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Saturday, September 14, 2019
Celebration of Life in Honor of Ifeanyi A. Menkiti 1940-2019: Oct. 5th, 2019
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
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?
Thursday, September 05, 2019
Except for Love New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall
Except for Love
New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall
New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall
Edited by Cynthia
Brackett-Vincent
(Encircle Publications, 2019)
Review by Lawrence Kessenich
No doubt inspired by the 2018 death of well-loved New
England poet Donald Hall, this anthology pays tribute to Hall through poems
about him and his beloved wife, Jane Kenyon, poems dedicated to him (or them),
and poems responding to Hall’s work. At least half-a-dozen of the poems are inspired
by specific poems Hall wrote, such as Scott T. Hutchinson’s “Wild Honey,” after
Hall’s “Self-Portrait as a Bear”; Tricia Knoll’s “Obsessed Haiku,” after Hall’s
“Distressed Haiku”; and Kyle Potvin’s “Waiting for the Results,” after Hall’s “Her
Long Illness.”
Some of the poets here seem to have known Hall and Kenyon, their
poems providing specific images from their life together, while others admired
the poets’ work from afar. Kenyon is secondary in this anthology, of course, it
being dedicated to Hall, but the two poets, married to each other for decades,
were so intertwined, that it would be nearly impossible to put together a book
about Hall without including something about Kenyon’s significance in his life.
For example, Steven Rattner’s poem “All the Time in the World,” dedicated to “Don
and Jane,” appears to be written from Hall’s point-of-view, saying things about
their life together such as:
One morning we taste salvation
in a swallow of milk.
There is frost scaling the bedroom window
and we take it for heaven.
These beautiful lines give a taste of the imagistic treasures
to be found in this anthology. Here are a few others.
From “Lunatics” by Sherry Barker Abaldo:
You gather me again
and again in your arms
like kindling,
our moonlit skin blue as India gods.
From “Seapoint Beach” by Mary Anker:
The last winter storm
split
our apple tree
in half
the wound
orange and raw
against her dark bark
orange and raw
against her dark bark
points to the sky
hands in prayer…
hands in prayer…
From “Whisper” by Andrew Periale:
I want to hear the soft explosions
of humpbacks surfacing; cold, salt spray
soaking our clothes; dark men poised,
their great harpoons held high, waiting.
But there are more abstract poems as well—a place where
Hall, for all of his New Hampshire country concreteness, would also sometimes venture,
such as in his poem “Advent”:
When I know that the grave is
empty,
Absence eviscerates me,
And I dwell in a cavernous,
constant
Horror
vacui.
Wally Swist’s “A Wild Beauty” speaks of how a scent:
nurtures us through what
are calculated avaricious
rants, vortices of disorder,
with what serves us
as an uncanny sustenance
its own inexplicable elixir.
are calculated avaricious
rants, vortices of disorder,
with what serves us
as an uncanny sustenance
its own inexplicable elixir.
The abstract is never far from the concrete in any of these
poems, though (even Hall’s and Swist’s above begin with concrete images, an empty
grave and a scent, before they delve into the abstract) so all of the poems
feel grounded and vital. There is a lot about loss and decline, but even more
about love, bounty, and the uplifting qualities of natural life.
In “Ancient History,” Dawn Potter’s character Baby tries to
forget the loss and decline around her mother, but finds it difficult: :
Forgets her skinny fingers
their skinny sharp nails,
their skinny sharp nails,
her stare like a chain
yanking him under
Forgets how bad she smelled.
yanking him under
Forgets how bad she smelled.
But in “Over Breakfast” Tricia Knoll imagines Hall and
Kenyon talking to each other about creativity in language peppered with uplifting
natural images:
Did you hibernate last night? Is
now when your nut
breaks open? Does your wild aster seed fall
on cracked silt? Your fruited branch bend
under pears?
…
breaks open? Does your wild aster seed fall
on cracked silt? Your fruited branch bend
under pears?
…
Maybe a murmur in green waters
lapping ashore as one
or going separately. If we must.
lapping ashore as one
or going separately. If we must.
This is a book of powerful, varied, vivid poems that don’t
shrink from the darker side of life, but which, on the whole, come down on the
side of love, creativity, and a deep appreciation for the beauty and richness
of nature. Hall and Kenyon would both appreciate it and be proud to have their
names associated with it.
Tuesday, September 03, 2019
Dennis Daly’s new book The Devil’s Artisan: Sonnets from the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, A Settler of Scores
Dennis Daly’s new book The Devil’s Artisan: Sonnets from the Autobiography of
Benvenuto Cellini, A Settler of Scores
article by
Michael Steffen
History
and art are the orders of the day in the new collection of sonnets by Dennis
Daly in the persona of Benvenuto Cellini, 16th-century master goldsmith and
sculptor who won the praise of Michelangelo. It is à propos for the Boston area
with its great traditions in the arts. Also because one of Cellini’s extremely
rare coins, and not many coins survive, is housed in a glass case in gallery
209 in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Page in
and page out a voice emerges and takes hold, urgent in its trochaic cadences.
Yet Daly, a poet noted for his ability with forms, knowing what goes where in a
line, surprises also with a seeming lack of footing, which had me wondering as
I read through the book if I were reading trochees (DA-da) or anapests
(da-da-DA), or whether we were in a standard pentameter, as with the fourth
line of the opening sonnet:
Some gold, some silver things that
men applaud…
The same
sonnet’s first line, however, skips off on an eye-opening anapest, unless we’re
going to call it a trochee, which would be truer to a 5-beat line scheme:
I confess my faults to Almighty God…
The point
is these are not translations, the poems are entirely in Daly’s hands, and
throughout the license taken with the measure of the lines had me both
grinning, for the ingenuity of it all, and at a loss, as a reader of
Renaissance poetry, wanting a regular iambic pentameter. Here is an example of
an early translation John Milton did from an Italian Canzone:
In love, young men and ladies crowd and share
a laugh at me "Why write this? Why
write in a strange tongue we know not, and strain
yourself in verse of love? How do you dare?
Speak plain, if you'd have your hopes not prove vain,
and your ambitions fall a shattered lie."
They mock me so "you've other shores to try
other streams, other waters in your reach
upon whose greening beach
now, even now, sprout leaves that never die
to wreathe your locks as laureate.
Why load your shoulders so with foreign freight?"
I tell you, Canzon. Give them my reply:
My lady says, and her words are my heart:
This is the tongue love boasts of as his art.
The Original:
Canzone
Ridonsi donne e giovani amorosi
M'accostandosi attorno, e perche scrivi,
Perche tu scrivi in lingua ignota e strana
Verseggiando d'amor, e come t'osi?
Dinne, se la tua speme si mai vana,
E de pensieri lo miglior t'arrivi;
Cosi mi van burlando, altri rivi
Altri lidi t'aspettan, e altre onde
Nelle cui verdi sponde
Spuntati ad hor, ad hora la tua chioma
L'immortal guiderdon d'eterne frondi
Perche alle spalle tue soverchia soma?
Canzon dirotti, e tu per me rispondi
Dice mia Donna, e'l suo dir, è il mio cuore
Questa è lingua di cui si vanta Amore.
We
certainly can’t be asked to stand up to Milton. But here’s a point about how Italian poetry has been
translated into regular English verse. Nor does Daly omit the occasion to use
archaic language for feel:
Out in the open air at the ruins
Of old Rome I escaped the dreadful
plague.
In ways circuitous and oddly vague
I entered the jewel trade, eating
pigeons… (page 26)
The Preface and the Biographical Sketch opening the book are worth the cover of this
most handsome book issued by Dos Madres Press. Cellini’s was a highly dramatic
life entailing murders, prisons, the rich patronage, society and opprobrium of
popes, as well as significant time in France under the patronage of the French
High Renaissance monarch Francis I, who was also a generous benefactor of
Galileo.
Daly’s a
master of sequence and thematic strategies as we saw in his previous books Night Walking with Nathaniel and Alisher Navoiy Twenty-One Ghazals. As
Rick Mullin points out, “Daly gives us the story as he receives it personally
from Cellini.” And we sense this as we read through the poems to a chilling
degree. It is absolutely visionary, if difficult to score. Speaking of which,
you would not wish for Benvenuto Cellini to have a score to settle with you.
It’s a
paperback that could easily sit on your living room table.
Dos Madres
Press, Inc
P.O. Box
294 Loveland, Ohio 45140
ISBN
978-1-948017-46-6
Saturday, August 31, 2019
Voices of Dogtown By James R. Scrimgeour
Voices of Dogtown
By
James R. Scrimgeour
Loom
Press
Lowell,
Massachusetts
ISBN:
978-0-931507-16-8
87
Pages
$15.00
REVIEW BY DENNIS DALY
James
R. Scrimgeour communes with spirits and he does it with wit and
wisdom. In Scrimgeour’s new poetry collection, Voices of Dogtown,
he conjures up the denizens of a long abandoned New England village
on the outskirts of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The few specters that
still haunt this plot of land, called Dogtown, are not happy campers.
Without any mollycoddling, the poet gives them voices and listens to
their grievances, all the while working into these poems a jumble of
scholarly citations, guidebook descriptions, ekphrastic commentaries,
and even conjectures from an earlier eminent poet. Consider this book
a topographical and historical adventure. At the end of his
introductory poem entitled Dogtown, Scrimgeour sets the tone,
“The
settlement at Dogtown was merely something
of
an eddy in the… history of Cape Ann.” (C&R, p.43)
“It
is the lonely highland of Cape Ann,
empty
of habitation, abandoned by the dogs
and
even by the cows that used to find
thin
pasture there, left to the ghosts
of
its deserted village. It’s where you’re off to…
when
the world is too much with you.” (Garland, p.57)
O.K.
We’re off…
In
short order the reader meets Tammy Younger, Queen of the Witches.
Foul mouthed Tammy does not suffer fools lightly. Her five timely
narrations inform and enliven the book. The first of those
narrations, entitled Thomasine (Tammy) Younger
(1753-1829)—Introduction, inserts eeriness into the landscape and
reveals the onset of a relationship between Tammy and Scrimgeour’s
persona, whom she calls “old geezer” throughout. Here Tammy
explains the soft spot she has for the poet,
f…in’
weird how I see so clearly into and through him,
an’
he sees into and through me—hafta admit it’s kinda nice
to
finally have someone tell our story from my point a view—
tho
I wish he wouldn’t clean up my language so much—
all
those f…in’ dots—aaarrrgggh!!! Whassee wanna do
sell
his book in the tourist shops—hmmmmm, might do
the
tourists some good to read somethin’ a little nearer
the
truth—an’ the geezer has an edge I kinda like…
The
hilly area chronicled by Scrimgeour is strewn with boulders left by
the last glacier as it recoiled from the sun’s new warmth. They are
accentuated by shrubs, bushes, new growth trees, and berry patches.
Even on hot days a mysterious chill (perhaps from nearby swamps)
seems to hang in the air appending melancholy inflections. Groupings
of smaller rocks signify abandoned cellars, each having a story to
tell-- sometimes known, sometimes unknown. Some of the larger
boulders the poet imagines as self-sustaining homes, scarred with
individual markings. Scrimgeour’s poem A Community of Boulders
begins this way,
large
and small, beige and grey houses
deposited
centuries ago by a retreating
glacier—homes,
rounded and smooth—
no
doors, front or back—cracks for
windows,
rare bluebirds resting on or
beneath
the eaves—wild shrub hedges
here
and there, bayberry bushes imported
by
colonists—with thorns and cluster
of
shiny red tear-shaped berries—guarding
the
non-existent doors…
A
second ghost that consorts with Scrimgeour (although grudgingly) is
the ill-fated Abram Wharf. Wharf, the most educated man in Dogtown
and a cousin of Theophilus Parsons, Chief Justice of Massachusetts
Supreme Court, played by the rules and for a while parleyed his
respectability into prosperity as a shepherd and a farmer. He married
young and apparently his own fortune declined as the town declined.
His sheep died and his own house became “hardly habitable.”
Scrimgeour’s piece Abram Wharf (1738 ca—1814) records Wharf’s
demise,
… one
day in 1814, Old Abram (aged 76 years)
“sat
by the fire sharpening his razor.
“’Sister,’
said he,
‘do
you think people who commit suicide go to heaven?’
“’I
don’t know; but I hope you will never do such a thing,…’
Was
her answer. ‘God forbid,’ was his solemn response.
‘Soon
he slipped the razor into his shoe, … went out,” (Mann, p.54)
and
“put [the] razor to his neck and crawl[ed] under a boulder
to
die.” (Dresser, p.15) Legend says no moss will ever grow
on
that rock…
Another
of the ghostly voices used by Scrimgeour to provide insight to his
readers is that of Captain Jack or John Morgan Stanwood. Stanwood’s
silky utterances demand attention. He insists that the poet read the
information embedded in dead leaves found at the site of his old
cobbling shop (or boo). The leaves, turned book fragments, then
reveal key background elements pertaining to the other characters and
Stanwood himself. Ol’ Abram, the suicide, for instance, believed
that Tammy Younger caused much of his misfortune with her malevolent
spells. Stanwood, through his leaves, clarifies the situation in
Scrimgeour’s poem entitled Fragments from the Book John Morgan
Stanwood Kept in the Corner of his Boo,
July
28, 1814
… had
a talk with ol’ Abram today—
I
almost felt sorry for him—a sad spectacle, so ol’
an’
feeble, so depressed—feelin’ evil in the place, he said,
silly
fool, still blamin’ ugly ol’ Tammy for his dead sheep,--
kinda
strange, I tol’ him, you believing in witchcraft,
even
though you don’t believe in your religion—
not
any more than I do…
Scrimgeour
gives Tammy Younger the last say as he concludes his book. Here his
Dogtown meditation take a quite serious turn. Tammy, in the piece
Thomasine (Tammy) Younger—Conclusion, ponders the nature of
eternity and, specifically, the hell of bitterness and spite she has
created for herself amidst the boulders of her former home, now
abandoned town. She seems tired of it. She says,
I
is getting’ soft—beginnin’ to think about thinkin’ kindly
of
others—mebbe, as I said afore—it’s getting’ close
to
closin’ time—
mebbe…
mebbe not.
Poems of place,
like Scrimgeour’s Voices of Dogtown, often proffer visions, ghostly
or not, of lost hard scrabbled cultures that wake readers to their
own mortality and tenuousness. Delicate, hopeful perceptions need the
damp cellars of historical grounding. Read this collection and it
will alter, or even redeem, you. Mebbe.
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