|
Uh Oh Time by Kenneth Hart
(Anhinga Press, Paperback, 98 pp., $15.00)
Reviewed by Peter Borrebach
They come in out of the world, worker gnomes, matter-of-fact
drop their packs and talk business as they take off, and hang up
coats on labeled hooks —
This matter-of-factness, which belongs to schoolchildren’s conversations in “Monday Morning,” characterizes
almost all of the poems in Kenneth Hart’s Uh Oh Time. Hart writes with an unassuming voice, presenting anecdotes
of Americana, convinced, it would seem, that each contains its own truths, though the poems that do the most work in tying
the book together are those that reach furthest in trying to place where one “lone American male’s” stories
fit into a larger sense of contemporary America.
“Rush Hour in America” introduces a central motif, the commute. The poem's first person narrator betrays
a bit of edge towards his fellow commuters, but mostly wishes to interact with them, finding empathy with his colleagues in
envying a neighboring auto’s coffee and crullers. Beyond the speaker, an irate radio personality who
maybe hires someone to thump his desk or owns a thumping machine. takes a central role. As with many of the book’s
poems, the goal here seems to be to make a singular experience plural—to combine the personal narratives of Frank O’Hara
with the grander sense of an America of William Carlos Williams. This plural
experience is heightened in a later commute poem, “Keep America Beautiful,” where Hart adopts the first person
plural to voice the action of its short narrative. While the speaker is “uneasy sharing this time with myself”
in “Rush Hour,” he can’t get as mad as the man accosting him through the radio—accosting anyone who
will listen, really. This accosted mass of anyones is the “we” of the “Keep America Beautiful,” in
which "we're stalled in traffic."
The pluralizing hinges on the details of a commute, which, no matter how uniquely reported or identifiable the location
(this commute happens to be in Providence), will always be of the same ilk. The prison crew picking up garbage and the seagulls
hovering over the scene are not clichés, but universals. Just as he skirts familiarity, Hart also ably dodges politics
in this poem; the judgment is light, the reportage incidental. I found the skillful play of freedoms which dances through
the middle of the poem— bumper stickers announce the price of freedom,
claim liberty is our right. The guard in mirror sunglasses leans against
the correctional facitily van, props a shotgun on his knee like he's auditioning for
a movie. He's protecting our freedom to litter from
the inmates' desire to be free of litter. —to build an expectation for more direct political thought, but through the calmness of
the voice I was persuaded to take a simpler view: the poet was driving down the highway, and this is what he saw.
The “we” of “American Music” is similar to that of “Keep America Beautiful,” both
in import and in grounding. Again, even as the action of the poem itself remains anecdotal, the experience is written as being
social, plural, as though the speaker has taken it upon himself to be the voice for the stunned shoppers of the occurrence:
Most of us stood around making believe we were looking through the 'L' or 'T' section
of CDs...
The “we” also seeks to be historical and relational. The potential disjunction arises when the sensibility
remains committed to a singular set of quiet details and consistent matter-of-factness, while at the same time wanting to
be grander in scope (more American, broader in audience, whatever). The national
scope of the book becomes comparative with “The Russian Women.” The Russian woman of the title, a stripper, gives
voice to a more explicitly anti-American sentiment: her and her fellow immigrant strippers are better read than most Americans.
The environs of the strip club keep Olya (or Alyona—the speaker is uncertain) from sounding too vehement, however, as
even her attack on American literacy occurs within a well-described flirtation. The poem draws to its close with a mind towards
the small narrative, as opposed to anything of national scope. Olya brushes aside issues of national intellectuality, and
reckons that this strip club is staffed by Russians “because we are the most beautiful,” and “flounces”
to the stage.
Though these miniature scenes are inarguable in their consistency of voice, the consistency itself may be problematic
for some readers, as, however well controlled the lines, some poems do seem to blur into others. The few more formally rigorous
poems in the book are invigorating, as the formal conventions provide some much needed tension within the matter-of-factness
of Uh Oh Time. Peter
Borrebach lives in North Miami. He has published several poems and indie comics with small journals across the country and
also writes a weekly cultural criticism column, "Culturology," at the multimedia blog www.audioshocker.com.
Begin Anywhere by Frank Giampetro
(Alice James Books, Paperback, 64 pp., $14.95)
Reviewed by Nick Vagnoni
In “Begin Anywhere,” the title poem of this collection by Tallahassee-based Frank Giampietro, the speaker tries
several different approaches to depict the suicide of a family member. “I could begin with my father’s strong
right arm / heaving his shotgun into the lake,” he starts, then continues:
... Or ten minutes earlier with my father not consoling, but wanting to console
my half-sister as she stands there, a shadow’s length from the doorway watching
him hold
what’s left of his first wife... With
each starting point, Giampietro brings us a little closer, and we can eventually piece together an understanding of the events
that took place.
It’s appropriate that this poem comes near the center of this collection and provides the collection’s
title, as it can serve as a guide to reading the entire book. Really, one can begin
almost anywhere in this collection of poems and get a fairly accurate idea of the style and subject matter that flow throughout.
While the poems do not focus on the suicide, many are fueled by a sense of domesticity that is usually undercut by something
darker.
“Dope,” for example, begins: The inscription on the barrel
of the .20 caliber
derringer I carried in the front pocket of my coat when I went to buy drugs
is as lost to me
as one of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” I memorized last summer
by taping it with Band-Aids to the hood of my riding lawnmower. In this first sentence, we are made keenly aware not only of the speaker’s
past as someone who regularly needed to arm himself when going to cop heroin, but of his more recent present as someone who
owns a riding mower, lives in a house stocked with Band-Aids, and has the luxury of enough time to memorize poetry.
Still, not all poems are split down the middle between drugs and Raisin Bran. Some are more purely playful, such as
“To Do List #5333,” which includes items such as “Discover all there is to know about pomade,” and
“Find the passage where God allows Moses to glimpse His back as He passes.” Others are more jarringly tender,
such as “Notes Toward a Long Marriage,” which begins: “Heather wanted James to read her by the panty liners
/ she left facing up in the bathroom wastebasket.”
Perhaps what makes Giampietro’s poems so accessible is the even-handed presentation of more jagged subject matter—smoking
crack on a rooftop with a pregnant woman, for example—alongside his treatment of the quotidian demands of parenthood,
such as waking in the middle of the night to bring one’s son a glass of juice (both occur in the book’s opener,
“Juice”). In writing about drug addiction, there is always the opportunity to condemn or glamorize, but Giampietro
wisely does neither. He presents events plainly, weaving memory into day-to-day life, and the result is a quiet irony that
never over-reaches. Rather, the speaker of many poems in Begin Anywhere seems, at
times, to have a sense of knowing tranquility, of the satisfied exhaustion that results from years of hard living smoothed
over by years of family life.
Nick Vagnoni recently received his MFA in poetry from Florida International University in Miami, where he currently
teaches creative writing. His poems and reviews have appeared in Alimentum, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Florida
English, Backwards & Ugly, The Secret of Salt, and Solares Hill.
Halfway Decent Sinners by
Michael Cleary
(CustomWords, Paperback, 120 pp., $17.00)
Reviewed
by Jesse Millner
Perhaps every poet
should drive a beer truck. Perhaps every poet should grow up with the rigorous rigmarole of Catholicism. If
that were to happen, then, and only then, would a poet craft a book as funny, sorrowful and beautiful as Michael Cleary’s
Halfway Decent Sinners. The
first section of the book, “Original Sins,” brings us “Boss’s Son,” which reveals key themes
of the collection. “Gradually they taught me their secrets:/ let your legs do the lifting and save
your back.” And herein lies Cleary’s genius: Within the literal, tangible
lessons that the other workers impart to the “boss’s son,” lie profound ideas about the worlds of work and
play. Much like Phillip Levine’s What Work Is, Cleary’s poems show us this wisdom
that comes from “sweat,” “sore muscles” and “hangovers.” The effect
of this poem is to show clearly a young man’s entry into that world and his ambiguous relationship with his father,
who is also his boss. Because the poet’s father will die young, a powerful light is cast upon this difficult relationship.
The real skill of Cleary’s
work is revealed in this first section as well. He creates concrete and specific situations, allows us
to enter into those places, and share the experiences imagistically. However, there’s much more than
a funny and/or moving experience chronicled in these poems: they often bring real complexity; a little box opens and out springs
trouble, beauty and insight. We read about childhood encounters with Catholicism, “I never heard a nun fart,”
and are surprised to find the speaker’s longing for a real girl nun, Sister Robert Claire, revealed in the poem.
Again, Cleary begins with the tangible and specific (and often quite funny) and brings in the much larger realm of
adolescent desire in a way that seems natural, even inevitable in the movement of the poem.
The second section of the book deals with the rather odd Aunt Sara, who provides a beautiful space between the first
and third sections of the book. Here the poems are less narrative and more lyrically risk-taking.
They deal with the sighs of illicit fulfillment, of strange love and lust as in “Aunt Sara’s Nap”:
“Nuzzling her cheek upon his chest/ She molds herself around him.” A remarkable simile
shows the intensity of this lovemaking in “Aunt Sara, Waiting”: “as his body gusts above her/like a kite
on an April day.” Within this section, there’s also the very uncomfortable poem “Aunt
Sara at the Meat Counter, “ where she encounters a child, “a boy, his face twisted with screams./
She knows she could comfort him, how easy/ to nurse any man’s child.”
The last part of the book, “Dirty Jokes,” finds the poet dealing with the most serious issues, including
the premature death of his father. These poems are intensely beautiful and rigorous examinations of loss
and longing. While the early parts of the collection document the loss of traditional religious belief,
including the soothing notion that heaven awaits the faithful and therein lies the opportunity to make things right, the final
section shows Cleary unsparingly looking for ultimate meaning, either in each particular poem or in the long meditation that
a book of poetry sometimes provides. In his case the poems add up to a kind of redemption in the hard-earned
realization that truly living means unloading beer trucks, learning crude jokes, falling in love, training a dog, getting
divorced and remarried, losing one’s father, instead of dwelling on the possibilities of an officially-sanctioned afterlife.
The meaning of Cleary’s meditation is the acknowledgment of agnosticism and his ability to accept the hard and
beautiful ambiguity that loss and sorrow, seasoned with those too-fleeting moments of laughter, even happiness, are the central
truths of our lives. The reader feels the imprint of a real life lived on every page.
But the most important effect of the book is shown in the poem, “Blue Barns,” near the end of the collection.
Here Cleary brings about a sad reconciliation through language: “so let me sweeten/ the lousy deal you got before
I let you go.” And the poem becomes the act of letting go of his father, and for a moment the “real”
and tangible world of sorrow merges with and becomes the words and their meanings that Cleary so adeptly shares with us.
Further, in “Blue Barns” the literal barns along the road are replaced in the poem’s closure by the
figurative Blue Barns of heaven. The real and imagined, earth and paradise, life and death, all exist simultaneously
in Cleary’s poems. And because of this amazing juxtaposition, he generously brings us along on the
journey between this world of light and love and loss, and the next world where perhaps the sorrows of this one will be finally
recompensed. Or not.
Jesse Millner has published three poetry chapbooks, The Drowned Boys (March Street Press),
On the Saturday After the Rapture (Main Street Rag Press) and I Give You This Ghost (Pudding House Publications).
A fourth chapbook, Holy Numbers, is forthcoming from Pudding House. A full-length collection, The Neighborhoods
of My Past Sorrow, will be released in February 2009 by Kitsune Books. Jesse teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University
and lives with his wife, Lyn, and dog, Sam, in Estero, Florida.
The Moving
Waters by Mary Jane Ryals (Kitsune Books, Paperback, 143 pp., $14.00) Reviewed by Kristin Kovacic
If still waters run deep, then moving waters are, by implication, shallow. Florida poet Mary Jane
Ryals puts this conventional wisdom to the test in her restless poetry collection, The Moving Waters.
Here the poet crosses the water many times—to Spain, France, Mexico, Ireland, Portugal, Morocco, Vietnam, even
the swamps of her native Florida—to navigate the eternal themes: love and fortune, beauty and temporality, motherhood
and romance.
Ryals asks both the traveler’s question—What to make of the riches of the world?—and that of the
rooted—How to savor what we’re given? The result is poetry that bounces between exotic wonders and more ordinary
ones, often with startling speed:
. . . I do not want to move, but to absorb this moment
that Genileschi understood,
not of Fate and of eating your children, but the story of how sometimes Fate delivers
you
to the left hand of Bosch’s triptych, to the god with the pink robe, Adam and Eve in an orange grove,
to the second chance,
almost to heaven where your children laugh and jump on beds when you get back from El Prado, and
angels float down
like bed feathers from coral fountains
into your life.
—“Finding Moses in Madrid”
Each section of The
Moving Waters has a watery title, invoking the streams, both literal and figurative, of the poet’s imagination.
The short section about Vietnam, the red bridge of the forever river, contains five astonishing poems about a country
disturbing in both its beauty and its horrors:
. . . the sidewalk is a shallow pool for surfing through the legless. —from “Red Chaos,
Old Hanoi, June, 105 degrees”
In Vietnam, the poet is moved, not just to look, but to see. She sees the color (turquoise) threading the
landscape and her own daughter’s flip-flops; she sees, through her twelve-year-old daughter, the injustice that is their
true connection to the Third World:
They are so poor, you said,
they have nothing. But
they still give you things.
—“To My Daughter at 12 in Vietnam”
I appreciate how Ryals
approaches motherhood with wonder but without sentimentality. Her kids appear throughout her journeys, as in utero travelers
and teenaged companions. They are insightful and crabby, touching and touchy—in other words, Ryals
makes them real. In fact, her approach to motherhood and to writing seem well embodied in the following
manifesto:
My son, my daughter, we will all die someday, but not now, not now. Look—
“To My Children on Father’s Day at Wakulla Springs, Florida”
This wide-ranging collection also looks hard at the world most writers truly inhabit—academia—but which
they rarely acknowledge as a subject. Ryals, a teacher at Florida State University, writes about her students,
about the soul-sucking odyssey of an MLA conference, and it’s refreshing, to say the least, to read a poet who acknowledges
where the money that fuels the poetic world (and the jet plane that takes you there) comes from.
Florida’s Big Bend is well served by Mary Jane Ryals, its Poet Laureate, as this ambitious first collection amply
shows. May the moving waters continue to flow for her.
Kristin Kovacic is the co-editor of Birth: A Literary Companion (University of Iowa
Press). She lives in Pittsburgh.
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.
Neil de la Flor Interviews Michael
Hettich
Photo courtesy of www.michaelhettich.com
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.
Michael Hettich's most recent books:
|
| Swimmer Dreams (Word Tech Publications, 84 pp $17.00) |
Michael Hettich
|
 |
| Flock & Shadow: New and Selected Poems (New Rivers Press, 150 pp, $13.95) |
Michael Hettich
|
|
Michael Hettich
|
|
|
|
Michael Hettich's books are available through Amazon.com by clicking on the book images, or at the Books and Books store in
Coral Gables Florida through this link.
Editor's Note:
Since this interview was published, Michael Hettich's latest chapbook Many Loves
has been released. Copies are available by sending a check for $6.50 to: Gianna Russo, Blake School of the Arts, 1701 N. Blvd.,
Tampa, FL 33607; or e-mail for more info: russo15@juno.com
|
 |
|
|
|
Published Florida poets respond to questions from Richard Ryal, for which they
deserve no blame. Question: It's right to call Florida the Sunshine State. The local sun can lull
us into rest or simmer us into an irritable frenzy. Florida's climate, always unique, is all around us and keeps
trying to get inside us. Is it in your poetry? If so, how? If not, why not?
Terri Witek: As someone who grew up
under the peerlessly overcast skies of northern Ohio, I keep a special trapdoor in my head for sunshine. When I was
sixteen, I was sent off to Brazil for a year I remember mostly as the vivid blues and greens supplied by intense sunlight.
I loved this so much that when I came to Florida for the first time I was moved by a sense of the longed-for.
I sit and write in a chair with the sun falling over my shoulder—this is as close as I get to a necessary poetic
position, I think! And (perhaps consequently), I have written many poems about sleeping and waking up in sunlight.
One I am happiest about writing is called "The Yellow Curtain": Googled with the quotation marks around it,
this comes up both as a gorgeous Vuillard painting and my humble poem, which actually references Vuillard. I love this.
As others long for sun in September, we are unthinking luxuriants in it. I hope my work will always be so happily sun-drenched.
Note: "The Yellow Curtain"
appears in The Carnal World (Storyline Press). Terri Witek is professor of English
and the Art and Melissa Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing, Stetson University, DeLand, FL.
James Brock:
I like to think of myself as an exotic to the Florida clime.
No, I'm not a Nile Monitor, or even Brazilian Pepper, but just a man who was born and raised in the semi-arid northern
rim of the Great Basin. That would be Boise, Idaho to those who aren't familiar with the geologies of the Intermountain
West. And so, I've taken semi-root in South Florida over the last ten years. It has been all too easy for
my hard-scrabble bitterbrush poetry to absorb all this moist, contrary, and fecund landscape of Florida, both natural and
urban, both Cracker and Caribbean, and both native and exotic.
In my poetry, it's just the problem
of Florida (or rather, the idea of Florida) that has been such rich fertilizer. Here is a place where everyone seems
to be arriving, on what sometimes feels like the true American West, on an unspeakably beautiful backdrop that is all to easy
to exploit, fill in, and inhabit. And in the trees are the mixing of languages, ghost tongues of Caloosahatchee and
"relocated" Seminole, of nasally Midwest twang against sharp New Yorker accents, of patinas of Spanish, Creole,
English, German. It's a place ready for any voice, which does make it exciting and possible.
The result is that
my poetry has taken all kinds of unexpected turns in the last ten years. Yes, initially, it was the predictable love-affair
a poet must have with Miami, where every line must be about sex, sex and sex. But then it was the drawing in of all
these other voices: I began to play with received forms, just as I was receiving all these new Florida sounds and colors
and light. Yes, some of the traditional forms, the villanelle and sestina, but also improvised and self-actualized forms.
The cityscape is all about erasure and renewal, and so why not in my poetry?
And then moving
to the "West Coast," that is, Fort Myers, where the cultural ties follow I-75 up to Ohio, a place trying its best
not to be the East Coast (meaning we get the development but not the cultural infusion), I landed in a place very familiar
to me, a kind of Boise, Florida. Here is where I began to appreciate the native landscape, especially the saw palmetto
and slash pine, just as acre upon acre of it was being swallowed up for gated communities and "towne centers."
So my poetry took a turn home, or imagined home in Florida. Yes, Florida critters infiltrate my poems (ibises and mammoths
most recently), as does the light and speed of Florida. I'm pretty sure I'm going native with it, as much as
those golfers who are now just teeing up on the 13th hole just beyond my lanai. Note: Author of Pictures that Got Small (WordTech) and nearly Florida (Anhinga Press), James Brock teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. On
the web you can find his e-chapbooks Tangerine, On the Windy Side of Care, and read his blog.
Richard Ryal grew up in the New York area. A South Florida marketing
writer, he has begun teaching interdisciplinary writing to graduate students at Nova University.
|
|
 The Search for Florida's Forgotten Poet Laureate And check out our Editor's blog on the history and role of state Poets Laureate.
|
|
To Stand in the Kitchen of Our Memories
Cooking Lessons, by Nina Romano
(Rock Press,
Paperback, 112 pp., $12.95)
Reviewed by Jill Drumm
When I first began to write about food and cooking, the sense of being planted in
front of the stove physically and emotionally defined the creative space in which I wrote and—yes, I'll say it—fed
the writing process. Nina Romano’s poems seem to spring from a similar location. Standing in front
of the stove frying zucchini or over the sink skinning roasted peppers, Romano connects to persons and places of her past
as exotic as the recipe for dried and salted mullet roe pouches called Buttariga. From the
first poem, “Cooking Lessons,” a sestina in which we observe the eleven year-old initiated into the female rite
of preparing a meal for a man she loves (her father), Romano invites us into her (mother’s) kitchen. Suffused
in memory, she asks, “When did midsummer girls // become sunbathed women? When did they begin to serve / strawberries
and cream?” At Romano’s urging, in the kitchen we may feast, yearn, celebrate, lament, observe,
and extend, as in the final lines of the book’s closing poem, “Form & Theory”:
I am my mother’s child learning cooking lessons.
Here’s one I haven’t
mastered—memories. I eat memories raw.
In form & theory I am my mother—every woman
is woman’s child. Our world passes by in silent roar—
all our friends are dying, no one’s left
to call our names.
Every
woman, Mom & I pass on.
Who
in this world will remember?
We
were every woman in our time.
“Lucky
Life,” a poem that closes the third section of the book (Food for Thought), draws similar parallels between memory and
kitchen work:
Lucky
there’s tidiness to wash away and renew.
Lucky for me, there exists the mechanics of cooking,
when my mind recalls minutely and I live vicariously
the past—moments
that make me wince or cry, feel guilty,
or want to re-live. And luckier still, I think fast and say,
when you enter the kitchen to catch me weeping, it’s
the onions,
or I’ve just nicked my finger with the knife.
The above passage also indicates how culinary ritual consoles and even provides refuge against emotions and
memories that are otherwise uncontainable. Food is inextricable from familial and romantic
connection, representing deep pleasure, nourishment, and devotion through the details as well as the more ambivalent aspects
of relationships such as duty, routine, and substituting food for emotional expression/gratification.
Food appeals to every sense and provides an immediate, visceral link to the physical body. It is
impossible to read, “The Crucifixion of Garlic,” and not to smell garlic, or to come across “halls, corridors,
and passage- / ways [that] reeked with boiling tomato soup from the refectory” and not smell that neglectful lunchtime
fare, see the yellow-lit institutional hallways, and feel our bellies contract as we read. Poems in which Romano trusts the
sensory image to do the narrative or lyric fetching and carrying are her most successful, as in “Lover of Baskets.”
My favorite lines appear midway through the poem—rich in image and sound:
Funghi were dusted of bosk coats,
and skinned in spots. When she’d picked a chilo, minus basket weight, she quit the thicket, headed home to slice, dice, and
dissect every floppy, fat cap and chunky stem till every white-villain-white-worm,
cajoled by scorching sun, inched
their tidy bodies out
“San Felice Circeo: Hunters & Gatherers” is
also an imagistic pleasure, whether read in vertical columns or broken horizontal lines. The last three lines of the poem,
“the
arbor the quiver the
honey
the
arrow the matchstick the
woodpile
the
whistle the twilight
the kindling”
conclude what is
a bold and satisfying lyric collage. Syntactically the poems sometimes stumble, with an
errant comma or modifier making the reader work toward clarity, as in these lines from “Alone in Guilin”: “when
you reached across the table / to take my hand in yours, so real the remembrance / of your touch, that startled, / I jump
backwards . . .” I prefer instead the direct purity of lines from “Tonight,”
where the narrator declares, “I pity everyone who is anywhere else / but in this windless, cloudless Sardinian port
tonight.” Or the intimate opening lines of “In Summer”:
it is the metronoming of dusk that sets my heart quaking: Lipari
Romano’s poems celebrate the labyrinthine connections between memory and food, and
they invite us to stand in the kitchens of our own memories. Her poems earnestly explore the recipe as
cultural and familial artifact. “And now I know for sure we never die till the last person we know
dies, for just as I am remembering her, so someone else I teach will remember me when I’m gone—even if it’s
just on a 3x5 recipe card.” Well-prepared food and well-written poems, from the gathering to the
eating, are best enjoyed when the provisions are ripe and fresh. Romano has set a long table for us, and I hope more poets
are encouraged to join the feast.
Jill Drumm teaches composition and creative writing
at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. Her work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly Review,
Creative Nonfiction, Crab Orchard Review, Southeast Review, Margie, and RUNES Review.
|
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
poem as much as I appreciate a good math problem. I know he’s not listening, but still I read on,
desperate to share her words with anyone in possession of ears. Pomrenze is that kind of poet. From the
first poem “Straddle” in which the speaker straddles the “merry-go-round horse/at Magic Kingdom, balancing
two worlds,” we ride the carousel with Pomrenze as she celebrates the joy, weirdness and struggle of life with a fearless
grin and whip-smart senses. The world of her Orthodox Jewish upbringing and the secular world pull in different directions in many
poems. It’s the juxtaposition of the sacred and profane, the spiritual and the material that interests
Pomrenze, but she doesn’t compartmentalize. Instead she bridges the gap with hilarity and beauty. In “Salute”
she remembers her family’s trip to the Pentagon for a dinner honoring her father. “I wear a
polka dot/ dress with a satin bow/ and we eat kosher TV dinners/ in disposable aluminum trays/ while everyone else dines/
on filet mignon. The brisket/ of my dinner hooks/ in my teeth, stubborn,/ determined to stay there.” Her voice
is playful, highly comical at times, especially when she writes about family members. In “Knipl,” her mother-in-law-to-be
informs her about her fiancé, “I taught him how to do everything,/ she said. Bleach out wine stains,/
prepare a brisket even, fold laundry./ He’ll feign ignorance but don’t let him/ take advantage.
Make him help.” With her in-laws and others, she talks frankly about the complicated relationships we have with family
members, the push and pull, the shaky ground of love and hate. In “Father-in-Law’s Yahrzeit,”
the speaker is cleaning out her deceased father-in-law’s apartment, his belongings telling the story of his life. From
his cufflinks to his coupons and his favorite brand of cottage cheese, Pomrenze gives such a strong sense of the guy, I felt
like I knew him myself. We get a close-up of the even more complex mother-daughter
relationship in the title poem, “Hook,” a prose poem that reads like a very short story. As
the speaker helps her mother bra shop after a mastectomy, she remembers fastening her mother’s bra for her every morning
as a child. The five hooks of the bra are tough to pull together because her mother wore it a size too
small. “What if I suddenly let go of the elastic? Would my mother fly against the room, smash into
the family photo gallery above the brass hamper?” But the entire house is organized
around serving her mother. “Even my youngest sister, Dee, who was exempt from the bra-hooking ritual,
was assigned the task of scratching my mother’s head nightly so she could relax.” We get the
humor and then we get the poignancy as the speaker faces her mom’s ageing, her mastectomy and their complicated relationship.
“Maybe it’s the garish light in the dressing room or the contour made by the polka dots but her breasts
take on the silhouette of the comedy and tragedy masks seen on the billboards of old movie houses.” At the back
of the book is a glossary for some of the Jewish terms and a list of errata with mock disclaimers for the poems, so, though
you may have cried, you’ll end laughing out loud. Reading Pomrenze is like experiencing a weird form of déjà vu.
She pulls images and ideas out that are instantly recognizable, but her eyes give it all a new spin, a thrilling freshness.
In “Grief While Waiting for a Car Repair,” she describes just that: “Powdered creamer clumps/ in your funneled
cup as/ you suddenly realize all/ that is unwell in your life.” This debut is truly an exhilarating
ride.
Alex
Handwerger is an editor of The Florida
Book Review and a student in the MFA Program at Florida International
University.
The House on Boulevard
St.: New and Selected Poems by David Kirby (Louisiana State Univ. Press, Paperback, 151 pp., $18.95) Reviewed
by P. Scott Cunningham
Reviewing a David Kirby collection is a little like reviewing Bartlett’s Famous Quotations. What
can I pull out that hasn’t already been plucked from somewhere else? The first poem alone, which
has the borrowed title of “Stairway to Heaven,” covers the thoughts and lives of the following people in just
four pages: Emily Dickinson, Led Zepplin, Gomer Pyle, Dante Alighieri, Roy Lichtenstein, Marianne Moore, Lord Byron, Virginia
Woolf, Donald Barthelme, Hayden Carruth, John Crowe Ransom, Jacques Derrida, Ted Solotaroff, Issac Newton, Wayne Newton, Kirby’s
own editor, and yes, even David Kirby himself, in the third person.
It’s no small project to make all of this intellectual and pop culture detritus into something poetic, and on
the surface, Kirby’s style, which he has himself dubbed “ultra-talk,” seems to be the polar opposite of
the taut, metrical meditations of a Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson. His lines, and the sentences within
them, are long, jagged, and ungainly, and outside of their Southern charm, sonically, they’re flat. If
you offered Kirby any instrument to acccompany his poems, I have a feeling he’d choose the recorder. But
because they are so idea-rich, especially within a poetry landscape that sometimes feels overly shackled to the mono-idea
of sound itself, their meanings carry a great distance. In other words, the words may ramble but the poetry
does not. The
House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, allows us to see more fully the scope of his concerns, of which family
is certainly at the forefront. Several poems address his deceased father; several address his children,
and even more manage to tie his wife and fellow poet Barbara Hamby into whatever intellectual thread he is guiding us through.
The subject matter can stray into sentimentality, but it never feels slight. Instead, it lends weight to enjoyable bookishness
like, “My new grad-school roommates and I are attending / our first real lecture, which has gone okay, / we guess, since
none of us understands it.” His narrator has an “aw-shucks” demeanor that seems to always
be apologizing for splashing the page with German philosophy and quotes from Racine in the original French. It
also allows him to toss in some overly-dramatic phrasing that not even Jack Gilbert could get away with: "Everybody hates
somebody: / we cast about for the author of our misery, and lo, it is us." He can parody his own heroes
without becoming bitter or silly, like in this hilarious bastardization of Whitman: “I hear America singing; it sounds
like Little Richard,” or delve into clichéd ars poetica without becoming quotidian: “A
writer can certainly keep writing the same junk over and over again.”
But personally, I like when the veneer of Funny, Placid David is broken and the coldly observant intellectual speaks, which
usually happens when he’s exploring the balance between mind and body. I love simple, clean lines
like, “So much pain out there, and almost none of it is ours,” and “There is something about cheap whiskey
/ that makes you want to throw furniture / through the window after a while.” For Kirby, ideas are
mostly about pleasure. Knowing things is a hobby no greater than knitting or philately, and beneath our
brains, no matter how advanced, is a small, misguided animal with a looming expiration date. So why not
drink wine, fall in love, and move to Italy?
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.
Yellow Jackets by Patti White
(Anhinga
Press, Paperback, 98 pp., $14.00)
Reviewed by Laura McDermott
In the insect world, queen yellow jackets can be identified by their distinctive color combination and characteristic, rapid,
side-to-side flight pattern before landing. While an etymologist observes and records this behavior, a
poet starts thinking: What is the yellow jacket thinking? What drives her? Patti White's new book
of poetry, Yellow Jackets, examines the creatures of the animal and insect kingdoms and attributes human , often feminine,
qualities to them.
White sees society and nature as conjoined: "everything
[is] connected / everything intact / inside and out / form and function” (“The Beauty of the Wound”).
While reading this book, I found my urban, conscious self exploring the value and depth of my own relationship with
the natural self which White describes as “shaded by green / deep as throats of emeralds…[that] waits for the
evolution of bees” (“Rose Fever”). The voice comes from a place of experience, often identifying with
characters from history, religion and folklore like Frankish Kings, Jimmy Hoffa, Satan, and Ali Baba. For
example, in “Curls Above,” she writes, “I’m a saved woman / but I swear there’s a demon in my
hair / that makes it go straight…” These references pop up in surprising places, often paired
in poems with bees, starlings and foxes in order to highlight domestic feminine qualities. White’s
poem, “The Discovery Channel Says the Etruscan Shrew is the Smallest Mammal,” makes many connections between a
mole-like rodent and a struggling single mother. “She lives a math problem, on borrowed time. / In
the end, it is the threes and fives that saves her, / their curled foundations like arms embracing her litter.”
White’s word use throughout the poem gives strength and encouragement to women overwhelmed by motherly hardships. In
her most compelling poem, “Yellow Jackets,” which appears last in the book, White offers us a literary entomology.
A hive queen experiences postpartum-like depression. “How can she bear the months of isolation? …
The wings beating / inside her head must drive her mad.” However, the poem continues with a note
of strength: “When she wakes, near starved, / the world of yellow jackets will start over. / The new colony will be
ruled by her scent, / her dispensation, her new covenant.” This poem brings a strong closure to the
extended metaphor of feminine qualities in the book, demonstrating the powerful drive of womanhood when she writes, "She
will understand her mission to be the preservation of a culture already frantic with the nearness of the last days.”
Laura McDermott is the Festival Coordinator of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and the event coordinator of the Literary Salon. She teaches writing at Florida International University and Broward Community College.
Editor's Note: Copies of Yellow Jackets
are available through Anhinga Press
Also by David Kirby and Patti White:
Books by other Florida Poets:
|
