Red Letter Poem #128

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.  To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

                                                                                                          – Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #128

 

 

“Politics is the art of the possible” – so wrote Otto von Bismarck, who masterminded the unification of Germany in 1871.  In our 21^st century United States, it seems we’re working hard to obliterate both of those ideas – possibility and unity – replacing them with this: politics as the practice of demonizing the other, of making one constituency fear its counterpart through the art of psychological manipulation and bald-faced lies.  All that matters is the achievement of power – even if, as a consequence, the very foundations of our democracy are being rotted away.  This week, we’ve witnessed an appalling example of the depths to which politicians are willing to go: a certain Florida governor (with aspirations to one day occupy the White House) used beleaguered asylum-seekers from Venezuela as pawns in a gesture to score points with his followers.  Clearly the suffering of those human beings was completely inconsequential to him.  While he’s been roundly condemned for this – even by some members of his own party – if the gesture plays with the base, it will certainly be repeated.

 

Channeling the spirit of Walt Whitman, Indran Amirthanayagam’s poems try to inspire readers with a sense of new possibility, a more open-hearted and humanist conception of how the disparate energies of our troubled democracy can once again be united.  An award-winning poet, essayist, translator, publisher, and diplomat, Indran was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, but also spent his formative years in London and Honolulu.  He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole, making him a living example of the way language can construct bridges between people and diverse experiences.  “The Return” is taken from his just-published collection Ten Thousand Steps Against The Tyrant (Broadstone Books.)  While many of the poems unapologetically celebrate progressive politics, what is clear throughout is his vision that community and justice must trump political gain.  When I asked him about the opening image of this poem, Indran explained to me his “partner in poetry, Sara Cahill Marron, is also a lawyer. When Ruth Bader Ginsberg died, Sara went to the steps of the Supreme Court and left her legal pencil as an offering.”  Words matter – and, when wielded with skill and conviction, they possess enormous power. “Ginsberg worked to advance rights for women, for minorities, for all of us. She fought to make our democracy more fitting, more expansive, closer to the ideals that motivated the Founders of the Republic.”   

 

In his poetic manifesto, “Starting from Paumanok” – appearing in his seminal Leaves of Grass – the bard wrote: “Take my leaves America, take them South and take them North,/ Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own off-spring,/ Surround them East and West, for they would surround you…”.   Indran, too, sings of those marvelous possibilities, hoping we might once again embrace what this democracy first engendered and hungers for still.

 

 

 

The Return

 

                                   

The pencil is magic––leaving it in offering on steps of the Court, then the call

from the DA's office for a second interview. There is a hand beyond, outside,

inside at all times circulating, sweeping up worshippers who have given

the spirit his and her due, who have understood that one knows the world

through heart and head, eyes, breath, and with none of these but learned

faith, trusting the call out of the blue, ready to rise, pick up the phone and recite

the right words, healing words, words that will bring children bawling

and smiling into the world, that will give the wronged the chance to escape

the unjust, that will break down the trickery of the desperate purveyors

of privilege. This is the New Deal again, the throwing out of Coolidge,

Ms. Smith going to Washington, returning now to Paumanok to assure that

Walt Whitman's words will be spoken at this time that Jack Hirschman calls

the American Revolution, to which I add, humbly and in the eyes of God,

the re-revolving rolling raising goose hairs and kissing them without the knife,

this vegetarian, wine-free yet wine-respectful non-American, worldwide electric

spinning dial whirling, whirling from Paumanok to Washington to Frisco Bay,

light as a feather rolling on wind streams into my heart and yours. I too

am walking now and about to run. Do you see me light and hope-filled

grateful that the word is in good hands and coming back to the island

from where it walked abroad, coming back strong?

 

 

                         ––Indran Amirthanayagam

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

* Two of our partner sites will continue re-posting each Red Letter weekly: the YourArlington news blog

https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/3184-redletter-090222

 

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers

 



Rebecca Burke, ed. In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers. Stillhouse Press. 258pp.

Reviewed by Ruth Hoberman




Curb cuts, kneeling buses, closed captions, and audible walk lights were a start. But disability rights activists are now asking for more: representation. This means representation in positions of power as well as representations in the media that they have themselves created. “Growing up, I never read a book with a main character like me written by a disabled author,” Rebecca Burke writes at the start of In Between Spaces, an anthology of work by thirty-three writers who identify as disabled. In solidarity with other underrepresented populations, Burke insists that publishing—long dominated by its “cisgender, heteronormative, ableist, and white supremacist history”—must make room for more diverse voices. In Between Spaces addresses ableism in particular: the assumption that bodies and minds differing from social norms or notions of health are defined solely by that difference, and that they therefore need “fixing.” Look elsewhere, these writers collectively suggest—at infrastructure, attitudes, and institutions—for what needs fixing.

Burke and her fellow editorial board members at Stillhouse Press—a student- and alumni-run press affiliated with George Mason University—have sought out work arising from the spaces “in-between traditional diagnostic criteria and textbook definitions, where lived experience fills the gaps in our understanding.” Individual pieces are true to this aim: fiction blurs with nonfiction, poetry with prose; poems push the boundaries of form and genre. There are no straightforward narratives of diagnosis, treatment, and cure. Instead we get immersion in the minds of interesting, carefully individualized people.

What exactly is “wrong” with the narrator of “Mornings,” a nonfiction piece by Rhea Dhanbhoora, which opens the book? What struck me as I read was how much I wanted to be told and how thoroughly my desire was rebuffed. The narrator has problems with her legs. “But you’re not disabled,” people tell her. “Disabled is—like really disabled.” But her legs “just hang there limp, loose, on fire.” My impulse was to impose a narrative on her experience, one where the tension comes from sickness and the happy ending means cure. Her friends tell her, “you’re not disabled—everyone has back problems.” But that urge to deny or fix someone else’s reality is one of the problems this anthology seeks to expose and counteract.

Many pieces point out the limitations of medical terms. Poems like “Health History,”“Galvanic Skin Test Response,” “Turner syndrome,” and “Bipolar II” undercut and complicate diagnostic labels. Kaleigh O’Keefe’s “Diagnostic Laparoscopy” echoes a medical textbook with its headings and bullet points:




I. What will the surgeon find inside me?

 . blood and muscle

  . inflammation

   .scar tissue (to be expected)

  .scar tissue (that wasn’t expected)

  .a box of Kleenex




The list mingles likely things (“scar tissue”) with unlikely (“maybe that tampon I still don’t know if I lost on the dance floor or if it got sucked into the black hole behind my cervix seven years ago when I got too drunk at that lesbian music festival”). There’s a hint of rage in some of the imagined findings: “an old stone wall creeping through my guts” or “a bomb”. We learn so much about this person through her fantasies that what the surgeon does finally find— endometriosis—feels laughably inadequate.

Lili Sarayrah’s “pain(t)—by—number,” a wry nonfictional account of back pain, complicates the infamous 1-10 pain scale with a paint-by-number set. Immobilized by pain and the pandemic, Sarayrah seeks distraction in her paint set but finds instead just another facet of her bodily condition: “If my pain were a color, it would be like paint No. 19, a shade of orange like those traffic cones marking caution ahead.” The pain scale, of course, frustrates with its narrow range of options; so, too, does the world’s desire to label who she is: “I feel in-between a lot of the time. Specifically in-between cultures, jobs, and diagnoses.” Sarayrah’s essay ends tentatively, inconclusively: there is no definitive triumph, only “acceptance of the imperfection.” And most important is her own incalculability as a human self: “I put away my pain(t) and when we film my first wobbly steps, no one’s counting.”

No one’s counting because experience isn’t reducible to numerical formulae. That lovely ending made me think of Whitman’s “When Last I heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” in which the speaker, “unaccountable,” gets impatient with the lecture and wanders out alone to look “in perfect silence at the stars.” The people in these poems, essays, and stories are all insistently unaccountable: individuals conveying what it feels like to live inside a particular body or mind at a particular time and place.

Resistance to categories means also resistance to conventional endings. Wendy Elizabeth Wallace offers the reader alternative plot options as she narrates “Your Very Own Low-Vision Dating Adventure,” and Teresa Milbrodt, in “Cyclops Notes,” a fragmented account of visual impairment, writes, “Life means continually revising what is normal, embracing your tenuousness, wondering if the twinge in your elbow is temporary or permanent. Nobody is ever out of the woods. Life is all about the woods.”

There are many more writers worth mentioning than I can include here. But I’ll conclude with Latif Askia Ba, whose four extraordinary poems depict life inside a body with “crooked glowing limbs.” “On Gospel (a Meander)” is particularly innovative and powerful. Aligned on the page’s left margin is an account of “this body like an exile,/like a wound dumb luck carved into my neurons,/a wound only words can pass through.” Interspersed is an account of listening to “Aretha’s gospel/over and over”—an account aligned along the right margin. “Only the gospel can remedy/this confusion,” we learn: the confusion of a mind where words from “Plato’s Republic/and the Pali Canon collide with verses/of Patwah.” The remedy: “She knows/one must bend to testify.”

Ba’s “Houses,” the book’s penultimate piece, epitomizes the anthology’s ability to familiarize us with unfamiliar voices even as it defamiliarizes the familiar:

Even houses are strange.

They live in you.

They’re shaped of corners and doorways,

parts of apartments and crammed lodgings—

private as a pair of testicles.

I thought of Philip Larkin’s “Home is So Sad,” but his houses are tame, “Shaped to the comfort of the last to go.” For Ba,

Houses cut you open:

a jagged wood,

a very bad word,

a question.

And when houses die, they leave behind an “inheritance” that captures the incongruities and beauties of this anthology: “a dying washing machine, a garden devoured by winter,/an old CPU, a bird unnamed by man.”

Tracy Flick Can’t Win by Tom Perrotta

Tracy Flick Can’t Win by Tom Perrotta. Scribner, New York, 2022. 257 pages. $27.00.

Book review by Ed Meek

Tom Perrotta is one of the best satirists writing fiction today. His new book is a sequel to the very funny novel Election. The main character of both novels is Tracy Flick. In Election, she is a high school overachiever running for President of her class. She is the type of student everyone hated in high school—always knew the answer, hand up first in class, front row student and leader of half a dozen high school clubs. Tracy is played to perfection in the movie version of the novel by Reese Witherspoon (although the novel is funnier than the movie). In our me-too era, the movie feels a little out of date with the main character involved in a consensual affair with her English teacher. Is there such a thing as a consensual affair between a student and a teacher today? The fact that my next-door neighbor married his junior high math teacher just doesn’t compute anymore (they did wait until he graduated).

Well aware of the fraught atmosphere of today’s political correctness, Perrotta has recreated Tracy as a sympathetic woman whose dreams of becoming the first female President were dashed when she had to leave law school to take care of her sick mother. Now, a single mom and the Assistant Principal at the high school she graduated from, she just wants to be Principal. Is that too much to ask?

A rich member of the school board, Kyle Dorfman, who made his fortune with an app called Barky. Barky has a “Love Bank. If you did a nice thing for Barky, gave him a biscuit or a bath or a bone, you would earn Gratitude Hearts—they would float up from the dog’s head and deposit themselves in a treasure chest—and you could use those hearts as currency.” Kyle has decided to create a hall of fame in the high school that will be public relations for the school and for him.

Meanwhile, the principal, Jack Weede, is retiring to take his wife, who is a cancer survivor, on the cross-country trip of her dreams. Jack was involved for years with one of the secretaries at the school who is known as Front Desk Diane but he ended the affair when his wife got cancer and now, he is ready to retire and make his wife happy.

At first, Tracy seems to be a shoo-in for the principal position, but things get complicated when she signs up as a member of the committee choosing who will go into the hall of fame. A heavy favorite for induction is Vito Falcone, a quarterback who was a star at the high school and made it to the NFL. Maybe the high school needs a revitalized football program with Vito’s former coach winning coach to lead the school in a new direction rather than Tracy Flick.

Vito has his own challenges. Football left him with concussions that cause him to lose his temper and hit his wife. As a result, he’s living in an apartment by himself and trying to atone for his transgression.

It is a little harder to write satire in 2022 than it was twenty years ago. In Tracy Flick Can’t Win, it is not just a coincidence that those who commit transgressions are all males. Perrotta could have followed Tracy into politics but instead he has decided to make her into a single mom we root for. Perrotta sacrifices humor for realism. If you’re so inclined, I’d encourage you to read or reread Election before picking up Tracy Flick Can’t Win. Humor is partly based on violating taboos, but what is acceptable to audiences today is not the same as what was funny twenty years ago. In any case, both of these books make great summer reading.

Doug Holder interviews poet Mike Ansara

     

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKl1ghw27lc      ( Click on to play)   We talked about Ansara's new book of poetry "What Remains."

Scene: From The Movie Giant by Tino Villanueva

Review by Paul Steven Stone: Scene: From The Movie Giant by Tino Villanueva



It's not very often that a cultural experience tears open the veneer one has unknowingly grown over one's vulnerabilities and cultural wounds, but Scene From The Movie Giant tells the tale of one such upheaval wrought upon the life and self-examination of a boy almost grown into manhood. Tino Villanueva was 14 years old when he sat in the darkness of a Texas movie theater watching the movie Giant. What he experienced was far more than a movie; call it a cultural earthquake, as he witnessed anti-Mexican racism supposedly offered to highlight and counter its racist cruelties, but still a painful dose of medicine for a boy struggling to understand his own identity in a bicultural community. Scene from the Movie Giant is Villanueva's exquisite portrayal of the havoc that viewing experience wrought in his life and growing understanding of the world around him. As he says in his artful poetry, "By now the day was fading into twilight/and I beginning/not to cast a shadow where I had always been/when I saw/suddenly a boy alone/who had to tear to prove he was…/Something from the movie screen had/dropped into his life, his small shield of faith/no longer with him." Words that cut deep into the human condition. A gem worth reading more than once.

Red Letter Poem #127

  

Dear Readers, for only the second time in the two-and-a half years of the Red Letter project, I’ll have to skip a week.  I’ll be on a writing retreat to a little island off of New Hampshire where WIFI is iffy at best.  I will be making my own red letter days there – and I trust you will the same.  See you again on 9/23.

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.  To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

                                                                                                          – Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #127

 

 

It’s at the heart of every magician’s trick: misdirection – distracting the audience with some feint, some attention-grabbing gesture so that, while their minds are elsewhere, the ‘feat of magic’ can suddenly take place.  It’s an act of self-conscious deception designed to provoke wonder in the onlooker.  Ta-da!  Cue the applause and the appreciative ooh’s and ah’s!

 

Is that what’s taking place here, in this new poem from Miriam Levine?  Not quite.  She begins by following her mind’s attention as it wends its way into the world, noticing bits of ordinary beauty (darting birds, blue-veiled Mt. Monadnock) and elements of the modern urban landscape (the half-way house, the cars struggling uphill.)  And suddenly, the startling news – and nothing seems quite the same after that.  While her carefully-observed images lead us onward, we’re more than a little shocked when, out of nowhere, the great 19^th century poet of Amherst steps from behind the scrim; and then a closing couplet materializes that is both beautiful and haunting. 

 

The difference between the magician’s legerdemain and the poet’s conjuring: I think the poet is both performer and audience.  I don’t think Miriam set out to lay a trap for our hearts but, lured on by her own exploring consciousness, was herself caught off-guard.  Was she, too, quietly stunned by where those flitting birds eventually settled down – as we were?  The magic within the contemporary poem is the daring (or unbridled curiosity? or intuitive skill?) that allows the writer to travel – not to what she thought, at the outset, was her intended destination, but where the poem (with a mind of its own) was leading her all along.  Or maybe I’m wrong, and these were a set of artful moves, designed to unsettle and surprise.  That, too, is the great pleasure in such a performance: we can reread a poem again and again and, each time, try to see how the trick was done – or to simply sit back and enjoy what appears out of that sudden flash of light and puff of smoke. 

 

Making a return appearance to the Red Letters, Miriam is that sort of bracing poet that seems to welcome her readers into the substance of her days, trusting that we will savor both the kinship to our own experience as well as moments extending beyond our reach.  In that manner, her work reminds me of Ruth Stone’s – another poet whose writing I prize.  The author of five poetry collections – the most recent being Saving Daylight – as well as a novel and a memoir, Miriam was Arlington’s first Poet Laureate, but now divides her time between New Hampshire and Florida.

 

 

 

Watching Birds

                                   

Birds flit low in early morning across School Street

past the half-way house for released convicts

 

as a lone car strains up the steep hill

toward Monadnock in the blue distance.

 

And now another car, electric, soundless,

empty except for the obscured driver.

 

The clear, clean light and scent of lilacs

make the fast-disappearing birds so

 

piercing now.  Another friend is dead!

He who was supposed to outlive us all.

 

I think of the verve and flash of robins Dickinson

watched from the edge of her garden,

 

breathing in the spice of lilacs while the morning

sun found a cold space in her and filled it.

 

 

              ––Miriam Levine

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

* Two of our partner sites will continue re-posting each Red Letter weekly: the YourArlington news blog

https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/3184-redletter-090222

 

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

Sleeping In The Dead Girl's Room by Cynthia Bargar

 

I had the chance to catch up Cynthia Bargar and communicate with her about her new collection of poetry "Sleeping in the Dead Girl's Room."   This is a challenging work about a challenging subject-- mental illness. Having worked in the field of mental health for many years I have an acute interest in this book.

Your new poetry collection " Sleeping in the Dead Girl's Room," takes place at Glenside psychiatric facility where you were a patient. I worked for 37 years at McLean Hospital and for the most part patient care was good. But your poetry deals with some traumatic experiences that you had while in that institution. I guess the saying goes, " Great pain brings great art.." Does this speak to you?

Glenside Hospital was not a “therapeutic environment” for me. I was lucky that the two staff members I met on intake, Winston and Sterling, were good to me. They tried to show me the ropes and keep me out of trouble. They were a little older than me, sharp and funny, and I have always considered them my guides through that locked ward experience. Despite this connection, I wasn’t safe at Glenside. In my poem, “WATER CURE”, I write of being raped by a staff person when I was granted a single room. When I was discharged the chief (and perhaps only) psychiatrist told me “you’ll be in and out of places like this for the rest of your life”.

I didn’t see this period as one of great pain. It was an adventure, capped by a visitation from my aunt, the one who presumably died by suicide when my mother was pregnant with me and for whom I am named. She spoke to me in an incomprehensible language, but there was a transmission. Only when I started writing the poems that became this book, did I remember her vaporish visit to Glenside. And then it took some years to see what that was about: haunting, entanglement. If you’re saying that my book is “great art”, thank you. I don’t know if it’s great pain that propels artistic endeavors. For me, it’s obsession. I can never let go of that drug-fueled (Haldol) time at Glenside. And I was desperate to know what happened to my aunt and if being given her name and her bedroom and living in the house where she died for my first five years had seeded the haunting. I’m grateful to my poems for braiding this all together and then helping me to begin to untangle the braid.

I know Sylvia Plath was referenced in the collection. Of course, Plath met her end by placing her head in an oven. A lot has been said about the romantic notions of the "crazy" poet. Did this influence you at all? Was Plath a sort of mentor?

I first fell in love with Sylvia Plath as a depressed teenager reading The Bell Jar. I identified with the protagonist, Esther Greenwood, many of whose struggles seemed to mirror my own. Sylvia Plath lived in Winthrop, MA, for six of her childhood years. I was born in Winthrop and my early childhood was spent there. My aunt was three years older than her, and in my poem, “MY AUNT TALKS TO SYLVIA PLATH” I imagine them meeting in an afterlife. When I started writing poems I didn’t have any connection to the idea of the “crazy” poet and I don’t connect with nor have I been influenced by that notion. I came to Plath through her novel, way before I wrote or read poems. When I did discover her poetry I was ecstatic.

You have a Jewish background. How does the culture, your family influence you and your writing?

In Jewish families it’s very common to name children after deceased relatives. I think there was an expectation that my parents would name me for my aunt. Oftentimes, the English version of the

name, as opposed to the Hebrew, uses the first letter of the deceased’s name. So I could have been a Carol or a Claire and that would have satisfied the tradition. But I was given my aunt’s first, middle, and last names: Cynthia May Bargar. My poem “MIDRASH ON NAMING” explores Jewish naming and the potential problems associated with naming a child after someone who died a violent death or by suicide, misfortune (dormant until stirred)/ will find the child.

I’m aware that keeping secrets within the family is not exclusively a Jewish phenomenon, but for some reason I do attribute the particular kind of unwillingness to speak about my aunt and the circumstances of her death to our being Jewish in what was as a hostile Christian environment/country. Assuming she died by suicide, I think the shame associated with that act and the fear of further stigmatization contributed to the silence.

Being Jewish — culture, family — has influenced all aspects of my life, including my writing. Some of my relatives spoke Yiddish and had limited fluency in English. The intonations of the Yiddish language probably had an influence on my writing.

The book is dedicated " For all the women and girls who stories were buried with them." By writing this book, unearthing your story, did you have a catharsis of sorts—a sort of clearing out of the repressed demons?

I wasn’t able to fully excavate my aunt’s story, which certainly was buried with her. But it no longer seems pressing to know exactly what was going on with her and exactly how she died. I’m okay with the not knowing. During the writing of the poems, I was immersed in the making and not the feelings. But once the book was published and I starting reading the poems to friends, family, and strangers, there was a shift in consciousness and I no longer felt haunted. I also developed compassion for my father, whose sister the other Cynthia was. We had a rocky relationship when he was alive, and because I was kept in the dark about the family tragedy, I didn’t have a way in, couldn’t understand what made him tick. I have come to see the poems as my way of making amends to him for judging him harshly.

I was interested in your fractured sense of self that you had under the spell of manic depression. Was this some sort of coping mechanism?

I think the "fractured sense of self" had to do with being haunted by the dead Cynthia, sometimes being confused by who was who, and often having to be differentiated (each of my grandparents referred to her as "my Cindy"). I absorbed much gloominess and grief in the house and family that may have fractured my sense of self. This fracturing was not just when I was in the throes of depression or mania, it was most of the time. It wasn’t a coping mechanism. On the contrary, it made it often impossible to cope.

You often use the pronouns "You" and "I" in reference to your late aunt and yourself. You also used "the She" to refer to your aunt. Why did you do this? Is this a way to portray your confused mental state—the blurred lines between you both? Did you want to have the reader as confused as your younger self?

Regarding the pronouns, I don’t know why I did what I did. I wrote the first poem in the book, “CREATIVE NONFICTION” last, after Lily had accepted the manuscript. As I was writing it, “the

She” presented itself and I liked it, so I went with it. The pronouns for me and my aunt are slippery because the line between us was sometimes blurry. The slip and blur are due to my being haunted and how mysterious that was.

I didn’t intend to confuse the reader and when I started distinguishing between the she who is not me, and the she who is me, in my mind it was a clarifying gesture. If readers are confused, that’s okay. I hope they enter my sphere and just go with it.

Why should we read your book?

I wouldn’t say anybody should read my book. I have heard from many readers who were moved by it. I think it resonates with readers because it illuminates some things about family secrets, memory and post-memory, and the human condition that many of us have experienced in very particular and mysterious ways. Even if their circumstances are different from mine, readers have told me they identify.

/ k l a ʊ d z / Mary Buchinger

 

 / k l a ʊ d z /

Mary Buchinger

Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021

25 pages ; $12

ISBN 978-1-7375043-7-5

Reviewed by David P. Miller

The title of Mary Buchinger’s chapbook is not Clouds. Rather, it’s “clouds” in the International Phonetic Alphabet. What’s the difference, you ask? Isn’t the word as it appears the same as the word pronounced? Only if we assume that what we see is the same as what we picture to ourselves. What does an upper-case block letter “a’” have in common with its lower-case script cousin? Apart from the fact that they may represent the same speech sound, not much that meets the eye. (Not to mention what a Fraktur letter would present.)

Clouds have always fascinated, soothed, or terrified us. Cooled water vapor, condensed on nuclei of dust, pollen, or smoke, ephemeral entities. A web search for “cloud metaphors” retrieves what you might expect: pillows, sheep, marshmallows, the place online where you store passwords. See that profile in the sky? It looks just like the Old Man of the Mountain. But the Old Man finally crumbled, and look, that profile in the air is dissolving. It’s morphing into a sail, maybe a kite.

/ k l a ʊ d z / represents these sky phenomena with twenty different, unexpected collective nouns: a “mewl” of clouds, for example, an “unravel” or a “ligament” of clouds. Those poem titles are, exactly:

/ myul / as in “a mewl of clouds”

/ ʌnˈræv əl / as in “an unravel of clouds”

/ ˈlɪg ə mənt / as in “a ligament of clouds”

We readers get a quick assist this way with the (dis-)connection between sound and designation. But we’re also tossed right into each poem’s puzzle: what is a ligament of clouds? How is an always-shifting group of water molecules a ˌtær ənˈtɛl ə, even for a moment? (Tarantella.)

These poems are visual. Each uses the resources of the page – white space, margins, lineation – uniquely. I’m not sure these are concrete poems overall, though a few are shape poems. I haven’t seen a pocket-shaped cloud in the sky, but there’s “a pocket of clouds” on that page (ˈpɒk ɪt). It would be a wonder to see “a hive of clouds” (haɪv) from my front porch, as it’s presented here.

Buchinger’s klaʊdz aren’t composed of water vapor, of course, but text. The poems are meditations on cloud-likenesses associated with their collective nouns. The “flagellation” of clouds thrashes its tight connections:

flung; Fahrenheit;

cloistered; caught;

muddled immolation;

dry scarlet indraw;

de-berried vines;

ponderous drape;

wracked; varicose; [ … ]

The “tarantella” twists through the center of the page, beginning with “midnight & carmine; / click & grind; / Dionysius & pals / (no pall); / piped hysteria; / spidery; unpopped / herky-jerky- / stomp-stomp;” Notice the semicolons: they pervade every poem. There are commas, ampersands, parentheses, and slashes, but the semicolon – that often-derided punctuation mark between comma and full stop (of which there are none here) – dominates. Its syntactic half-linkage, which almost but not quite joins clauses, is the image of forces that give shape to clouds even as they already give way. (Let’s drop the blanket prohibitions of language resources: yes to semicolons, yes to adverbs, yes to your love-to-hate.)

Once into the progress through / k l a ʊ d z /, look back and recall that the opening poem isn’t a cloud. Titled “derivation / ˌder·əˈveɪ·ʃən /:” it suggests the ground, both earthly and inspired, from which condensed water vapor and images arise alike:

a daily ration; whence cometh;

watershed; meadow & muck;

begotten not made; [ … ]

Its final line summons the about-to-be-spoken, nearly-created: “whereas; Genesis; & etc.” It’s hard to imagine a more economical introduction to everything that follows: grimalkin, swift, braid, lantern, trans …