What the Blood Knows by Peggy Miller
(WordTech Communications, Paperback, 84 pp., $17.00)
Reviewed by P. Scott Cunningham

            If poems are songs, then are poetry collections “albums?”  The popularity of “New and Selected” volumes seems to suggest otherwise, the subtext being that what history needs to canonize is the poems itself, not any one particular arrangement of them.  If poetry had a governing body like the Recording Artists of America, then we’d probably also have a download-able database of poems similar to iTunes (iLines? iAmbics?).

But some poets would subvert that project by creating book-length poems, or, another approach, a series of poems with an interlocking structure, something like what Peggy Miller does in her new collection.  Each poem in What the Blood Knows is assigned the Latinate name of a plant or animal, as if the collection were the experimentation logbook of scientist testing a new theory.  One of the goals of poetry, more or less tossed aside by Modernism, is to seek truth, and while Miller’s collection doesn’t offer any definitive answers, her poems are constantly striving to reach a verdict about the world, through the lens of physics.  Subsequently, it’s hard to imagine removing any one of the poems and letting it stand on its own.  If this is a field study of the world, or of Miller herself, the reader needs as much data as possible.

Science is to Miller what Greek mythology was to Keats and alcohol was to Bukowski—the unifying element of her lyricism.  She visualizes super strings in her kitchen and, over the course of several poems, offers a crash course on photons.  In “Sun Ripple Damage,” she hypothesizes a box in her basement called “Instant Ocean” that contains everything the ocean has in miniature: sharks, typhoons, tides, etc., and isn’t that more or less the preeminent belief of lyricism?  That the poet is a vessel containing within herself the world entire? In scientific terms, we’ve entered Ptolemy’s universe, with humans squarely in the center, and Miller has fun experimenting with that idea.  In “Getting Things in Context” she says, “I’m average. / The average of hot and cold, dark and light, energy, / rock and vacuum, and probably you are too.”  And again later in “The Leaf and the Photon: “And if we stand as stepping stones of correlation / between the subatomic and the astronomical, / doesn’t that put us right in Ptolemy’s center / of the universe?”

In other poems however, she recognizes that she’s lending a greater importance to humans than they deserve.  In “Getting Past the Artists”, she compares the beauty of inanimate New York City—“street lights curl with elegance,” “a skyscraper takes the afternoon sun”—to the relative ugliness of its sidewalk painters.  But as the latter metaphor suggests, Miller can’t quite imagine the universe altogether without us.  Even a poem like “Taxonomy, Linnaeus,” which asserts mid-way through that “We are careless and selfish and we will die / out too,” ends on a illogically hopeful note, insisting that the names we have given to the objects and species of the world “will persevere, mellifluous inscriptions / for the headstone mountain of our fossils and our folly.”  To suggest that post-language, someone or something will still be keeping score is letting the poet get the best of the scientist.

            But there’s too much here that is scientifically and poetically interesting to complain.  Miller’s ekphrastic poems, all directed at paintings, are very good.  “Suspended Sea” for instance, about a 1908 still life by someone named, in a way that seems very 1908, Alfred Henry Maurer, draws conclusions from his pictorial sea that have real gravitas: “I imagine in this boundless sea / hunger is so large it seeps into the salt, / as if hunger invented life and will consume it. / As if hunger will persist when all else goes.”  If Jack London or Frank Norris ever wrote poetry, that’s probably what it would sound like.

            The longest and strongest poem is “The Buttercup,” a multi-sectioned argument that tries to figure out what exactly, if anything, defines a life form, and the answer Miller comes up with, hunger, specifically the drive to keep living, “the deepest of the thousand hungers,” comes across as both scientifically and poetically sound to me.  But Miller’s project, like any good science experiment, is much more concerned with questions than answers, and as she says in the second to last poem, “The Slightest Difference,” “If / I am entirely mistaken, if I breed false hope / with these frivolous wanderings, don’t worry. / It won’t make the slightest difference in your life.”

Except that, as a scientist, she knows it will.

P. Scott Cunningham is a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor and a regular contributor to the New Times. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pool, Court Green, Cider Press Review and Mc Sweeney’s Internet Tendencies.

     Michael Hettich's most recent books are Swimmer Dreams and Flock and Shadow: New and Selected Poems.  Hettich's chapbook Many Loves, winner of the YellowJacket Press contest, comes out in April 2007.
      Born and raised in New York, Hettich lived in upstate New York, Colorado, Northern Florida, and Vermont before coming to Miami, where he teaches at Miami Dade College.

ND: I thought we’d start by addressing readers of poetry who often want to ‘get it’ even if there’s nothing to get. Some want to know the poet and to understand him/her through their writing. Others just want to be told what to think. What do you think? What should readers ‘get’ about you and your work? Or should they just step in and wander into the forest?

MH: I write poems, at least in part, in order to communicate to my readers. But the very fact that I write poems means that I’m striving to communicate in different ways than I would were I writing fiction, or essays. Fundamental to the poem is its cadence, and so I hope always to communicate a clear music, and to communicate a process of thinking that is intimately tied to cadence and music. This grounding music of poetry allows poets to speak in ways that seem to me to be more primal, more intuitive, more image-based and finally more compressed than the music of fiction or the essay—generally speaking—allows. So, the reader may “get” –and be moved by—something in the music or imagery of a poem without “understanding” the whole. But if they only feel befuddled and confused, I don’t think they’ll keep reading for long. They’ll take a nap! Or read something more engaging.

The best poems, however difficult, communicate through music and content in a way that feels organically bound and is thus moving for that very reason.

I want my readers to respond to my poems as poems, so even if the poem is about a personal experience, it should have transformed that experience, as form transforms and informs content, so that the interest lies in the poem itself, not only in its subject matter or occasion. The poem, as Donald Hall says, should attempt “the unsayable said.”

I strive to move, surprise, engage my readers through the dance and content of the poem, the ways the dance and content can become one thing, the ways my particular approach to form and content result in lyric experiences. What would I like my readers to understand about me? Only what’s in the poems--which is and is not this person who walks around and has a job and family and is more or less a presence in the world.

 ND: Is any subject fair game to write about or are some personal experiences too private? Where, if anywhere, do you draw the line?

MH: I think that any subject can be written about, provided one can write about it. By that I mean that one has to feel free to play with the material—to transform and shape it. That is, if one intends to write a poem and not autobiography or memoir.

For me the entire practice is about process, about using the practice of poetry as a tool for exploration. It’s about listening, breathing, leaping out into thin air—and trying to make something that sings in the ear and in the heart and in the mind. But it’s not really about presenting actual, “unvarnished” experience. It’s about transformation and exploration.

ND: After I read your poem “A Kind of Family Tree” from your book Swimmer Dreams I realized your poems, taken as a whole, represent a kind of family tree. Your work captures both the iconic image of family and the joy (if not joy then what?) of writing. Tell us how your family feeds your creative process and when, if ever, do they come into conflict with each other?

MH: Family has always been one of the major focal points of my work. In my first few books, much of my focus was on the family I grew up in, while in the more recent books it has shifted to my immediate family of wife and children. In the earlier work I think I was trying to understand something about my parents as people—people separate from me and in a relationship with each other that I watched but couldn’t understand. I see myself as a child in many of those poems, a child looking at these adults who seem to have secret lives—lives behind the lives they show—which the child whose eyes I am looking through can glimpse only in moments of “insight” he probably doesn’t understand.

I think as well that it was my brother’s sickness—he had a near-fatal brain tumor—when I was 15 and he was 12—that forced me into poetry, in a sense. Not because of the pain of that experience, necessarily, though that must be part of it, but more centrally because the disruption of what I knew and expected from family and life—at a vulnerable time in my own life—forced me into a kind of privacy, a way of looking and thinking—that eventually found its way into poetry. I think that experience taught me something of how poetry can transform difficult situations in ways that can heal, even though I hadn’t written any poems yet. In a sense that’s where I think my sensibility for poetry may have been born, as well as my need to speak its coded language.

More recently, my poems have found themselves writing about my wife and children. I think the urgency behind these poems is one born of an awareness of the fleeting nature of such moments—moments of joy--as well as the poignant tone of all parental love. The moments of pure happiness, too, fuel these more recent poems. Also, the fact that these are the people I know best in the world, and I yet sometimes feel I don’t know them at all, that I don’t know myself, that I don’t know anything! And, finally, many of the poems in Swimmer Dreams are fueled by the sense that my children are preparing to leave—to go off to college and into their “own” lives—which is a complex feeling of pride and joy and sadness that I can’t help writing about, or writing from. I think that’s where one primary impulse to write is located, for me. That, and the amazement of nature, or the garden. And so I am a modest voice, a poet of domestic life.

I think my family likes and admires what I do in my poems, though at times I think they have taken what I’ve said more literally than I’ve meant it. I don’t know whether that answers your question. . .

 ND: Finish this line for me: “As long as we’re dancing…”

MH: “As long as we’re dancing I can look into your eyes.”

ND: I’m sure you’re not talking about my eyes. Anyway, tell us about the poetic arc of your book Singing With My Father. How did your father help shape the trajectory of your work and how did he influence your footsteps?

MH: When I was a little guy my father sat me down beside him—he might have done this only once!—and read poems to me—Frost and Eliot and Yeats. He sat there beside me with his whiskey and his voice and read poems I couldn’t understand but the magic of whose sounds charmed me deeply. And just sitting there with him was wonderful.

He was also an extremely enthusiastic, vivid person, and he had a huge capacity for love. But he was also someone—like most men of his generation—who kept himself secret, essentially. And so I watched him, and I learned from him—but I also couldn’t understand him, and I wanted to. And I wanted him to open up to me in a way he never did. And I wanted to open up to him, too—which I don’t think I ever did, either.

He loved music, excellent jazz: Monk and Bud Powell primarily, but also Miles Davis, Charlie Parker—and later Bach and other classical composers. We communicated through music, in some sense. Which is part of what the poem “Singing With My Father” is about. The poem is based on an actual experience, though I didn’t actually sing with him. I listened and watched. The book, a small chapbook really, was written the year after he drowned, as I tried to remember certain moments of connection. I saved those moments that seemed to speak beyond our personal relationship and to say something other people might respond to.

 ND: Singing and dancing, music, bebop and the cha-cha-cha are integral to your work, especially bebop. I noticed on your website (www.michaelhettich.com) that you and your son Matthew collaborated musically. How did this collaboration come about? What was it like working with your son?

MH: Yes, music is extremely important to me, from bebop to folk to rock to jazz and experimental music of various kinds. I love sound artists like Trimpin and some of the noise artists Matt has turned me on to, and I love work that just makes me listen—non-narrative music you might call it. Parenthetically, I’m often surprised by how limited many writers’ ears are, how narrow their listening is. I find it inspirational to listen to music I may not even like but which stretches what’s been done in interesting ways. I think of composition in poetry as much like improvisation in jazz. I think also that the development of poetic technique is similar to that of a strong jazz player. You practice and practice and practice—and then you play. If it’s terrible, OK, do it again. Listen to everyone & keep your ears open!

I love working with Matt, not only because he’s an interesting musician and composer but also because he’s a generous, creative, disciplined and extremely intelligent person who’s open to all sorts of musical possibilities and understands how hard it is to get anything just right. Working with him has been extremely gratifying; we have very little problem working as colleagues; we respect each other and don’t hesitate to critique each other’s work. In the context of these collaborations, we see each other as friends and colleagues—which is very satisfying, to say the least. (Click here to enjoy Michael Hettich's musical collaboration with his son Matthew)

ND: Tell me who are your greatest musical influences—past and present—and in what ways, if any, does music influence your writing?

MH: Ha! There are too many to mention, but let me list ten:

Bill Frissell, Theolonius Monk, Bud Powell, Cecil Taylor, The Beatles, Dylan, Neil Young, Eno, Terry Riley, Carla Bley, Steve Reich—and let’s make it twelve—Beethoven and Bach . . . There are many more! Such a list changes all the time. At one point in my life, The Band and Joni Mitchell were extremely important to me musically; at another it was talking Heads and Television. The Dead. But I guess those listed above have been there since I first heard them, and influential in some more “permanent” way. Stravinsky and Bartok too.

Two ways it influences my writing: The idea and practice of improvisation, and the way, as Ashbery says, music can take an argument the terms of which are essentially abstract and carry that argument through complex changes to a satisfying conclusion. I like that idea though I don’t really practice it.

ND: In the first section of Flock & Shadow, your latest book, there’s a sense of gloom and isolation colored by your use of blue and pale colors. Rooms fill-up with snow and freeze the boy/man inside. The poems “Visiting Hour” and “Romance” exemplify this sense of darkness. But there is hope in the act of singing and the act of breathing. Language, I sense, is hope. Hope ‘way down where creatures (words?) are more pale than air, down where we might even make our own light and see’. How (or has) writing saved you? And, if not, why?

MH: Good question. I think writing has “saved” me, in a number of way, most fundamentally because it is an ever-changing, ever-deepening discipline one can never master, a life work and a way of life that brings moments of joy, a general sense of there always being something to do, a sense of excitement, a sense of brotherhood with all other artists, and an ever-evolving tool for exploration into aspects of the world and my own psyche I would never have access to otherwise. I don’t believe it has functioned for me as a vehicle through which to exorcise or assuage my psychic demons, but it has been a way to stay healthy and focused and more vividly alive. Certainly there’s darkness, but there’s also light and energy and the grace of craft—whatever level of craft I’ve achieved. And it’s a way of mapping the terrain of certain aspects of one’s life—not of understanding those aspects necessarily but of making them vividly real.

I remember being extremely excited, when I first started writing poetry, that I could approach the “truth,” in poetry, at a level of magic that made that truth simultaneously more vividly real and more “mythic”--primal in its effect or resonance. Tell the truth but tell it slant. That’s it. And such poetry seemed to re-invest the world with the numinous qualities of childhood, to shape the world and the world of spirit and thereby seem to make the world bigger!

ND: In the poem ‘Sleep’ from Flock & Shadow, I’m interested in the line ‘celebrities and small scale catastrophes’. How does pop culture influence your work?

MH: Not at all, at least as I understand your question. Except outside my intention.

ND: Is there too much or too little vanity in the world?

MH: Too much.

ND: From the poem “Flock & Shadow” in Flock & Shadow I made some notes: Bird bones; we are bird bones; the woodcock is the essence of earth and grass; we are earth and grass; stop breathing; breathe; so busy; the flock scatters; just keep breathing; sing. What are the dreams you keep on the tip of your tongue?

MH: I rarely remember dreams, so I guess the dreams I keep on the tip of my tongue are the poems I’m working on at any given time, or the poem I would be writing if I were writing at that moment!

ND: Your work is extremely sensual yet genderless, neither masculine nor feminine—at least from my perspective. There’s no overt I’m-a-man-hear-me-roar-ness about your work. Your language is simply elegant, beautiful—universal even. I find this fascinating and genius, refreshing. Can we divine something of the poet out of this?

MH: I don’t know. Thanks for the question, for your generous response to my work.

ND: If you could be any historical figure, who would you be, and why? Yikes!

MH: The Man Who Lived A Thousand Years, Then Turned into A Woman and Lived A Thousand More! –I’m sorry I can’t remember his/her name.

Or that famous man who discovered true happiness, and gave it as a gift to his children, who gave it to their children, who passed it on to theirs. Yes, maybe I’d be him, whose name has also been lost.

ND: You are a poet and a teacher. Openness to different points of view and different ‘ways’ of writing would seem to be required of any teacher, especially a teacher of creative writing. Being human, however, we’re subject to fatigue and exhaustion. How do you keep your mind ‘open’, fresh and engaged to new ideas for your own work and when you read others’ work?

MH: Not only am I a teacher, but I’m a teacher at a community college, which means I encounter many students whose background in poetry (when they have any background at all) is quite different from mine, and whose culture, traditions, language, education, taste, and expectations from art are extremely different from my own. As a result I have to keep my mind open, keep my judgment wide and clear, encourage my students as often and as accurately as possible, and constantly encourage them to read, to read and to embrace education (as opposed to training), to discover what they love and go for it with their whole hearts and minds. At the same time, I want to direct them to the real stuff, so to speak, to give them the tools and attitudes that might allow them to keep growing throughout their lives. And I realize of course that very few of my students will continue to work at writing. So I do get discouraged sometimes, but it’s usually about the ways our education system at all levels treats students as things, as products whose highest goal in life is a “good job” or a “career.” But I have many wonderful students; most of the time, they restore my good spirits. And, finally, I love the place where I work—its mission and democratic inclusiveness.

ND: What are you working on now? Can you give us a little excerpt of a poem or musical piece you’re working on today?

MH: During the academic year, I work on poems every day from 6:00-7:00 am. On those days I don’t have morning classes, I keep working until 11:00 or so. I generally spend a few years just writing, without thought of a collection, and then at some point I start to arrange things, to see the themes and/or subjects I’ve been attending. I recently finished a chapbook which is being published next month (April) by YellowJacket Press in Tampa. The poems in that book are small, clear pieces I probably won’t publish in my next full book. They seem to me at this point mostly to represent moments of sudden happiness, sudden moments outside humdrum experience.

And to get to your question, here are a few lines from something I was working on this morning, still rough and clumsy:

I Unlock the Front Door

and walk into the cottage of my own body

alone, she says, and call out to the ceiling fans,

to the softly dripping faucet, to the clocks

circling my life. Such a slowly spinning top

must topple. Not quite yet. And I call out, because…

       And it goes on from there. She finds a man lying in her bed, and she shaves him while he sleeps. As I said, it’s very stiff now, but I’ll work it into something more flexible. I like the image of a woman shaving a sleeping man who may not actually be there!

My regular writing process, when I don’t have much time: I write something out, fast, until it is finished in conception and, to a certain extent, in form—and then I smooth it, taking things out and putting them back in, until it sounds right to me. So the form and content become braided—as you can probably see they are not, in the example above. And then I let it sit for a few months and look at it again. That’s when I can tell whether I really like it or not. So I usually carry some version of a poem around with me, and I look at it a few times during the day. My studio is filled with notebooks filled with poems, which I read through, looking for works I can salvage. I probably have 15 full three-ring binders up there. I work with “hard” copies, though I store it all in (outdated) computers, and hopelessly outdated word-processing programs.

ND: Final question: without caesura can there be poetry?

MH: Yes, there is always poetry—The job of caesura is to make us feel that fact!

Neil de la Flor was born in Hollywood, Florida where he grew up wanting to be a cowboy but ended up a poet and fashion designer. His poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, Court Green, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review and other publications. Facial Geometry, a collaborative chapbook published with Maureen Seaton and Kristine Snodgrass, was published in 2006 by Neo Pepper Press. He currently lives in Miami with Hector and Nico.

Hooked on Hook

Hook, by Haya Pomrenze

(Rock Press, Paperback, 80 pp, $12.95)

Reviewed by Alex Handwerger

It is a tribute to Haya Pomrenze’s poetry that I read it aloud to my husband who appreciates a