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Saturday, September 01, 2018

The Sunday Poet: Eliot Cardinaux









Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1984 to a musical family, Eliot Cardinaux studied jazz piano at the Manhattan School of Music from 2003-2006. After sustaining a career in New York as an improvising musician, Cardinaux took an interest in the art of poetry, and moved to Western Massachusetts in 2008, where he read and wrote diligently for just over 6 years. Cardinaux then decided to return to school, and attained a bachelor's in Contemporary Improvisation as a pianist at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He is still active as both a pianist and poet along the East Coast and in parts of Europe, and has gone on to produce material in other mediums as well, including voice and film, as well as graphic design. 

In 2016, he founded The Bodily Press, a small chapbook publication and record label through which he has released the works of other poets, as well as several of his own albums and chapbooks, including, most recently, Sweet Beyond Witness, and By the Hand




Anima

This suffocation,
year of yesterday’s breezes
playing in my hair

the pines will answer:
I’ve seen its edges, but I
haven’t found it yet

on the walk at dusk
tomorrow will be — as dead,
as animal as

you, familiar
species, formless as the wounds
inflicted, witness.








Haiku on Leaving the City

I

To someone with hands:
pinhole, landscape; hand and strings,
while you have no land.

II

Clocks tick like always.
I gave the cat ice water.
Things are packed away.

III

Rather than writing,
the billboard needs changing, but
tonight I can’t reach.

IV

This bar is so loud;
I’d like to stop talking now,
so you can go on.




Friday, August 31, 2018

A Lifetime of Reading: Sweet Marjoram: Notes & Essays by DeWitt Henry







A Lifetime of Reading: Sweet Marjoram: Notes & Essays by DeWitt Henry

by Michael Steffen

One of the many virtues of DeWitt Henry’s new book Sweet Marjoram (ISBN 978-1-941196-72-4, MadHat Press, 2018) is its liberally associative arrangement. It allows us, like our favorite books of lyrical poetry, once we’ve read it through and are on to this welcoming element, to open its pages where we will and just start reading. Skipping through a book is a good way to allow its individual passages to surprise us, to get by or around, in some cases, the author’s control freak editor and modesty, to get at the book’s heart, or “meat.” In the case of Sweet Marjoram, one may even on a first perusal jump to the 17th essay, “On Meat,” where our sources of fascination knock against our weaknesses and guilt.

la carne, in Spanish and carne in Italian, echoing the Latin carn- or caro (flesh), as do carnal in English (having a relation to the body as opposed to the soul), carnival (a time of feasting and fleshly indulgence as opposed to Lent and fasting), carnivorous and carnivore…Among flora, the carnation is a flower as red as raw meat, as blood.

Meathead suggests more muscle than brains. Sexual organs are called meat… (Antony even calls Cleopatra cold leftovers on dead Ceasar’s trencher)... [page 94]

I’ve left ellipses instead of A1 sauce. The line of thought cools down in the course of the essay with sobering references to Benjamin Franklin and his pragmatic advice, “Rarely use Venery except for Health and Offspring; Never to Dullness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another’s Peace and Reputation,” Saint Augustine’s spiritual sense of love with allusion to another kind of “meat,” and further discussions involving Noah, Henry’s daughter, Tolstoy, a grad-student memoir of a friendly neighbor meat butcher, and more. In the wake of any one of the essays, on reflection, we marvel again and again at the variety of Henry’s sources and multiplicity of his angles of consideration on his subjects. The logo for NPR’s flagship news program, All things considered, would be a good subtitle for the book.

This is true, and so its opposite: an uneasiness at the seeming authorial absence, a lack of point of view, an omission of agenda, of logical or narrative sequence. Topics are announced in the titles: “On Weather,” “On Conscience,” “On Falling”…“On Privilege”…“On Cursing”… Henry’s meditations encompass a wide topical range, from the ordinary, “On Handshakes,” to the lofty, “On Dignity,” and the ironic, “On Folly.” A source of inspiration, it may soon dawn on the reader, lies in the 16th Century, in the French and English essayists Michel de Montaigne
(“Of sadness,” “Of friendship,” “Of cannibals”) and Francis Bacon (“Of Truth,” “Of Death,”
Of Revenge”).

The epigraph of the book, taken from Shakespeare, citing the origin of the author’s title, is telling of this inspiration from the Renaissance, an age in its writers characterized by a spirit of the revival of classical philosophy and literature and its attitudes of open inquiry into all subjects, its copious and liberal curiosity. The title comes from a recognition scene in the beginning of the denouement of King Lear, as blinded Gloucester’s inward senses are being restored to him, and Lear is still simmering after the storm:

Lear: Ha! Give the word.
Edgar: Sweet marjoram.
Lear: Pass. (4.6.93-95)

Sweet marjoram” (Marjoran hortensis) refers to a mint-like herb, which annotators believe was used as a medicinal cure for madness or mental illness. The title’s useful to its author also because it echoes the title of an earlier book, Sweet Dreams, a memoir of Henry’s youth and family, centered around his father who owned and operated a candy factory.

Literature and commonplace phrases and sayings serve as springboards for a good deal of the texts, offering a wide range in citations from the Bible to contemporary films, novels, essays and science, references of expressions spanning from early English, “Fair-weathered friend,” to our day’s greetings with fist bumps. Sven Birkerts praises the book’s display of “the accrued benefits of a lifetime of reading, teaching, viewing and thinking,” noting its “Shakespearian breadth of interest subjected to a steady inquiring pressure.”

While the choice of inclusion in the essays is arbitrary, though familiar, these are not “personal” essays, nor so much in academic terms thesis essays, for their lack of method and inclusion of biographical material. Announced topics are also freely digressed from, sometimes at ̊180 as in the essay “On Silence,” which more or less meditates on the impossibility of silence.

Buddhist teasers: The sound of one hand clapping. A tree falls in an empty forest. Sunyata.
There is no absence of sound, except for the deaf, who feel vibrations through the floor or other surfaces of touch.

Listen carefully, and even in scientifically designed anechoic chambers, in the absence of most sound, you’ll hear the roar and pulse of your own blood. (This, of course, is amplified in ultrasound exams of the heart, which, when I heard mine from a speaker, sounded like kicking in a bath, glug, wash, glug.

Our industrial and technological revolutions have increased ambient noise, especially in the cities… [page 15]


Again, the risk run in this manner of leaping from instance to instance is the impression it may leave the casual or unfamiliar reader that the author is writing simply to hear the ink blot from his pen, that he’s not getting to the point. Like Gertrude to Polonius, we may prove an itch to say, “More matter, with less art.” Or do we want to ask for More art, more structure…?

Maybe readers of today, used to clicking here and jumping from partially read story to partially glimpsed ad, will be very much at home in Henry’s paratactic discourse.

We are given fair warning on the title page these are not just essays, but “Notes & Essays.” Often “paragraphs” or separate units consist simply of one sentence. Or just a fragment.

Speak now, we say, or forever hold your peace.

Enfolding silence, thick silence, heavy; moments filled with silence.

Dead silence.

We mute the familiar, annoying commercial.

Philomela, the rape victim, tongue-less, hand-less.

Brier Rabbit and Tarbaby.

Hold your tongue.

Tongue-tied?…[page 16]


Passages like these can induce a sort of reader’s vertigo. What—where in…

Yet Henry stirs our curiosity in this difference from the bulk of writing which is very agenda- or purpose-driven. Harkening back to an age whose poet characterized the function of his art “to hold the mirror up to nature,” Henry’s writing attains in manner and example a wide scope and variety of our sources for thought. When these are juxtaposed, hovering, side by side, often intentionally for contrast—old/new, ordinary/exotic, common/lofty—the reward for the effort is comparative, a glimpse of objectivity and tolerance rather than a dedicated referential orthodoxy to justify some argument.

This has been one of the primary reasons for studying Michel de Montaigne in World Literature classes, often his essay “Of cannibals,” for its refutation that “other” people, the natives of what was then considered “Anarctic France” (Brazil), were inferior as humans to the seemingly infinitely more sophisticated Europeans who were at that time just discovering this new world and its inhabitants.

I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato did not know of them; for it seems to me that what we actually see in these nations surpasses not only the pictures in which poets have idealized the golden age and all their inventions in imagining a happy state of man, but also the conceptions and the very desire of philosophy. They could not imagine a naturalness so pure and simple… [“Of cannibals”].

The essay “On Appetite” in Sweet Marjoram gives us the nutshell passage from Montaigne’s essay: “I am sorry that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own.” [page 77]

Henry, too, is aware of other lands and other people with their customs which differ sharply from our own. Not unlike Montaigne:

Islam discourages handshakes between men and women, probably to ensure chastity. In Switzerland, when an Imam’s sons recently refused to shake their teacher’s hand—a Swiss tradition—authorities imposed a $5,000 fine and provoked an international controversy… [page 11]

The discussion occurs in the essay “On Handshakes.” Ordinarily, the contrast, even conflict, between Muslim and Western customs and ethics would by far outweigh the simple gesture of a handshake. Instead of getting engulfed in all of that, Henry proceeds with his topic, to unearth a very contemporary Western oddity in the consideration of the gesture.

In addition to religious customs, there are also health and safety concerns. Handshakes spread germs. No one shook on deals with the germaphobe Howard Hughes. Supermarkets offer wipes to sanitize shopping cart handles as a precaution against epidemics of flu or AIDS. Dentists and doctors wear latex gloves… [page 11]

Here we have a case where Henry’s stylistic boldness of laying instance out after instance comes into a powerful statement, revealing virtue in the madness of his method. In a sense, it is writing as showing rather than telling. These things, the conservative manner of Muslims, Howard Hughes’s mania over germs, today’s assimilation of that mania into expected, habitual use of sanitary wipes and latex gloves, our somewhat de-humanizing (don’t touch me!) scientific awareness, all emerge from the discourse as evoked in our daily experience. The author has done little more than arrange the images and notions together under the marginal awareness of our hands and how we use them. Terrible importance is trivialized. The simple unassuming takes on poetic weight, even to the point of farcical proportions. The ant is a centaur in its dragon world, wrote Ezra Pound. Or, more recently, The feet of an ant make their own sound on the earth—Jane Hirshfield.

Sometimes, as with questions of handshakes, social attitudes shift swiftly, within one’s lifetime. Other beckoning changes can take generations.

Medieval nobles were celebrated by gisants, sculpted on their coffin lids… The knight lies at rest in full armor… On the Smith College campus, I loved Leonard Baskin’s gisant of a factory worker in this traditional pose, reclining on a slab, pot-bellied, care- and work-worn, aged, but noble also in his way… [page 21]

By disregarding temporal as well as spatial and topical parameters, the Renaissance/Henry essay assumes the power to see History, what is beyond our ordinary senses, reminding us of our society’s roots in revolution. Baskin’s gisant, elevating a common worker, may be a memorial for Democracy and its valuation of the individual, or for Communism and its proposed elevation of the working class. There are spoilers of both systems of government which are not included in Baskin’s sculpture. Further in the book, in the essay “On Privilege,” Henry will make mention of how “the redistribution of wealth under Communism privileged bureaucrats, commissars, and Stalin.” [page 28]

If America’s foundations hold up ideals for our aspirations, our history is not without its ironies.

All men are created equal, writes the slave-owning husband and father, Thomas Jefferson, philosopher, scientist, architect, statesman, politician, patrician. [page 25]

As to himself? I noted when writing about Sweet Dreams the paradoxical unselfishness—for a memoirist—of DeWitt’s manner, with a diligent regard for those around him. He bears himself with personal objectivity. It persists in Sweet Marjoram, with references to himself coming off as a sociological type:

Male and white, straight, employed and able-bodied, I should mind my manners, consider others, and reexamine my attitudes towards “difference.” [page 27, “On Privilege”]


Quietly siding with Harold Bloom’s notion, with respect to literature, of the Western Cannon, Henry entertains the opposing view:

Here is Terry Eagleton: “There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself… ‘Value’ is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations…” [page 27]

But Henry also goes about quietly defending the values of a humanist body of writing by citing and so including Toni Morrison (“A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only ‘universal’ but also ‘race-free’ risks lobotomizing that literature…” [page 28]) and Albert Camus (“Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live: in fact, for the humiliated. [page 28])

The tendency—altruism, evasiveness—belies Henry’s fondness for commonplace language, and his persistent eye for his nuclear others. From “On Appetite”:

Your eyes are bigger than your stomach. Biting off more than you chew. Clean your plate. I binge on wafer-thin Pringles, unable to eat just one. It’s better to eat smaller portions more often than to stuff yourself. Our oldest brother Jack, however, the only naturally thin one in our family, came home for Thanksgiving from his life 2000 miles away. He did the carving. We marveled while he out-ate all of us, three or four portions of turkey, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and even the roasted vegetables. [page 74]

It is one of the foodier-for-thought books I’ve come across recently. Henry wins our regard for settling into this tradition of essay writing, and our admiration for making the genre useful as his own to unlock a lot of needed conversation for our times.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Green Midnight By Stuart Bartow





Green Midnight
By Stuart Bartow
Dos Madres Press
Loveland, Ohio
ISBN: 978-1-948017-12-1
69 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Breeziness in poetry has its advantages. Stuart Bartow draws one into his new book, Green Midnight, with an easy, light touch. Martian cat women, New Age vampires, cannibal Sirens, and quacking ravens open the collection by amusing and baiting the unwary reader as he or she drifts inexorably into the poet’s sublime and deepening hive of nowhere and everywhere.

Bartow’s opening piece coyly mulls over the source of artistic inspiration, his muse, and the tenuousness of that normally one-way line of communication. The poet asks,

Who needs to make
a poem every day
when one has real work to do,
shoveling snow, washing dishes,
drinking? And doesn’t she
have other things to do, like
tend to her other loves,
that mountain in Greece, the wind
at 4 a. m., the Milky Way?

In the last line of this poem, Bartow divulges the unlisted shared phone number of dual petulant muses, the whisperers of love and lyric poetry, and for those, like myself, who often have trouble contacting either of them, it is easily worth the price of the book.

Merging cosmology with biology in a wonderfully crafted villanelle entitled Without the Stars, Bartow looks at life in a pantheistical and hopeful way. He dwells on our deeper universal knowledge that we can and should waken, its causes, and the happiness that often ensues with this conjuration. The piece concludes wonderfully,

Without the stars there’d be no us.

We can watch the stellar gusts,
can rue the meteors we’ve missed,
still not forgetting we are stardust

that somehow makes us know the stars enough,
the knowing enough to conjure bliss.
We know without the stars there would not be us,
all of us made of ancient stardust.

Do Not Open After Dusk is my favorite poem in this collection. It delineates a coffee shop with a magical door into our own imaginations. Not unreasonably, there is a warning sign. Although the entrance into this dusky world offers mere mortals visionary status, it comes with a catch. The door, once used, disappears. Bartow introduces his Twilight Zone in this way,

Of course the sign was about fear
but I always like to open portals
to see dusk, to go out into
space and time between

like William Blake, who,
in sunrise and set,
saw a golden chorus singing.
I, too, have dreamt
of opening that door

to meet something on the other side…

More than a few of Bartow’s poems are about birds. These pieces are chock full of curious detail, often setting up stunning metaphoric constructions. One of the best the poet entitles Carolina Wrens. Consider this detail that the poet uses before setting up (later in the poem) his poetic trap,

They thrive when winters are mild
but heavy snow and cold
can devastate them. They like
woodland thickets, ravines,
rocky slopes covered with brush.
Their eggs, usually five, are white
with brown spots. Rich brown above,
buff or yellow chests, these wrens
have a distinct white line
above and behind the eyes.

In his poem Invisible Bartow deals with the nature of ghosts and then speculates on their psychology. He restates with images Shakespeare’s oft quoted, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” and continues down that path of inquiry. Here is one of the poet’s speculations, the first sentence of which terrifies me,

Perhaps ghosts can view their own lost lives the way actors
Watch movies in which they star, flawed performances
that cannot be changed, long ago released to the world’s
audiences. Maybe through fissures, cracks in time, ghosts
might break a window, turn a clock’s arm, make a foot-
print, but the beauty is in invisibility. It must feel strange
when people walk through you, a brief rush, erotic.

Some poems are just “cool.” Bartow’s Midnight at the 24-Hour Laundromat in Corinth, New York is one such piece. After the reader figures out who the skipper is of this poetically-fueled, cosmic submarine, the poem continues thusly,

Without, the Adirondacks loom,
sonar forces immense around the sub.
The engines of the dryers cruise on
while the washers’ portals sing song
an ocean’s madness. The sub is on chart
through the frozen mountains and beyond
to the infinite sea of stars.

A monk-like world of activity inside of a tree’s womb stirs up a philosophical buzz on perfection and infinity in Bartow’s poem entitled Wild Hive. Single-minded bees, encouraging one another with songs of praise, produce a dynamo of ferocious sweetness. This ancient fable reverberates with measured metaphor and unpredictable menace. Follow the effervescent verbs,

Who conducts their hymns,

Gregorians gone mad, fiercely
composing bee-wine. Their oratory churns

electric, mind of guardians, bristled with stingers.
More than the sky, the wind’s robots,

they concoct ambrosia for the prophets
that is the same gold as their bodies,

fly like grooms into the flowers and wallow
like messengers gone drunk. Then, propelling body

as compass, return to that aerial cathedral,
that clandestine brain, and with an alchemy

of spittle and pollen create combs soaked
in amber, smelt the earth down to its essence

of honey…

It’s morning—about 4 a.m.—as I finish my first read-through of this marvelous, portent-laden collection. The wafts and brief puffs of late night zephyrs have steadied and deepened to gale force, like Bartow’s poems. The curtains flap wildly. Is this applause, or just the perfect background for this review