Parts of Everything in Days & Days, Michael Dickman’s new book of poetry

Parts of Everything in Days& Days, Michael Dickman’s new book of poetry

article by Michael Steffen

With the haystack of 2019 comes the needle of Michael Dickman’s fourth book of poems,

Days & Days, a renewal, extension and honing of the poet’s vision and craft quietly polarized,

as Franz Wright recognized, with “utmost gravity as well as a kind of cosmic wit.” Over again the poems’ speaker widens our look with surprising combinations salted with colloquial signatures—“shuvit in the gloxinia on the first try” (“Butterfly Days,” page 3).

While the whole assemblage of the book would seem to stand every traditional notion about poetry, language and sense on its head—which in itself isn’t new or radical in poetry—deeply familiar notes are sounded, beginning with the title and its evocation of a pastoral awareness—

I wanted to say “celebration”—of time, fulfilled by a preoccupation in the poems with nature, urban or suburban albeit, with trees and shrubs, flowers, (pieces of) grass, butterflies and butterflies, crape myrtles, pear blossoms, deer pellets, tea and test roses, fringed tulips, something dull in the bushes is that a rabbit?…

A normal juxtaposition of terms expects Days to be followed by & Nights. James Merrill had

a book of poems with that title. And so Days & Days strikes us also with a Kafkaesque sense of the technological day we live in and cannot turn off.

I picked up everything in the house & set it all back down just to

the left of the clicker (“Lakes Rivers Streams,” page 118)

If more classically it is Hesiod’s Works & Days we are just missing here, the title Days & Days becomes more burdened and ominous, especially in Dickman’s portrayal of time’s lapses.

These conditions somewhat give rise to and affirm Dickman’s alterity, especially his mincing and fizzling of our principle sources and signs:

Some sun above the day

a squiggly light that waits round or

scribbles over

a school of Radio Cabs

& bubble letters

A doe

A deer

A female deer

Traffic moves in

the leaves & then stops

to say hello (“Scribble,” page 9)

The overall arrangement of the book, meanwhile, reveals structuring, with four poems in the first section titled “The Poem Said,” a theme of roses, actual or otherwise, central to the second section (ROSE PARADE), and the third part of the book set in a long poem Dickman calls “Lakes Rivers Streams,” with a nod to John Ashbery The long poem coheres attentively though not laboriously by way of anaphor, repetitions of “The day” personified as subject, the odd use of “ditto” here and there, and an almost robo-linguistic reprising of “For instance.”

Generally, Dickman’s is language poetry, with an insistence on the preservation of the naïve spirit of creativeness, and on the necessary failure of correspondence between sign and thing, lest the correlative archons and tyranny of the day win us over.

I would go there right now

folded up in the silence of a maple tree in the front yard

A tiara

if I could get one leaf right

& sleep in air (“The Poem Said,” page 10)

Where meaning seems insistently to elude us, it sneaks back up on us…almost everywhere. To humanize the traffic in that last strophe with “& then stops/to say hello” is a keen deflation of the poet’s method and terms. It is a stroke of humor, humility and self-awareness, a sudden grin of friendliness from the alien and fugitive procedure and manner of Dickman’s elsewhere noted austerity.

From the onset of the collection, we know our ventures of personality are not made to a facile welcome on the horizon, with—

something else

more difficult to describe

a dustup

around a brown & orange aura

or Lorca’s flowers

The page under its poem’s heading “Butterfly Days” begins in paradox already with reference to an ending: “icing on a cake”—however associated with the residual or sticky, ceremonial, artificial. Icing. Beginning ending. Ending beginning. It is as odd and yet apt this book of copious near-handed wonders (“Neighbor dogs are kind & hunt balls to death”) should conclude with an embodied image of our foremost bearings of first things,

In the morning the kids come running down the stairs (“LRS,” page 121).

Days & Days

poems by Michael Dickman

is published by Alfred A. Knopf

ISBN 9780525655473 (hardcover)

available for $27.00

A Word For It, poems by Warren Slesinger

A Word For It, poems by Warren Slesinger

Dos Madres Press. 50 pages. $16.00

Review by ED MEEK

One way to consider poetry is as an attempt at exactness of expression. It consists of le mot juste as the French call it when it captures a thought or feeling. “This is the hour of lead,” says Emily naming the feeling that follows a death or “great pain.” Dylan Thomas reminiscing about his childhood says, “Time held me green and dying/ Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” Warren Slesinger takes the idea of poetry as a means of defining words and feelings and runs with it. This slim volume has twenty-six poems arranged in alphabetical order (of course). Each poem begins with what sounds like a dictionary definition expressing form or function.

Glass (glass) n-es 1. A miracle that occurs

in the mineral world when a white hot mass

of silicates, oxides and potash fuses to form

a bright and brittle substance that is clarity

itself: a thin, square, rigid pane of glass

Slesinger goes through four definitions concluding with an example:

… 5. An object

made wholly of glass; hence, its’ contents:

Before he sipped the bubbles of champagne,

he raised his glass: “To Life!”

So, although the poems seem like dictionary definitions, the lines are arranged as a poem with attention to sound and rhythm and there’s a leap, as Robert Bly would say, to something insightful and often surprising at the end of the poem. You may have noticed the apostrophe after the s in the word “its.” There are a number of those in the book along with quite a few typos: a K missing from Knowledge, an e left off of secrete, an r missing from sandpiper. There should either be a comma or a hyphen between white and hot in the above poem. Proofreading is going the way of the dodo.

Some of the poems are self-contained and funny like this one called “Shirt.”

Shirt (sh.irt) n-s 1. An

article of clothing with

a buttoned frontal

opening, two sleeves,

a collar and a tail for

tucking into the trousers

thereby covering the

buttocks and the genitals.

2. One’s most prized

possessions. Self-

composure when exposed

to risk or injury: keep

your shirt on.

One’s most prized possessions indeed. One can also find comments on language in a number of poems. “Letter” begins with “a form of written expression, brings in a reference to Maupassant, goes on to “love letter” and ends with Letters … Literature in general. B. Learning and/knowledge esp. of literature: “In truth, / I prefer a pretty woman to all the arts/and letters.” That’s a paraphrase of a comment by Maupassant who said: “I prefer a pretty woman to all the arts.”

A few poems make political statements. It appears that the United States has finally woken up (or is woke) to the notion that poetry can be political. This poem is called “Vapor.” It succinctly captures the awful nature of the current state of warfare.

Vapor (vay.por) n-s 1. Something

in the air: a mixture of suspended matter

that makes it difficult to see down the street

in Baghdad. 2. A mist with a man in it.

Vaporize: (vay.por.ize) v. 1. Only

to convert into a vapor with the heat

of a high explosive. 2. To detonate

a mess of manhood high-strung on hate.

Vaporous (vay.por.us) adj. 1. What

is collecting in a cloud of Middle-Eastern

malice. 2. Rising from a blast of body

parts on the ground.

Many literary magazines today are obsessed with experimental hybrid forms that are often just a mash up of poetry and prose. New rule: art must evidence some skill in order to be considered good art. Slesinger’s approach succeeds at being experimental. Well worth a read. Just don’t pay any attention to those typos.

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO A film by Raoul Peck

James Baldwin

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO

A film by Raoul Peck

From the writings of James Baldwin

Cast: Samuel L. Jackson

93 minutes

Vintage Trade Paperback

Edited by Raoul Peck

IBSN 980-0-525-434696-6

eBook 978-0-525-434471-9

Review by Wendell Smith

I Am Not Your Negro is a challenge to our liberal certainties that we are not racist; it questions all our claims that we are “colorblind.” In answer to those questions I must admit that I have been tardy in looking at my own denials; I was in my 70’s before I began using “slave labor camp” rather than “plantation” to describe the birthplace of my mother’s maternal grandmother. Recently I had to listen to an otherwise right-thinking friend claim Andrew Jackson was despised by some of his right-thinking contemporaries because he did not treat his slaves well. Well, if this right-thinker of our times could still think that it was possible to treat slaves well, rather than only less sadistically, and, if (as that example and this film demonstrate) less sadistically is still a measure of virtue for some of us, we have a long way to evolve in our ethics and understanding.  I hope you too will find that I Am Not Your Negro facilitates that evolution.

If we are going to survive these times with our souls intact we must be willing to change our makeup. Our changes must be more than cosmetic and, as the soul is written on the visage, we will need mirrors to assess our progress. While I can't tell you where we will find those future mirrors, I can tell you where to find a current one that tells us where we are and why we must to begin to change. That mirror is the documentary I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin, edited and directed by Raoul Peck, and narrated by Samuel Jackson.  

May I suggest that in our current reality, which has Orwell’s books flying off shelves, that Baldwin is the writer we should turn to. He tells us clearly what we need to know about ourselves and our betrayals.  No harm in cheering the soaring sales of Orwell but I don’t think we should be satisfied until we see, as evidence that we are willing to face the truths with which he confronts us,  James’ books taking wing along with George’s classics.

My one frustration watching I Am Not Your Negro was relieved with my discovery that it is also available in a Vintage Paperback. Often during the movie I would want to reach out and grab what Baldwin was saying only to have him continue with such eloquence that I immediately would say, “No, that's what I want to hold onto.” If I had known the paperback existed I would have relaxed knowing I could soon have all his words to savor at my leisure. One of the earliest of these passages that caught my attention was his praise for an early influence Orilla Miller, or as he referred to her, Bill:

I had been taken in hand by a young white

schoolteacher named Bill Miller,

a beautiful woman

very important to me.

She gave me books to read and talked to me

about the books,

and about the world:

about Ethiopia,

and Italy,

and the German Third Reich;

and took me to see plays and films, to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a 10-year-old boy

It is certainly because of Bill Miller,

who arrived in my terrifying life so soon,

thatI never really managed to hate white people.

Though, God knows,

I have often wished to murder more than one or two.

Therefore, I began to suspect that white people

did not act as they did because they were white

but for some other reason.

That passage in the film is an excerpt edited from chapter 1 of The Devil Finds Work. It is presented in the paperback as free verse, which I have copied here, because that form reveals the poetry that empowers Baldwin's prose.

Reading and rereading his words I am often brought up short and must stop to ponder them. Watching the film you are moved from one instinctive agreement: yes; to the next, oh, yes; to the next Oh! Yes! But, while with these yesses we accept the documentary’s thesis, the speed with which we are carried forward in the visual media is too rapid to permit the pleasure, which the book allows us, time for contemplation.

One of the things, which this documentary helps us, as whites, to do, is to admit that, when it comes to the reality of the African-American experience, we don't know squat and, therefore, we need a witness we can trust. Baldwin is that witness. I Am Not Your Negro is a narrative of Baldwin’s witness to the lives of his friends, Medgar Evers, Malcom X and Martin Luther King; and his reactions to their assassinations. He receives the news of each death in circumstances that any of us would consider comfortably normal even gentrified, however, while in I Am Not Your Negro his circumstances are unavoidably violated by the racism at the root of the assassinations, we may pretend that our circumstances are not.

I Am Not Your Negro takes up his observations of these three friends in the chronologic order of their deaths. While speaking of the first of these, Medgar Evers, he tells us about bearing witness; it is because of how he tells us, we will trust him. He is travelling in rural Mississippi with Evers:

I was terribly frightened,

but perhaps that "field trip" will help us define

what I mean by the word "witness."

I was to discover that the line which separates

a witness from an actor is a very thin line indeed;

nevertheless, the line is real.

I was not, for example, a Black Muslim,

in the same way, though for different reasons,

that I never became a Black Panther:

because I did not believe that

all white people were devils,

and I did not want

young black people to believe that.

I was not a member of any Christian congregation

because I knew that they had not heard

and did not live by the commandment

"love one another as I love you,"

and I was not a member of the NAACP

because in the north, where I grew up

the NAACP was fatally entangled

with black class distinctions,

are allusions of the same,

which repelled a shoeshine boy like me.

Baldwin tells what he is going to tell us; he tells us; he tells us what he has told us and then he tells us again. Through all that repetition of such a tired story his words remain fresh; he has a genius so astonishing that you must conclude it is some cosmic consciousness trying to capture our attention through him and tell us the truth about ourselves. Sometimes this truth is expressed at some length:

For a very long time, America prospered:

this prosperity cost millions of people their lives.

Now, not even the people who are the most

spectacular recipients of the benefits of this

prosperity are able to endure these benefits:

they can neither understand them

nor do without them.

Above all, they cannot imagine the price paid

by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life,

and so they cannot afford to know

why the victims are revolting.

This is a formula for a nation's or a kingdom's

This is a formula for a nation's or a kingdom's 

decline for no kingdom can maintain 

itself by force alone.

Force does not work the way

it'itss advocates think in fact it does.

It does not, for example, revealed to the victim

the strength of the adversary.

On the contrary, it reveals the weakness,

even the panic of the adversary

and this revelation invests the victim with patience. 

and sometimes briefly:

The story of the Negro in America 

is the story of America.

It is not a pretty story.

One of the final pages of the book is dominated by a photograph of a black woman in a modest ankle-length flowered dress with long sleeves. She has a wedding ring on the relaxed fingers of her left hand. Her toes are pointing down like a dancer’s at the apex of her leap. The sleeves of the dress are pulled slightly above her wrists by a rope that is bunching the collar of her dress. The rope rises vertically to bleed off the edge of the photograph and, were it not for the way her neck is twisting her face to the left and downward, you could imagine it to be part of a theatrical device to create an illusion that she is in flight.  In the closing moment of the film this is one of a series lynchings for our witness; images, which go by too fast for the attention we can give to this one. That of course is the difference between the two media, a contrast that presents this question, "Aren't all of those extinguished lives equally deserving of our attention?" Under the photo Baldwin's narration serves as caption:

You cannot lynch me

And keep me in ghettos

without becoming something monstrous yourselves.

And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage.

You never had to look at me.

I had to look at you.

I know more about you then you know about me.

Not everything that is faced can be changed;

but nothing can be changed until it is faced. (Italics mine.)

And then he goes on to his conclusion:

History is not the past.

It is the present.

We carry our history with us.

We are our history.

If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.

I attest to this:

the world is not white;

it never was white,

cannot be white.

White is a metaphor for power,

and that is simply a way of describing

Chase Manhattan Bank.

                      *   *   *

If I’m not the nigger here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether it is able to ask that question. (The italics here are not mine)

Amen; 

“Not everything that is faced can be changed;

but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Hypothetically Speaking By M.K. Sukach

Hypothetically Speaking

By M.K. Sukach

Encircle Publications, LLC

Farmington, Maine

28 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Just sayin. Apocalypse by Raptors. Toasting Death. Scatological Pledge. Hell’s Bill. Mindless Breathing. Cataclysmic Ponder. Robotic Hearts. Just sayin.

Poems of wrath and dire suppositions dare us to awaken and live darkly in Hypothetically Speaking, M.K. Sukach’s new collection of fractured visions. This poet knows how to destroy with graven logic and malefic lyric. Never close enough for out- -and-out rage, Sukach sets up his alternate universes with a dastardly sharp and shifting wit, enticing us down some pretty idiosyncratic narrative paths.

The book’s opening piece, Abaddon, damns hypocritical politicians and their financial enablers to hell. Niceties of detail abound. Connections to reality are alluded to. Brood on these lines for a moment,

…they moaned as lobbyists were crushed

under oaken tables adorned with feathered quills

and hand-lathed legs broken at the knees, sir, my oath

we didn’t pass the bill, filibustered over tee-time deals,

last one then two then three uncapped their pens

and signed each other with love, I raise you, so help me

god, I raise you, as the nave cracked from bow to stern,

the conclave turned as moths to a light to cross their bodies,

in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, so nakedly

were they decended upon by raptors and it was done.

In The Little Book of Anxieties Sukach deals with life’s concerns through art. Needless to say, his little poetic book, burning with passion and a blinding insight, tries the physical faculties of the reader beyond both critical and painful misjudgments. The poem begins in a blaze,

If all the pages are on fire,

well then, that’s a difficulty,

but you can’t read it

otherwise, e.g., each

gracile nerve ending

sprained at the fingertip,

which pressed to the tongue

returns to the book

by rote, just suffers and suffers

no matter the healing

water…

Through the very strange prism of a frog dissection, Sukach, in his poem entitled Formaldehyde, eyes the messiness of human emotion and the first stirrings of love. Maybe not so strange. The teenage years with trial and error, unseemly moments and hand-wringing shame certainly seemed like a frog dissection, come to think of it. Biology lab conveyed a lot,

Glossy gardens of urogenital systems,

Wet blossoms and what the cloaca does,

Pages of diagnostic manuals turning

Silent as a novice’s prayer book at night;

One of us forgets and licks his index

Finger, dollops of saliva, room of laughter

Chalked up to digestive compulsion to name

Unnamable, unspeakable amphibian things:

Vena Cava, Spermatic Canal, Dorsal Aorta,

Yuck of frog sex, Jeanie’s first kiss, mutely waiting

Sukach’s piece, Porno Star as CIA Operative, accurately comments on two professions. For both the star and the operative cover is everything. An allusion to “Leave It to Beaver” works diabolically well. The poet describes the scenario,

It’s all a bit of tradecraft, really, uncanny

Cunning, the way she was always leaving

Arriving so easily, so imperceptibly made up

There were never any clouds in her afternoons

Weird like June Cleaver always gardening in her pearls

So perfectly cartoonish like politics and porn

A “plumber” arrives but her pipes are never fixed

Really, how many of us ever made it whining about the rules

What a great last line. What a profound eternal truth.

Wakes puzzle together the “Loved One,” each relative adding a piece to be pushed in to place. A mosaic obit. Sukach’s poem Quotient does this. The restored life reeks with hyperbole or wit or tut tuts. Illusion can capture the truth, which skipped out on flesh and blood. Understatement spreads with the vigor of the nod, always knowing. The poet concludes the piece in search of a lubricant,

…the aunt

who “availed” herself

was “apparently” and often

“intimate” but left

no “offspring”

yet so “colorful”

remarks in passing

uncles reappearing

from rooms and closets

into the whole

contemplative portrait

looking for more booze

I’m all for starting at the beginning, at a conjured childhood. That is why Sukach’s piece A is for Apple pleases me so much. Continuing the story from its onset the poet’s protagonist finds his way through life’s thicket, following a zigzag “remedial’ path. He recognizes his shortcomings here,

A is for aphasic and anomia. So I write

with a dictionary and cheat through (a) thesaurus

because A is for ambiguous and amphigory.

A is a grade and grade A is aleatory.

With any luck no one will mark you a “B”

then cart you off to an institution

with all the other crack ups

muttering A is for Effort.

Red-eyed zombies downing Starbucks coffee at Reagan National take center stage in Sukach’s poem of inconsolable patterns, Crossword. The poet, connecting the dots, quotes Aristotle, “No matter where you go there you are.” Muttered opprobrium rules the day. Cue the flight attendants,

who instruct us

on how to save ourselves with flotation devices,

those silly cups of oxygen that drop and dangle

just before the plane broadsides into a mountain,

smile antiseptically as if everything is okay

and complementary and for our own good

Just sayin. Abrupt Ends. Ditch Drunk. Pearl Onions Forked. Scaled Back Compassion. Chum Frenzy. Labyrinthine Sewer. Piggyback Conspiracies. Just sayin.

Put down the sparklers and read this damn book.