Jensen's From the Hilltop

In From the Hilltop, Toni Jensen’s first short story collection, Jensen shapes worlds where grief births silence and mourning accompanies shifts in weather and landscape, making land a character, one who can feel and act humans do. Rainfall accompanies a teacher/student relation in “Learning How to Drown”; a cornfield moves from place to place, arriving near the twelve-room Blanco Canyon Hotel, right after the death of the owner’s wife in “At the Powwow Hotel.” The land is as hot and dry as a choked throat in the beginning of “Flight,” where a teenage girl goes to live with relatives in South Dakota.

Jensen’s characters are aware of these weather patterns to some degree, their awareness strongest in “Sight and Other Hazards,” where a woman deals with her dying mother while overseeing an apartment building that used to be the Holcomb hotel. Hotels are also a character in From the Hilltop — whether abandoned or lived in as much as a hotel can allow others to “live” in it, materializing the promise of change present in all these characters’ lives.

While some of Jensen’s characters share her Métis background, (a mixed Native American and European ancestry from the Northern U.S. and Canada), many of her characters are men. Not only does Jensen craft both male and female voices realistically, she lets them sing, creating a sharply grounded view of life “off the rez.” This sharpness comes from her use of details — a pony-like dog near a canyon, fruit-bearing trees rooted unnaturally on the high plains of West Texas. The experimental, loop-like structure in “From the Hilltop” shares qualities with the shifts in time and clustering/threading of detail present in Stephen Graham Jones’ work, whom Jensen thanks in the acknowledgement section of her book. Like the fluxuation of weather (present in the book), the language cycles as the narrator’s mind cycles, each section of the story beginning with a different lead in, such as “If,” “Because,” and “Given.”

Jensen’s stories open with impact and close in a wonderfully subtle way, putting a tiny weight in your lungs — one forgets to breathe for a moment, and then realizes these characters will be alright, life continues for them. You will learn from “Still” how to cradle infertility, how to nurture it with silence. From “Butter” one learns about statistics and beauty and butter-headed replicas of local Dairy Queens. In “From the Hilltop,” one learns about the highest point in West Texas and, at the same time, through the honest voice of a man, how to lose a brother when you’re just a rebel kid, how to grow old with a story, telling a story again and again, hoping one day to get it just right. And you will feel as the character already has.