It’s Not Love Till Someone Loses an Eye By Clay Ventre

 

It’s Not Love Till Someone Loses an Eye

By Clay Ventre

Nixes Mate

www.nixesmate.pub

ISBN: 978-1-949279-47-4

50 Pages

$18.00

Review by Dennis Daly

First books of poetry rarely surprise. Clay Ventre’s initial collection, It’s Not Love Until Someone Loses An Eye, does. His first-rate love poems are off-beat and oddly self-demolishing. He chisels each quirky narrative to innovative perfection and then keeps on chiseling. The new, miniature worlds created by Ventre’s persona and his persona’s lover highlight reality’s instability and logical absurdness. But that’s alright. Creators (read poets), after all, are (for good or ill) gods and goddesses by virtue of their productions, and they make sense by rearranging the raw material of chaos.

“Across a crowded room” love’s magic defeats distance and verbal communication in Ventre’s piece entitled Soiree. A broken semaphore of compelling motion causes contact between two lovers and opens an ever-expanding, uncanny zone of passion and ardor. Ventre concludes the poem by describing this newfound lover’s haven,

the party was over

the guests having shrugged

themselves to indifference

and disappeared in a

haze of ennui and

disappointed sex

leaving them a vast

and empty space

they could finally wander

across as lonely nomads

and find each other—

read her book together

and agree that the weather

inside them was the same

The battle of the sexes starts small with afterthoughts and little motions that signal cataclysmic changes. Ventre’s poem Infinity War is well titled, with surprises at every turn. Here the protagonist god, albeit newly created himself, sets a pose of dominance by announcing the superiority of his divine passions. His consort pushes back as she fashions their future together. The poet puts it thusly,

She said

It’s not a competition

and he saw now that

she had been carving

out of some

as yet undiscovered stuff

a miniature world

for them to inhabit someday

—It kind of is

He shook from his

Closing throat

When dreams and reality clash, addition results, a detritus, not deliberate, but needing to be dealt with in a concerted way. In Ventre’s poem The Impossibility of Some Situations the lover’s expectations of his beloved’s largesse grows exponentially to the tune of twelve small elephants. His lover arrives in some distress, and she denies culpability. Loneliness and longing take over and the protagonist puzzles over his next move. Here he explains his conundrum and cedes his own future over to his fantasized beasts,

when I woke up from the dream

they were all here and

now they won’t leave me

They can’t stay here

She said

I know

He said

But they won’t leave

Well

She said

It’s them or me

He looked down at the smallest elephant he had taken

to be their leader and waited for a sign

It came in the form of a wink

timed

to the sound of a closing door

Love’s danger often slips into softened tokens and pleasure’s intensity, both underestimated and overlooked. Ventre’s title poem It’s Not Love Till Someone Loses An Eye reminds all mere mortals of their frailty in the face of God-given fervor. Right from the get-go mankind serves love’s desire under full threat. The poet opens his poem by powering up his persona’s beloved,

I should warn you

She said

Two of my former lovers

were dragged to their

deaths by wild horses

Sometimes a breakfast joint fills the whole world with satiety and delight. But when one tries to reduce it into component parts it somehow loses its luster. In his poem Breakfast All Day Ventre’s protagonist converses with God (the Almighty One) on the virtues of his favorite diner. God pushes back in the way that God always does. An omelet, the music, and the rain become foils in this delicate argument. The protagonist’s beloved becomes the salve. Here God tones down (somewhat unfairly) the man’s satisfaction and hyperbole,

That diner

God said

Is just a cemetery with a pond

in the middle to drown in

they fish the bodies out and bury them

in the surrounding hills

I know

He said

Also

Continued God

To get here

You climbed into a car

Full of men with scarred faces

I know

He said

But the omelet was perfect

Courting demands putting one’s best foot forward or at least a recognizable and familiar foot, soothing to the judgmental beloved. Of a Feather, Ventre’s poem of fervid accommodation or, perhaps, rapt identification, succeeds wildly in devolving all oppressive expectations and conjuring up a down-to-earth lover’s tryst. The poet opens his contemplation of same-feathered birds this way,

Don’t come near me

She said from the

other side of the door

I smell like a dumpster

I have no joy in me

And I’m tired

so he walked for 1000 miles

and presented his sad

dusty shoes to her …

Love’s logic demolishes all competitive philosophies. That’s not to say that it promotes health or happiness. Obsessions usually don’t. In Ventre’s epilogue poem, The Godless Night Kitchen (Remodeled), the poet laments love’s process, but savors the result. Or is it the opposite,

He finds he and she add up

to each other

and in the morning he’ll wake

before her when

someone comes to him and

tells the truth of what

an unfinished symphony

they are

And that all hearts are designed

To harden and crack.

There are birds in there

That’s how they get out

The good news is that somehow most lovers, knee deep in cranberries and jackhammer dust, do survive. Mutually assured destruction still works, and artists of all stripes, as Ventre’s stunning poetry collection attests, navigate between the twin dangers of self-immolation and fame. And more to the point—creation and love triumph.

lesser case by Mark Decarteret

 

Mark Decarteret, lesser case. Nixes Mate Books.  2021. 86pp. $18.00

REVIEW BY RUTH HOBERMAN

            The bio in lesser case tells us little about Mark Decarteret:  only that he “has appeared next to Charles Bukowski in a lo-fi fold out, Pope John Paul II in a high-test collection of Catholic poetry, Billy Collins in an Italian fashion coffee table book, and Mary Oliver in a 3785 page pirated lit-trap.”  More traditional accounts on-line note that Decarteret   has been the poet laureate of Portsmouth New Hampshire (2009-2011), has worked at Water Street Books in Exeter, and is widely published—in anthologies; in journals such as AGNI, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Poetry East, and Third Coast; and in six previous collections. 

            But Decarteret’s elusive “About the Author” is revealing in its way, evoking him through juxtaposition rather than as a biographical self.  The poems in lesser case push against any easy distillation of meaning or authorial presence.  In Decarteret’s previous  book, For Lack of a Calling, punctuation, capital letters, and syntax operated more or less conventionally.  Here, in contrast, the upper case is reserved for “I” and Jesus, there are no periods, and the syntax is sometimes difficult to parse—as in the book’s title:  lesser than what?  should it be “lower case”? if not, what kind of case?

            The book’s first poem, “front,” while providing no answers to these questions, invites the reader in, to a place

                        where my shaking finds company

                        more light has gone bad

                        & yet the weary recognitions

                        always happily remain

If I take the title as continuous with the first line, the poem situates me at the front of this book, keeping the speaker company as he shakes—whether from age, illness, or uncertainty—a shaking that has replaced an earlier more “resolute” self: 

                        first we had bed creaks

                        & all sorts of hunger

                        then reality sat in even

                        more radiant aberrations.

I love those oxymoronic “radiant aberrations,” with their celebration of weirdnesses and mistakes which, given the poem’s positioning, we then expect to encounter in the poems that follow.  Indeed, the phrase “reality sat in” (not “set in” as we might expect) hints at strangenesses to come.

            One strangeness is the poems’ relation to the natural world.  In a 2018 interview, Decarteret described the nature-poems in For Lack of a Calling as “eco-laments” about “living in a time and place where [nature has] almost run its course in some way.”  In lesser case he rejects the poetic praise of nature as self-serving. Take, for example, “I have a minor in visual arts,” which ridicules his own past use of imagery:

                        now those starlings I once rated

                        an 8 are not even worth

                        throwing one’s latest voice—

                        that shock of hearing one

                        making a lesser case for oneself

Perhaps the “lesser case” is their and our inevitable stance in a fallen world, where manufacturing tropes (“what’s not to liken to anything else?” he asks) brings us no closer to anything and leaves the poet “wobbly as a calf/licked well past relevance.”  As the speaker notes in “inhabitants,” the poem that follows, “we won’t ever be/worthy of this house.”

            When Decarteret allows himself to indulge in descriptive language, it’s wonderful:  in “some say (seed),” for example, a cardinal comes “crashing the scrub/singing & stammering/cross-tongued” amid “branches signing/their iciest of scripts—/a blanket of wet/& then chatter, exaltation.” But the exaltation is dashed in the next stanza: “this response to be cashed in—/an image in shambles again/like a berry’s taxed memory.”  Decarteret undercuts easy pleasures, opting always for the “lesser case.” 

            A related strangeness is Decarteret’s harsh stance toward his own role as poet.  In “the last ever ode to one’s pencil” the speaker lambastes himself:

                        even w/the sky full of sun, unflawed

                        I’ll waffle or low-ball, tell you lies

 

                        go what you’ve come to call

                        post-modernist on you

 

                        try to sell you on the same sparrow

                        I saw yesterday atop the potted flowers

Like the “berry’s taxed memory” in “some say (seed),” the sparrow has been compromised by human greed, and the poet’s words are complicit.  Indeed, with his “lab coat & paper hat,” balling up “more poems into asterisks*,” the poet sounds downright ludicrous.

            That asterisk*, though, is a key pivot, as it sends us to an actual footnote: “please know if I’m lost on you, stolen & sold-off-in-lots, that my line about love was about a lot more than just votes.”  Asterisk:  a quasi-star that sends us toward additional annotations and qualifications—away from, rather than toward the source of light. Or love.

            There is a presence here that counterbalances the poet’s “lesser case”: the subtle, complicated invocation of Christianity as a source of transcendence.  Various poem titles—missal, host, lord god bird—invite us to think in these terms.  And various poems not only suggest that humanity on its own is a sorry thing but hint at an alternative. In “rather,” for example, the speaker has come to hate  “the velvety kings/we’d become/thinking ourselves/all but invisible/as our hair was combed/back in the mirror/by yet another.” Another what?  Some presence we’ve preferred to ignore?

            I’ll conclude with a final strangeness, Decarteret’s poem “the kingfisher,” with its homage to Charles Olson’s 1949 poem “Kingfishers.”  Critics argue over what Olson was getting at in his poem.  Olson himself, in his 1950 essay on “projective verse”  argued for a poetry that was kinetic, more speech act than discourse, and thus resistant to paraphrase:  “the conventions which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open as quietly as must the too set feet of the old line.” Decarteret’s poems have a similar resistance to being pinned down, a similar pressure on the reader to follow their short lines and uncertain syntax into self-questioning and suspense.  “What does not change/is the will to change,” Olson’s poem opens, a line equally relevant to lesser case.  But even as Decarteret quotes Olson several times in “the kingfisher,” he does so with a difference—shifting from several to a single kingfisher in his title, and extending his poem beyond Olson’s final, inconclusive line, “I hunt among stones.” Decarteret concludes:

                        I hunt among stones

                        where the shadows have long been

                        trying to enter their side of our story

Or, as the speaker says in “lord god bird,” “if one holds their/place long enough/one will begin/to see the ghosts/burning their way/back into things.”