Ordinary Psalms Julia B. Levine

 

Ordinary Psalms

Julia B. Levine

Louisiana State University Press, 2021

ISBN 978-0-8071-7474-6

Reviewed by David P. Miller

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives this first definition for ordinary: “of a kind to be expected in the normal order of events.” Its definition of psalm: “a sacred song or poem used in worship.” The title of Julia B. Levine’s book, Ordinary Psalms, complicates what the conjunction of these words might imply. First, because in these poems “the normal order of events” denies many of the synonyms for ordinary, such as routine, unremarkable, workaday. Second, because the sense of the sacred and the act of worship are inseparable from the experience of suffering and a questioning of the purposes served by the idea of deity.

The book’s four sections center on, but do not exclusively concern, the blindness which Levine has experienced as an adult, a friend’s lung cancer, and another friend’s suicide. The first poem, “Psalm with Wren in Daylight Saving Time,” places us immediately:

Late afternoon, I chop onions by feel,

listening to crows cry to each other across the ridge.

Gone now, white recipe card on the white floor,

green sea glass found on a Humboldt beach.

But this hour I have been given back, carried out

of gorse, red flash of maples, finches in our cedar.

Meaning, today I returned for the first time

to the moment I understood I was going blind.

In these lines, five senses are activated. The action of chopping onions connotes touch, secondarily the sense of smell, and even taste. Sound and vision are evoked even as she loses her sight. Levine sustains this intensity of presence throughout the book.

Of equal significance is the directness, in the fourth stanza, with which she describes the catastrophe. Because we can assume that this experience has been emotionally wrenching, it’s unnecessary for her to tell us that. Her frankness, devoid of melodrama, allows space for us as readers to use empathetic imagination. (I am writing as someone who still possess his sight – temporarily-abled, let’s say.) At the same time, we must understand what this requires of us: “Sometimes we must drag our grief out of the river / and put our mouth on it. Then a loosening comes.” To be present for that which is still to be praised, we must keep our suffering as a living thing.

The inextricability of all seeming opposites (together comprising the ordinary) surfaces again and again in these poems. “Psalm with Violent Interruptions” chains “the TV news // with its body count, looped reels of the partly butchered and fallen” with “iris noosing cobalt blue.” The might of a “A four-point buck // staring towards the Pacific, his ears like paired kites / tugged by wind” exists in the same flow as “new suicide vests / hang[ing] unexploded on hooks.” These are simultaneities, not contradictions.

“Preaching to the Debris Field” concludes the book’s first section. The title immediately refers to the official destruction of a shared cabin (no cause given). Though Levine, as always, refuses bromides, the remnants are still tied to their own beauty, partially via glint/girder/glittering, shards/shiners, raccoon/rubble:

Winter now, and behind me is wreckage—

copper tangled in the glint of a girder,

mirror shards flashed in the hummock and slag.

Let me tell you something.

Long before the park service demolished our cabin,

there were whole days of glittering,

the raccoon and her delicate hands fishing for shiners,

the dark wick of a seal lifted up from the bay.

And let me remind you that beneath rubble

is bedrock, layer of origin.

The second section begins with “Anthropocene Psalm,” a longer multi-sectioned poem. Here, the poet’s encroaching blindness is folded into her friend Mary’s cancer. Here is another view of the inseparability of all facets of experience:

And I’m remembering too, how once,

passing a crepe myrtle in full bloom, every leaf, every branch

crowned with fuchsia,

Mary stopped, gasping,

and I froze, terrified she was in sudden pain.

But it was beauty. The way it enters sometimes

like a knife and we both felt it then—

This, while she declares “I can no longer see // out of one eye, and the other / vandalized, cracked, and taped so that strange shards / of light fly in.”

Lamentation poems first appear in this section of the book, as psalms persist. Perhaps these are intermingled in Levine’s question: “God, I thought, are you never sorry / or always?” But it’s the poem “God Speaks to Me from the Almond Orchard” that crushes a reader’s easy hope of salvation. The title itself is immediately undermined: “You wanted me to say it through their flowering, / didn’t you? To declare my love / with these ferocious prairies of snow?” We want so badly to believe in the natural world’s reassurance through obvious metaphors, but:

[ … ] when one of you lies face up under a canopy,

wind flicking petals from a branch,

you like to think,

This must be God’s fingers touching my cheek.

I advise you to stop imagining the aftermath

as something you can apprehend.

The challenge is to neither lean on the banalities we easily derive from non-human creation, nor to give way to nihilism. As in “The Anointing, ” the poem following “Almond Orchard,” where “Stars-of-Bethlehem float over the lawn” in all their vitality. As “the dogs on the sidewalk lie down in praise,” the speaker “continue[s] on, past the poppies toppled over / with radiance. Still helpless as any god // to keep my friend on the next block / from dying slowly of cancer.” Yes, “god” in lower-case here as elsewhere, though not always. The upper-case “G” is sometimes granted, sometimes denied.

Poems in the third section reach back to the poet’s early life through young adulthood, with confrontations and startling experiences prefiguring the wisdom she brings to bear. “Lamentation with the Detroit River” begins with innate knowledge of the eternal as it persists through damage:

Perhaps nothing was beautiful,

but still my sister and I knelt beside

the water flushed out of factories,

poking sticks into its green syrup,

daring each other to swim.

Something true had been stolen from that river

and we wanted the wholeness of a thing,

the world before the wound.

In this poem also, Levine imagines “my mother as a little girl / before she grows up mean.” Brief but definite references to abuse appear in other poems here. In “Antidote,” the child has a vision of death “as a floating into music / and happiness at the epicenter // where your mother was / no longer a broken promise, / your father setting down // his belt, / his spittled cussing.” A crucial realization then arrives, in a heavy snowfall and a chilled body:

[ … ] a presence

neither outside nor in, but both,

knelt down close

to ask if you were ready to survive.

What’s jolting is the statement that survival requires volition. A person’s survival is not simply a matter of good fortune, but involves repeated acts of will. To be at the edge of ending one’s life, but to hold it at enough distance, is put another way in “Dispatch from the Forthcoming”: “Listen. // It’s okay to love the exit. [ … ] you can love the exit without leaving.” In the poem “Hast Thou Not Poured Me Out like Milk and Curdled Me like Cheese?” (the title from Job 10:10), after a violent assault, the speaker “came adrift … begged to die.” Instead, she achieved the depth of the sacred as embedded in the perishing, neither reconciled nor contradicted:

[ … ] Death stapled into the urge of being.

Tonight, in the darkness and light of my porch,

a nightjar calls out from under the cypress.

The path out of my yard glows milk white in moon.

How hard I have fought against faith. For if I surrender,

what notice will you take of me again?

Again, the complex relationship with deity: the desire to remain in its sight, while denying an upper-case You.

The final section begins in the midst of a destructive flood: “Cache Creek Bridge at Flood Stage.” The creek has “flung oaks against the bridge, torn // off limbs and crushed them to death,” as the speaker recalls a phone consultation with a psychic, who supposedly conveyed a message from Gregory, “the best friend I ever had,” a victim of suicide. The certainty of natural disaster and Gregory’s death on the one hand, the doubtfulness of the psychic’s ability on the other hand, leads to this threshold:

[ … ] I’m done

second-guessing what comes next,

whether an oracle or charlatan ferried

something of Gregory to me

over waves, if there is a god

waiting anywhere for anyone.

It is the call of the concrete that’s undeniable, that holds fuller insights than come from wishful abstraction. In “Psalm with Errant Joy and Devastation,” after a hummingbird flies through a broken window and dies, Levine’s daughter “[l]ays the tiny bird in her palm // and looks close at the delicate overlay of plumage, / the iridescent rust and emerald wings, // a stippling on the throat’s underside.” Here as elsewhere, beauty and corruption stand together, unreconciled. We have the chance, then, “to speak clearly to the devastation // the poem calls a heart, / and the heart calls a poem.”

After the radical uncertainty about the reality of the Divine, including whether its words are to be capitalized, it’s significant that the final poem, simply titled “God,” is rooted in the evident:

You know that hour in winter

when the light is salted gauze

and you stop a moment

in one of the last untouched fields

in this landlocked valley—

the new grass a rain-fattened green,

thick as uncombed hair.

[ … ]

This is the moment you need a prayer

from your animal self.

“I turn my flashlight on. / I don’t know what else to do but witness.” These lines conclude “Cache Creek Bridge.” Gregory’s suicide, Mary’s cancer, Julia B. Levine’s blindness. The hummingbird’s iridescence, crepe myrtles in bloom, the feel of chopped onions. Lamentations cover part of this ground, but psalms include all of it. If reconciliation comes, it is only through full engagement with the gorgeous, the unbearable, and the incomprehensible.

Sprawled Asleep By David P. Miller

 

Sprawled Asleep

By David P. Miller

Nixes Mate Books

Nixesmate.pub/books

Allston, Massachusetts

ISBN: 978-1-949279-21-4

70 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Too often contemporary poetry dwells on the versifier rather than the verse. The confessional reigns and the uniqueness and self-importance of the poet drives both the narrative and the music. In the worst and most extreme examples of this navel-gazing art the poet and his readers develop an unhealthy bond of elitism, which separates them from any objective world view and renounces the joy of detail shared by soulful creation. David Miller’s first full length book, Sprawled Asleep, does not do this. Its meditations are directed by an exactness of observation that deemphasizes the poet-observer to the point of irrelevance. As this poet-observer fades, his objects achieve a singular, eye-opening clarity that leaves one somewhat stunned. The motif in which this observer delineates his objects is often mass transportation. Alienation, counter intuitive as usual, finds a niche here.

In his poem Look at the Sky Miller seeks word precision in his atmospheric scan. He does identify the observer’s position as in a bus, his intellectual preparation (it doesn’t take), and his sensory limitations. The piece opens with directness,

Pinned and plunging beneath the flat

of a thunderhead, a thick purple-

bruised ceiling more threatening

than night’s translucent black.

The bus scrambled out

from beneath that dark table,

toward the blue shelf

opened at the horizon.

I can write thunderhead. Or write

these: horsetails, lenticular,

buttermilk sky. What I want:

to exhale ah! Altostratocumulus.

To know the mundane sky

direct as knowing the breath.

No study or action of mind.

Gaze, or Don’t, Miller’s poem of humorous denial or, perhaps, faux resurrection, triumphs with deadly accurate observations and deductions. The poet considers the life or death evidence pertaining to an unmoving sedentary elderly man attracting some attention from his fellow travelers on the subway. A determination is made in the heart of the poem,

Men in shirts of Egyptian cotton,

suede shoes of charcoal grey,

slumped at the railings in end seats,

chins at their chests, wide woven hats

upside down at their feet,

are: asleep.

Asleep at the end

of the line and asleep

when the train switches back.

Sleeping for us who gaze, or don’t

at scaly red arms, the flushed crown

of a head, smart slim-fit jeans.

See his fingers are twitching.

Miller zeroes in on the mass of humanity in his poem Landscape with Hilton. He opens with the portrait of an elderly female beggar holding a paper cup in a wash of playgoers exiting a theatre. His action then moves to his well-drawn sketch of a waitress in a Faux-Fifties restaurant and past door men ushering a wealthy man to a taxi. This stratified jumble of society mixes in just the right way to elicit the connective Aha of memetic recognition. Next the poet surprises by etching historical contexts into the denouement of his urban landscape. The poem concludes this way,

Slide one block to the Tenderloin—

pale block letters against brick

remember Elegantly Furnished Rooms

Private phones Steam Heat

Hot Water Elevator Service

Private Baths $20 Month.

Above the sidewalk, a voided sign

for a vanished café, shaft rising

toward Corinthian columns and satellite dish,

overpainted entirely in white.

Taking one step beyond his usual ruminations, Miller’s deadpan tone of “just the facts, Ma’am” becomes almost Kafkaesque in his piece entitled Someone Else’s Daughter. Time in this strangely enclosed dimension intertwines with movement and thus with breath. The mode of transportation becomes more real than the travelers, who are reduced to mere passersby status. Instinct drives knowledge. Consider these lines,

The same train on the same rail

enters the same tunnel. Two faithful

train-on-track tones: the upper

thickens as tunnel walls resound

overtones against the body. Remember

how your dog always sat up when the Rambler

slowed, two turns before the house?

The train returns to open air and you rise,

Open eyes, the dog coming home.

My favorite piece in this extraordinary collection Miller entitles Another Poem About Fireflies. But this is not your generic firefly poem straining to connect the microcosm with the macrocosm. Instead Miller’s delightful meditation happens after he is drawn onto his porch by a misconception. He thinks he hears a soft rainfall or drizzle, but the basis of his sensory perception is rather the sound of leaves caught in an air draft. Nature sometimes surprises and this confused state can illuminate other mysteries. The poet notices how his objects assume a fuller reality as his perception withdraws. They dominate this shared world, and, to some extent, dispossess mankind. The poet describes his irrelevance,

I don’t remember when I last saw

fireflies, and I don’t know if I will ever

see them again. So stark, their white-yellow signals

pull from deep in the yard across the street,

and down the street. Each its own light-

point cycle, so many aerial lighthouses.

Flash cycle nebula densing the more

the more I abandon eye focus. This erratic

point cloud beneath tides of treetops,

and me in the fade to black…

The abnegation of self becomes an exquisite meditation and more in the collection’s concluding poem, Half the Day is Night. On the surface an ode to autumn’s equinox, the piece delves into eternal stillness. The poet outdoes himself in these lines,

I sit outside this dark September night.

The hand of dusk across my heart, my spine

caressed by stillness. The listening to come

to what there is to hear when nothing is to hear.

Miller’s remarkable poems lead us beyond his uncommon, well-wrought observations. They verge on the ethereal and visionary. Sprawled Asleep deserves serious artistic acclamation.

First Generation Krikor der Hohannesian

First Generation

Krikor der Hohannesian

Loveland, Ohio: Dos Madres Press, 2020

93 p.

ISBN 9781948017817

Review by David P. Miller

djamangeen gar ooo chagar: an Armenian invocation, the introduction to storytelling, sits quietly on the cover and title page of First Generation. “A long time ago there was and there wasn’t.” The almost insupportable tensions between the death and life of a people and culture, the reality of genocide and the viciousness of denial, infuse Krikor der Hohannesian’s first full-length collection of poems. It is dedicated to Armenag Nazar, “who fled Turkish Armenia in 1910 to escape the Armenian genocide along with his wife Gulenia and four young children, one of whom was to become my mother.“  At least in part, these poems are his attempt “to slide beneath the shield of that which he kept to himself.” Vivid paintings by the abstract expressionist Garabed Der Hohannesian (1908-1992), the poet’s father, serve as cover art and as introductions to the book’s sections (see http://garabedderhohannesian.com/).

Although the poems aren’t in a strictly chronological sequence, there is movement from the poet’s youth into adulthood and later age. This is intertwined with the complexities of bringing a partially suppressed heritage to light, more fully realizing it, and striving to carry it forward. Part One, The Bearer, begins with “our first naked thrust / into a blue and eerie world” (“Entrance”). As the child grows, he begins to hear “the stories… Zeitun, / Musa Dagh—strange sounding names / not easily rolled off the tongue.” This poem, “Death March: Deir al-Zor,” shows us something of the boy’s struggles to grip the past, paralleling his difficulties with place names. With time, his knowledge deepens; he speaks to his grandparents in retrospect:

Now, nene, I understand that which

as a boy I could not comprehend. [ … ]

It was told that many, knowing their fate,

threw their babies into the amniotic waters of

the Euphrates, then joined prayerful hands

to leap in behind [ … ]

It was told that others, half-crazed by thirst and hunger,

too paralyzed to resist, submitted like docile sheep

to the cruelest sexual perversions. [ … ]

Now, mairig,

the words we could never share.

In this section, der Hohannesian intertwines memories of his childhood with muted hints that came from his elders. In “The Attic” he finds “crazed sepias / of austere gentlemen / in over-starched high collars / and ladies bedecked / in lacy décolletage.” These curiosities reverberate with what the living both show and hide: “Old Armenian men, hunched / on cane-backed chairs, / drinking Turkish coffee in dim, / smoke-blue cafes – sotto voce / exchanges punctuated / by a knowing nod or /arched eyebrow [ … ] eyes now and / then misting over …” (“The Secret”). The loving bond between him and his grandfather does much to catalyze his emerging consciousness, particularly as he watches his grandfather write:

a river of discourse

flowing in strange, squiggly-looking characters

of Armenian script. I was awash

in his serenity, basked in his aura,

smelled the sweetness of his presence,

wishing to spend the rest of my life

in that room. (“The Birth of a Poet”)

The final poem of the first section recounts the poet’s night visits to a local cemetery. Although he can’t account for his fascination to skeptical friends, or even to himself – and although the place isn’t clearly identified with his ancestry – he can’t help but ask of the stones, “alive with family sagas,” the question “Who were you?” (“Requiescat in Pace”).

In Part Two, Passages, we see the adult der Hohannesian’s full-blown awareness of the genocide perpetrated and its continuing resonances in daily living. Despite an inherited sense of Armenia as “a corpse veiled … a derelict of history best forgotten,” the poet’s generation took on the burden of making the history manifest:

To us

fell the task of giving voice to the ineffable –

to erase the shame that murders the psyche [ … ]

We scour freighter manifests

for clues, badger Congress for acknowledgement,

devour memoirs of survivors, thirsting to know

as our forebears thirsted at Deir-al-Zor. (“The Stain”)

This is an emotionally contradictory burden to bear, however, as several poems in this section attest. “Passage to Ararat” witnesses the struggle of a friend whose father renounced his Armenian heritage, even to the point of ridicule: “he chose / anglophilia, changed his name, / became an English dandy [ … ] Worse yet, / the mocking of his forebears as ‘quirky’ / and besides, ‘the language was impossible.’” The friend’s return to his origins therefore means acting against his father. In Yerevan he tosses “a yellow rose / into the burning oil, your tears / a cascade down your cheeks / like snowmelt from the slopes / of Ararat.” The poet himself is torn over the possibility of return, conflicted over what he may claim: “I fear the ghosts. I fear mourning / what was never mine, the grief / that belongs not to me but to those / who gave up their birthright” (“The Cherry Tree”).

And yet grief is certainly his. In “Hear the Wind Blow,” written in memory of the poet and steelworker John Beecher, der Hohannesian sets his friend’s fate during the McCarthy era against the hell of polluted factory towns during that period. The deaths of seventy from the notorious Donora smog of 1948 – “gagged on smog from steel / and zinc plants, the inversion of air, / the trapped poisons without a breath / of wind to purge the valley” – find an echo in the unspecified “accident” which ended Beecher’s work in the mills. “Old Man John the Melter,” though he “stood tall for steely men … was blackballed / in the witch hunts of the 1950’s / for not signing a loyalty oath.” Even more stark, perhaps, is the eruption of heartache chronicled in “Soul Brother.” After three days of celebrating the life of a deceased friend with food, drink, and music, the inevitable arrives:

The day-after tears – not the choked back kind but

full-bore gushing – finally swamped me

like a rogue wave. I am lost,

marooned on an isle of mourning.

Part Three, The Eternal Flame, opens with a poem that poses one of the book’s central questions: “What do you do / with the weight of the unspeakable, / the grief which you could not lift?” (“What Do You Do?”). First Generation takes a great step toward making this weight both speakable and spoken, and many of the poems in this final section address the question how to move forward with the knowledge the poet bears.

“Walking Toward the Edge” grapples with the burden of a lack all the more devastating for having no particular shape: “How do you measure silence, / its vacuum of sound, dead air / absent before the storm?  / What happened to the Armenians? ” In reply to someone’s well-meant but inadequate advice – “’You need to grieve,” she says” – the poet replies that the conditions for grief have been undermined.  The possibility of achieving grief feels liberating, but the reality is illusory:

How does one grieve absence,

its nothingness? I have walked

toward the edge many times,

excitement in my step [ … ] Yet

a hesitation as I near,

the fear that I will no longer

recognize myself, that I am

staring at death, the paradox

of its comfort.

The devastating realization is that grief is “the cold ash / from a fire that never burned.”

Nevertheless, der Hohannesian is able to express some of the marvels of his own life. In “These Hands,” he takes a look at those extremities so often taken for granted, and how they bear the deep traces of a long life with guitar playing, holding newborns, planting roses, dancing with speech, and, of course, writing. He sees “Wrinkles / like wind-blown ripples on desert sand, / veins the blue-gray of the river, / knurled knuckles, nails ridged like bark …” – eloquent, elegant marks of aging.

In the book’s final part, we also return to der Hohannesian’s family, with elegies for his parents. “Saying Goodbye” concentrates our attention on the final scene in his father’s hospital room. These last moments are burdened with “the unsaid” that “shall stay unsaid … It can’t be helped in the few hours left.” The continuing trauma of genocide is felt even here: he arranges for cremation because “Mother didn’t believe in funerals – / after all, none of the 1.5 million / dispatched by the Ottomans were so graced. / She was two years old and had survived.” “Requiem” begins with the death of his “dear Mother – last of those from home,” and develops toward an unexpected, perpetual vengeance. The slaughtered Armenians cannot be eradicated, despite rumors that “Osman’s descendants intend to plow under / all vestiges, once and for all to silence the screams”:

Anatolian breezes

will forever betray them, bearing bone dust

and blood motes into every fissure and crevice

where Armenians once lived.

Where you, Mother, once lived.

“How long does the spirit linger / in dust motes dancing / in cones of sunlight / before it is all forgotten?” This key question is from “To the Author of my Epitaph,” the book’s concluding poem. In First Generation, Krikor der Hohannesian presents us with a deeply vested inheritance, intertwined not only with sorrow but also with friendships, love, and the possibility of realizing joy. He takes the essential risk involved in any bold creative act: asserting his voice against the inevitability of disappearance we all share. We should pay attention, with gratitude.

The Human Half: Poems by Deborah Brown

The Human Half: Poems

by Deborah Brown

Rochester, NY: BOA Editions Ltd., 2019

$17.00

ISBN 978-1-942-68382-7

Reviewed by David P. Miller

In The Human Half, Deborah Brown wrests vitality and insight from doubts, contradictions, cul-de-sacs, and seemingly wrong turns. Her rich, unexpected diction reminds us that each starting point is fraught with multiple, buried potentials. Nevertheless, our lives’ permanent unpredictability need not be simply disorienting; with proper attention, we can understand, maybe experience, fluidity and depth.

“Voices,” the opening poem, testifies to the slippery relationships of sound with speech, speech with identity and personhood. At the start, something has gone missing:

                This isle, my ear, is empty.

Before, voices hummed in my ears,

they piled up, black cannon balls

stacked on the town green, geometric,

perfect, all memory of death

swept under June’s mown carpet.

Many different things occur here. The remarkable image of voices as cannon balls pivots into their assurance and tangibility. At the same time, their perfection is petrified, as the speaker can’t help but bring death into the picture. In any event, the voices no longer have stability: they mutate into other sounds, vocal and otherwise, “rarely songs.” She wishes “for tones / that shimmer, sounds that twangle, a poem / in the swill of speech” but must settle for “dried peas in a coffee can. The day rattles / empty as a gourd.” Notice that although she concludes “My ear’s been alone too long”, it’s clear from the language itself that her ear is well and thoroughly tuned, whether to voices or tones.

There are poems that suggest a difficult family history, often embedded in seemingly simple memories. In “The Unpainted House,” the speaker as young girl has either just fallen from her first bicycle or is “on my knees in the woods / scraping pine needles left and right / with cupped hands to make neat trails.” One or the other (or both) of these moments is wedded to remembered voices both definite and tentative:

[ . . . ] From the woods –

I think I heard it—anger so loud

trees and rocks and earth piles trembled

and then—I think I remember it—

a screen door from its hinge

left to flap like a demented tongue.

The rage that disables the door from speaking carries forward in an encounter with a mother, likely in later life, bound up again with voices both frank and stifled:

I hear my voice, stuck in memory,

“Pull your nightgown down, Mother.”

And my name in my mother’s voice,

a growl in her throat, the taste of tannin

and fear in my mouth, the burnt

crust of the edge of ever[y]day.

In “What I Know About the Night Sky,” Deborah Brown fuses the qualities of light and darkness, almost to suggest them as inextricable. “The new moon is never visible / on the night of the New Moon.” There’s a failure, as the night betrays its own name, “though when the sky is darkest / you sometimes see fireballs flash.” This image pivots in two more lines to the speaker’s brother, suffering during that same night the explosions of electric shock therapy. At the same time, light arrives from a dead time: “Andromeda / so many light years away that the rays / I see tonight were emitted / when wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers / roamed here.” A moonless night named for a moon; light in the night sky like the bursts in a wounded brain; starlight from a possibly extinct source; and finally

The next day my brother

reaches out to me from the darkness

he’s wrapped in. He tests the light.

Many poems in The Human Half express the radical uncertainty of knowledge, or instability of perception, with what appear to be simple premises that go to pieces as one contingency evokes the next, the poems escaping the speaker’s (and reader’s) control. “Here’s Looking” is an outstanding example. The lead-in title evokes “here’s looking at you,” and at first the poem seems genially autumnal: “at the way fingers of birches tangle / as roots reach up, reach out”. That’s the first couplet; the second quickly undoes it: “at the row of colored bottles lined up / that you’re taking aim at”. While in that first line, the bottles could have been decorative finds or souvenirs, with the second there’s immediate violence or its threat. This pace slides into further rapid-fire images of danger and threat:

and at the mulberry bush we hid under

together and at the father speeding

into the garage, ramming the bins

after you jump out of the way

There’s an attempt to recover with another “Here’s looking” and some quiet expressions – “through the keyhole, out the window, / down the rabbit hole” but that can’t be sustained either. The poem hurtles toward a conclusion of forced looking/refusal to look. The title finally becomes impossible, with even “Here” unbearable:

Am I still looking for, at, out

for you? Not. And not

under the bed. Looking past

the house, the car, the guns.

“What to Call a Chicken,” complete in six couplets, similarly seduces at its opening with a curious question: “Why call a chicken a chicken when you could / see it as a yellow feather in the eye of the morning?” An interesting, fresh metaphor. Then, as with “Here’s Looking,” the poem plummets almost instantly, one image falling into another in stunning succession. An unsettled farm (“the broken eggs, the goat’s sad bleat”) slides through an empty bed to an empty, collapsing house (“the shattered wall, the crumbling / bedroom door”) , to hanging, crumbling stone and even a snow that fails:

The stone wall has toppled all over itself,

the snow failed its banks, its whiteness.

Quieter on the surface, but finally as unsettled, “The Green Scent of Snow” begins with a modest sensory image:

Snowfall fills the crevices

in my dreams, a scent fresh

as green. My neighbor

leaves for the night shift,

snowbanks reflect car lights.

Looking into the night, the speaker searches for Pluto but remembers it’s not possible with the naked eye: “Another one / not seen anymore.” That disappearance is followed by an understatement of willful collective suicide: “We clear our neighborhood / of the atmosphere we need to live.” A state of complete obscurity, created by us, ends this brief poem:

For weeks now no one in Beijing

has seen a neighbor

walk through the thick gray air

towards her at noon.

Although every perception is provisional, every conviction unstable, what consistently stands out in these poems is a lack of rhetorical distress. There’s no melodrama in Deborah Brown’s language: the insecurity of our existence comes through in what almost seems like a succession of rudimentary facts.

This selection doesn’t do justice to The Human Half’s range of tone and subject matter. There are insightful ekphrastic poems, such as “In Black and White and Red,” concerning a painting by Matisse, and “A Woman Holds a Balance in Jan Vermeer’s Painting.” In contrast with Matisse’s work, where a female model representing a maid is subjugated to function as a compositional/color element, the Vermeer painting seems to model the speaker’s own longings for reason and harmony. “A Woman” is also one of the few poems in the book that speaks in short lines, and the only one with lines of a single word. Its line-broken diction skillfully enacts its images, as in:

of this

derangement of mind

and senses inflicted

on me—perhaps not

on me alone—

“Various Rains” stands out with the remarkable imagination brought to bear on its subject. These rains are sometimes personified (“sooty city rain that grabs your lapels”), sometimes not (“rain full of molasses”).  Each has an unexpected relationship with human moods or emotions, but resists stereotyped associations, as the feeling-tone of each is experienced for itself.

“In the Snowfield,” the book’s concluding poem, evokes blankness, a potential fall off the edge into a void. At the same time, this hazard is countered by her actions and the imagination she brings to the place:

[ . . . ] My skis

carve an equator. The wind

sketches meridians. So much

that I see is not there.

The map I make

guides me through the blank fields.

But these markings are provisional, to be taken back by the world which includes us but does not depend on us. “The straight lines / are longing. Drifts / erase our path.” We desire, we pass through. We leave our traces, we are erased. Until then, as “In the Cambrian” reminds us, there is “that flare of life in me, through you.”

Did You Know? Elizabeth S. Wolf

Did You Know?

Elizabeth S. Wolf

Studio City, California: Rattle, 2019

ISBN 978-1-931307-40-6

48 pages; $6.00

https://www.rattle.com/chapbooks/did-you-know/

Review by David P. Miller

Elizabeth S. Wolf’s Did You Know?, a winner of the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Poetry Prize, tells a compelling story of family destruction and heartening (if incomplete) recovery. There is no sidestepping the fact that the engine is, yes again, male arrogance and devaluation of women. I’ll confess to a dilemma: I’d like to say more here than I will. A more extensive description would mean one spoiler after another.

There are two critical elements braided through this tale of severe dysfunction/recuperation. The first is the decision by Wolf’s lawyer father, in 1968, to deliberately conceal the fact that her mother had a degenerative disease – knowledge concealed from his wife and children, but apparently from no one else, including the mother’s parents. As she writes: “Believing the stress of naming the disease / would make it worse, my father chose / to be her guardian, the gatekeeper / of incoming information. He would tell her / when the time was right. He was certain / he would know / when the time was right” (“Tangled Web”). That time, unfortunately, never arrived, as the father suddenly died eight years later.

The second major element is the exceptional rejection of Elizabeth, the daughter, by her father and grandfather (also a lawyer). This is introduced by typically obtuse misogyny: “My father used to say there was nothing a girl could do / worth paying for. Girl talk was vapid” (“May 4, 1970”). It manifests in the casting-out of the daughter into a chaos of homelessness and foster care, beginning here:

My father made vacation plans with my mother.

He told me, you can do whatever you want

for the holiday, as long as it isn’t with us.

                I was 12.

(“The Center Did Not Hold”)

Sadly but unsurprisingly, her mother seems to have internalized not only a state of helpless dependence on her husband, but also his disregard for their daughter, who became the subject of a complex family shunning and bizarre institutional cruelties.

The secret inevitably explodes after the father’s death. This marks the beginning of Wolf’s re-integration into the family (grandfather excepted) and the steady remaking of her mother’s new-found autonomy, even as her body continued to degenerate. Wolf finds new personal strength, and crucially, a rebuilt and affirmative relationship with her mother. The crux of it is here:

Now there was an “us”:

the ones who did not know.

And with that I was restored.

(“That Night My Mother Called Me”)

Among stories of the mother’s developing self-image, “There Used to Be Rules” is one of my favorites. During a visit, Wolf experiences both astonishment and tenderness at what her mother truly considers an act of rebellion:

“I used the top sheet from one set

with a different fitted sheet,” she declared.

“I thought you’d get a kick out of that.”

I stared at the bed.

I stared at my mother.

But realizing that this is really a threshold moment, the daughter gives her mother what she needs:

“Wow!” I answered. “I thought I woke up

extra spunky. Now I know why!”

She turned and crutched down the hall, giggling.

As subsequent poems show us, Wolf’s mother moves well beyond this first stage of self-repair to become truly her own woman, even as her physical condition continues to decline. In “March 2004,” Wolf and her young daughter visit for the final time: its conclusion is one of the most moving passages in all of Did You Know?

The nuclear family’s healing (Wolf’s brothers included) does not, however, mean the rehabilitation of the father’s memory, nor of the grandfather’s after the latter’s death. The family damage these men did was their legacy, even as their professional associates held them in warm memory. “July 1993” begins: “When my grandfather died, / lawyers wept. The family / held a roast, presided over by his younger daughter, at a hotel / by the funeral home, / probably on his dime.” And Wolf’s mother was, at last, able to forgive all those who deceived her, “Except for my father. / He remained dead.” (“April 2004”)

And that’s enough spoilers for one review: there’s a lot more to discover in Elizabeth S. Wolf’s Did You Know? Only one concern: the boilerplate on the title page verso says “While the perceptions and insights are based on the author’s experience, no reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.” Well . . . not true. Fortunately, this isn’t really part of the book. Was there no other legalese to use instead?

Opening the Camp by Kenneth Lee

Opening the Camp

Kenneth Lee

2019

ISBN 978-1-7923-0063-9

$10: available from Harvard Book Store (https://shop.harvard.com/opening-camp-kenneth-lee)

Reviewed by David P. Miller

If a person has the good fortune to reach older age in decent health, more or less stable circumstances, and of sound mind – and yes, that’s a lot of ifs – it’s possible to develop a double consciousness about your life. You can look at its decades as a phenomenon, a strange occurrence not taken for granted, a curious tale about a person who happens to have your name, face, and Social Security number. This isn’t only the province of aging, of course. Back around 1980, David Byrne put it memorably in the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime”: “And you may find yourself in a beautiful house / With a beautiful wife / And you may ask yourself, well /How did I get here? … You may ask yourself / Where does that highway go to? /And you may ask yourself / Am I right? Am I wrong? /And you may say to yourself / ‘My God! What have I done?’ ’’ I wonder what he would write about this now, forty years later.

Kenneth Lee’s poems often show an acute sense of amazement, sometimes bemusement, regarding the fact of his life. I find that his approach to autobiography evokes my own personal incredulity. Let’s spend time on “Memoro Ergo Sum.” The title riffs off Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum,” often translated as “I think therefore I am.” Lee substitutes memory for reasoning, suggesting that one’s identity is more deeply rooted in what one remembers. The first stanza features his characteristic specificity of description, in his treatment of the streetlight, unusual perception of the snow’s color, and its vanishing intensified by simple repetition of “disappear”:

Black snowflakes, backlit by the streetlamp,

drift across its yellow megaphone

as I stand on the corner of Palmer and Griggs

looking up at them as they disappear

and disappear into the blackness around me,

age six, late winter of forty-seven.

So far, a simple, nostalgic picture, immediately complicated in the next stanza. The snows of 1947 weren’t evoked by wintertime in later life, but by the poet’s double in an anomalous moment:

Except that it’s summer of 2017

and I, on the self-annihilating point

of the present, trolling in its wake,

have hooked a snow-filled interlude

entered that night by my recorder

standing with his notebook beside me.

Notice the density of this. The instant of recollection disappears as soon as it arises, “self-annihilating.” And yet there it is: a disappearing mental event, in a summer seventy years removed, evokes black snowflakes in street light, and the poet’s double-consciousness manages to snag it. Who is the “recorder?” The final stanza says it’s like Samuel Johnson’s constant companion and biographer:

My Boswell, with his instinct for the highlights,

to document my growing apprehension,

that life was real and I’d been placed inside it.

The “growing apprehension” is the six-year-old’s, becoming aware of his own awareness. His Boswell, by his side since childhood, made sure even then that this sensation – black snowflakes in a megaphone of streetlight – will be permanent in the memory bank, to surface who knows when, for who knows what reason.

It can be sobering, even frightening, to consider that every aspect of your present life exists only because of every specific thing that previously occurred. This means an infinitude of forking paths past. Never mind “the” road not taken: it’s more like a four-dimensional universe of disappeared paths multiplying at every instant. And so we have “What Never Happened”. It seems that his parents lost the chance to put money down on a house, and so “we grew up in River Vale, not River Edge.” Against the too-similar neighborhood names, Lee concisely imagines the shape of an alternative past, shaped by “all the kids who went to high school there”:

whom I never fell in love with, never married

to father kids who never existed with,

or become old friends I’m out of touch with.

I lived my life, grew old, and never missed them.

Of course, non-events only exist because actual events did happen. In retrospect, these seem so inevitable that one can make “The Case Against Free Will.” Here Lee casts his memory back across a varied set of happenings: a risky walk home by himself at six years, an expensive auto repair estimate, and his marriage proposal, concluding “I don’t remember choosing to be naughty, / electing to accept that estimate, / or opting to commit myself forever.” The poem “Pleasing God” unpacks his life’s stages using a different framework. Lee’s awakening into art and matters of the spirit was delayed by the command to obey a parched idea of God:

the gospel drilled in by those jack-hammer nuns

that anything painfully gained pleases God

caused me to dismiss English, Music and Art

as pleasure gods, unworthy of my worship.

As a college student, he “filled [his] empty attic” with engineering study. But the repressed returns. He fell into poetry near “the age of poor Shelley’s last birthday,” music at “the age that took Mozart away,” art at an age “approaching the one that stole Rembrandt.” He concludes with the ironic reflection that God required engineering “so I’d cram my left brain to appease Him / that my right might remain a pure virgin / until she was primed to be ravished” as he achieved the ages at which those artists disappeared. Still, his years of college cramming are given music and meter:

I analyzed the water weight of salt,

I gauged the shear and tensile strengths of steel,

the time it took glass ingots to anneal.

Lee’s capacity for close and fresh description has been noted. Although this is hardly the exclusive province of age, if sharp perception endures, experience itself may become more precious. Opening the Camp’s penultimate poem, “Shades of Gray,” is a brief, exquisite essay in re-learning to see. The speaker views a range of mountains on the morning after a rainy night, realizing that each one “represents [a] sovereign state of grayness:  / ashen, smoky, pearly, leaden, iron, / all fringed with filmy evanescent tassels,  / and here and there perceptible between, / a streak of iridescent green, a blush of blue.” It’s a cue to this reader, at least, not to let the title phrase simply rest as a cliché for relative morality.

In “Pleasing God,” Lee tells about being cracked open to the arts; ekphrastic poems bring his powers of observation into this realm. “Clash of the Great Powers,” a title hinting at the grandiose, ironically frames two concise quatrains. It approaches the puzzle of contrasting civilizations by considering two artworks. An outdoor work by the Japanese-American sculptor Noguchi, a “great grey mass of twisted stone,” allows “infinite replies to light by form” as viewers have the freedom to experience it from different angles. In stark contrast, the same viewers, in front of Titian altarpiece “set fixed above / a grand Venetian altar” are “forced to view / the same magnificence from every angle.” The narrow response compelled by an authoritarian context is reflected in its slighter description: there is simply less to say. Among other poems devoted to music and art, “Of Art, Of Craft” responds to an Eva Hesse exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Here it is, complete:

Of wool, of rope, of wavy plastic tubes:

of simple and of sparse and yet so strong.

How are they not like a boat in a bottle

or a glued and beveled solid walnut table?

The question is doing a lot of work. It invites a close comparison of Hesse’s pioneering and controversial work, using perishable materials and labeled-feminine processes, with traditionally labeled-masculine crafts. At the same time, as Hesse’s work has been established in the realm of art, what does that suggest about other forms of making not given that status? (And kudos to Lee, in any case, for giving Eva Hesse, who died far too early at 34, a place in this book.)

There’s evidence, throughout Opening the Camp, of Lee’s sensitivity to the slightest events and simplest images as portents of far greater things. “Scavenging My Earliest Memories” provides insight into memory’s its origin in early consciousness, linking concrete images – “Brown chickens on a lawn beside a barn, / white dunes along a shore seen from a car” – and the mature reflection that, with these, “agency sought entrance to awareness.” At the stage where images first imprint and persist, the child’s sense of self as a separate being with a history takes form: “a rock-rimmed goldfish pond, / a tiny stucco house beside a well / precipitates from blankness into time.” Personal time begins with recoverable awareness. (My own sense of myself as an individual person began with self-aware fascination with gold Christmas ornaments shining in a window.) This original self-consciousness may, mysteriously, reappear in moments outside any logic, as we see in “Still Going,” the collection’s concluding poem. On a September evening in the Adirondacks (the transition to autumn pictured as summer “pulling up a Caribbean blanket”), Lee watches Orion sink below the horizon, then turns to go inside. “Then, as I straighten and turn for the door, / I’m greeted by the basic core of me.” And what is this? Not the older adult occupied with present concerns and past regrets:

No, it was the one, untouched since its inception,

by memory, anxiety, or age;

the one that first congealed when I was three

who comes unbidden intermittently,

to bring me the good news that he’s still going.

The great good fortune of Kenneth Lee’s poetry expresses the anxieties of impermanence and time (with its terminal effect on each of us), simultaneous with joy in the present and often in recollection. This balance is not given to everyone who arrives at a later stage of life. It is rediscoverable at the most ordinary of moments. A final example will be the simple, formally elegant “Smoke Break in the Courtyard,” in its entirety:

Meanwhile mid-March restokes the coming fire.

And I note that since my morning smoke

a crocus shaft has thrust its fervent bill

outside earth’s startled shell in one sharp stroke.

But, where within a crocus lies its will –

how can a gristly bulb invoke desire?

Understanding Hans Hofmann: Reflections by Sam Feinstein edited by Sascha Feinstein

Hans Hoffman

Understanding Hans Hofmann: Reflections by Sam Feinstein

edited by Sascha Feinstein

Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Arts Press, 2018

112 pages; $25.00

ISBN 978-0-944854-64-8

Reviewed by David P. Miller

Sam Feinstein, artist and writer, lived from 1915-2003. Beginning in 1949, he studied painting with Hans Hoffmann, the renowned 20^th-century painter and teacher (1880-1966), in Provincetown, Mass. His relationship with Hofmann developed into a collegial friendship. This book, Understanding Hans Hofmann, began life as a series of conversations between Feinstein and his son, Sascha Feinstein, recorded between December 1989 and January 1990. Nearly thirty years after those conversations took place, we are gifted with a volume of remembrances and insights into Hofmann’s life, work, and convictions. The text of the original conversations have been edited and organized into chapters with thematic focal points. The unity between Hofmann’s approach to teaching and painting is a persistent emphasis, as is the need to see Hofmann’s work in relation to his root principles and personal nature. As the son states, “Our mutual goal for this book was to present several sides of Hofmann: teacher, painter, friend, critic, writer, and delightful abuser of the English language” (11).

For years, Hofmann was commonly regarded as a “great teacher [but] bad painter” (9). Although this has gradually been overturned, and the value of Hofmann’s art increasingly understood, there remain gaps in the Hofmann literature. Sascha Feinstein states that “Even the best accounts of Hofmann and his painting fail to deliver a sense of who the man really was” (9), in part due to conceptual/theoretical emphases that obscure the relationship between his personality, humor and spirit, and the art itself. Despite Sam Feinstein’s close involvement with Hofmann, his “retreat from an overly commercial art world” (10) meant that he removed himself from arenas where his understanding of Hofmann could have reached a wider audience. The conversations between father and son eventually served as the medium to bring these observations to light.

Hofmann’s teaching is mainly addressed in the chapter titled “The Summer Classes.” Sam Feinstein discusses how his understanding of Hofmann’s teaching changed over time. At first, he strongly resisted Hofmann’s approach: “his methods seemed to me to be the most imposed, absolutely dictatorial, arbitrary approach to the whole process” (16). This included drawing on top of the students’ drawings, or tearing their drawings into four pieces and rearranging them. This “forceful and seemingly arbitrary approach to teaching [was one] that many students either misunderstood or were unable to get past” (14). As time went on, Feinstein came to understand Hofmann’s teaching style to be based on valid principles, and partially motivated by the older artist’s characteristically awkward English. Physical demonstrations, supplemented by verbal remarks, seemed the most direct and necessary method under these circumstances, however unnerving. (His often amusing and memorable struggles with English are recalled in the “Hofmannese” chapter, where Sam Feinstein mentions that Hofmann’s own writings on art could be misunderstood, given his idiosyncratic word choices and resistance to revision.)

The “Summer Classes” chapter also introduces the reader to some of Hofmann’s critical principles, particularly the interplay between space and form. He regarded it as essential to transform the two-dimensional space of the canvas into a work possessing three-dimensional force, rather than representing three dimensions pictorially. In response to the discoveries of Einstein, he regarded “space as form … contain[ing] forces that ultimately made the forms that we see” (18). Forms are not merely static presences but contain “driving energies.” His students attempted to grapple with this by, for example, “[shifting] forms across a flat rectangle to create pictorial space rather than illusionistic space, to create depth consistent with the flatness of the medium” (20). This extended to figure drawing, in which elements such as kneecaps or elbows were not regarded “as fixed locations but as accumulations of vital energies thrust outward by inner forces” (21).

This discussion is elaborated in the chapter, “Hofmann’s Principles.” These had to do with what Hofmann considered as “three kinds of natures”: the nature of the individual artist, that of the encompassing world, and that of the art medium (72). Hofmann’s commitment to the dynamic nature of two-dimensional space manifested, in particular, in what became known as his “push/pull” approach, where the interplay of planes and other forms evoked a sensation of backward and forward movement. “This would replace the old idea of perspective as being an illusion of distance” (74) and was complementary to the movement of the human eye perceiving different layers of depth. Sam Feinstein again emphasizes the difficulties Hofmann’s English presented for some students; his teaching could be distorted, in that “a lot of what got repeated simply emphasized Hofmann’s personality rather than his concepts” (71). This chapter also touches on a theme elaborated elsewhere, that of Hofmann’s “two natures.” In his work, he gradually found ways “to reconcile certain splits within his own makeup between what he called a dramatic, or lyrical, aspect to his nature versus what he called a scholarly side” (79). His active use of squares and rectangles, for example, were positioned in relation to freer “sweeps and flows of color” (37).

In the chapter, “The Film,” Sam Feinstein discusses his work shooting the material for the documentary film Hans Hofmann, showing the artist at work teaching, painting, and discussing his ideas about art and the creative process. Although filming began in 1950, and the final script was developed in 1964, the first showing, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was delayed until 1998. Hofmann made a new painting, “The Window,” during the process of filmmaking. Sam Feinstein discusses the painting, as an element in the documentary, from several perspectives. He describes the physical items in Hofmann’s studio that served as the painting’s material basis and details how Hofmann’s process moved from direct representation to dynamic spatial relationships. He notes that, at the time “The Window” was painted, Hofmann “was still working with colored form rather than forming with color” (42). Feinstein compares it to the artist’s later, more mature work, the painting “Rhapsody” in particular. These are both reproduced in the book’s fine color plates, making it easy to follow the discussion. Feinstein points out that his film put emphasis on Hofmann’s teaching principles, as exemplified through his painting activity, and compares it with other films about Hofmann, where Hofmann only appears to paint: “you can see from his brush that he’s not doing anything” (44).

Sam Feinstein compares Hofmann’s work with that of other painters, particularly the Abstract Expressionists with which he is often associated. He finds it “ironic that Hans Hofmann was being called ‘the father of Abstract Expressionism,’ only because he was so much older than the other young men practicing it” (58). Feinstein draws contrasts between Hofmann’s painting and that of Kline and de Kooning, and does not regard Hofmann as an Abstract Expressionist. For example, in contrast with the latter group’s typical relationship with the canvas, he quotes Hofmann (preserving his diction): “It is not what you do to the canvas. It’s what the canvas doos back” (95). Feinstein regards Hofmann’s work as having much more in common with the Fauves, and perhaps unexpectedly compares the painter’s work to that of Mondrian. Similarly, although Hofmann’s ‘”push and pull” has been discussed in relation to Cubism, “it actually related more to what Cézanne started with his planes of color” (75). These discussions are found in various chapters, particularly “In the Context of Critics and Painters,” where Feinstein also reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of critic Clement Greenberg’s evaluations of Hofmann.

Integrated with his reflections on the teaching, artwork, and principles of Hans Hofmann, Sam Feinstein also recalls a great deal about the artist’s personal relationships and the scenes of his times. These are found in the chapter appropriately titled “Intimacy and Jealousy,” as well as “An Opening of Landscapes,” which centers on a 1953 show of landscape paintings done between 1936-1939. The chapter includes Feinstein’s original catalog essay, and a brief review he wrote for that show.

In the conclusion, “A Final Look,” Sam Feinstein states, “There is a direct, primal drive that comes through in [Hofmann’s] work that is not simply gymnastic, not merely optical; it’s a certain intensity, a life force” (105). Sascha Feinstein’s presentation of his late father’s memories and insights makes this clear and is a tribute to both elder men. He and the Provincetown Arts Press have done us a valuable service with this book.