Taurus by Paul Nemser

       


Taurus  by Paul Nemser

Review by Alice Weiss

            Paul Nemser’s Taurus is a poetry book with the scope of a Russian novel and the reach of a modern metal robotic arm able to withstand radioactivity, able to dispose of  radioactive waste.  There are over 100 poems here most of them lyrics, many of them in tercets, recalling Dante’s Inferno, like this one, a vast journey through a cultural landscape. There are lists and newspaper reports, classified ads for Russian wives.  There are mythical lovers and robot lovers and mythologizing scientists, bus images  Taurus is immensely ambitious at its core –sad and brave and funny, romantic—the book undertakes an epic reanimation and a re-evaluation of the Europa myth  engaging with an urban underworld of exploitation, technology, and science.  

             A myth, after all, is  a story of characters whose relationships reflect, explain, or symbolize both explicit and inchoate issues like origins, sexuality, love, landscape, culture and the seasons, power, domination,  science, and patterns of historical immigration and cultural exchange. In the original myth, Europa is a pretty cowherd on the Phoenician coast whom Zeus,

in the form a beautiful white bull, seduces and carries on his back west across the sea to the island of Crete.  Here, Europa is carried east over borders like a fugitive into Russia, “the snow cracks of a dark imperium.” She “listens for footsteps/Do they come for me?” “My Fate” she says

                        steps forelegs

            down out of the sky.  My exile

            beckons with shaken horns.

            My husband bears me on his back

           

            toward crosshatch birches

            where gods and men

           

            walk in the same shadows—

            But this lyrical figure, seeming at one with the natural world, is crossing the border into a different world controlled, as in the original myth, by the bull god, but different, contemporary.  The god  takes the form of a metal gargoyle perched under the roof of an insignificant palace near the Fontanka, the river that flows through the middle of St. Petersburg.  This is the city that Peter the Great pulled into Europe, and pulled Europe into.  The Palaces, the wide avenues, the paintings, the sculpture, the architecture, all Paris.  The bull gargoyle himself is a European figure but here he launches into Russia, makes Russia his bailiwick, his night club, his love nest. 

            When the god animates the bull to climb down from its perch, he becomes a bouncer in a night club,  Europa, a model on a scrolling placard. 

           

            He’s a god in the costume of a gargoyle

            in a speed shocked age.

            antennae in his horns, mirror glasses.

and she:

           

            How palpable she is across land and water,

            her dusky electricity

            almost in his metal reach.

            We are taken through the journey by an impersonal guide, our Virgil, in the form of side bars telling us what is going on and what we are about to see. In the five page series, for example, “His Age, Any” the sidebar:Personal ads /from the bull/ gargoyle’s/ website for /Russian brides. Romance vies with devastating humor, for example, “Anna’s personal info: I am calm and lovely.  I have well-sided interests.” and Irina who wishes for a partner, thus: “I want to meet a man with serious relations to me.  I need a lot of attention, kind and warm feelings. . .I want to be loved and one woman only for one man (height 5’7”)”  Europa, in one of any number of lyrical prose poems, desires

           

            A man with a mineral strength. A straight-ahead

            approach. who will breakfast on herbs and new mown grass, his chest bare

            as a boulder.  Whose words boom within that chest and Ohhhh comes out

            round as a sphere.

Nemser’s romantic imagination seems boundless: Europa as a matryoschka, a nesting doll,

           

            You inside you

            and inside that

            is you,

            Child- sized you fingernail you,

            tiniest speck

            without flaw.

and again, “Her Image-Griboedov Canal”

           

            I envy the photographers

            who saw you live:

            golden airy thinness,

            a direct unceasing gaze

            as if the lens had a soul.. .

            Snapshot. Snap. No haze, no shade.

            Snap. Snap. Every shot rips a hole.

           

            Is it like that for you,

            My photogenic bird?

            Lightbringer, when the shutter closes.

In a poem called “Nuclear” Europa  speaks

           

            Come we’ll sleep when all’s exploded

            Let’s rise and split and slice like moons.

            Eclipse me. Reflect me

            in a broken reef, a blackened sea.

            I’ll destroy you if you destroy me.

Another aspect of this work, like going down a creek bumping into rocks, are the puns. The title

of the personals section, His Age, Any, is actually the refrain.  All the Russian brides will take a man, any age, but the breadth of cultural consideration and reconsideration bounces you into the notion of “Age” as era, the Matryoschka poem is an email “attachment.”

            Once Yevgeny, the robot arm shows up from the secret city of Tomsk where he had been enriching plutonium, he enters the “Radium Institute founder, VI. Vernadsky. . .

           

            mapper of the radioactive flesh of Mother Russia.

            Yevgeny full circle.  Once “bomber,” “poisoner,”

            sponges up the Pu, U and all the transuranics.

PU indeed. A poem or so later, there is a list of all things in Russia and the world named for Vernadsky, as if he were an Athena, or George Washington.

            And love, love.  The air as orgasm.  A group of pages from newspapers describing weird incidents of ball lighening, interspersed by Taurus speaking poems.  Here is Taurus listening to drumming near,  Dom knigi,a famous bookstore in St. Petersburg in the renovated Singer sewing machine building. “Drum. . .”

           

            Like the god’s voice, but without the god.

            Without even the demigod, the hemidemisemitgod.

            The bull-man, revved up, ready to explode—listens:

            that rhythm? Is it an empire falling?

            Is that glass kniving into Nevsky tar?

            . . .The water settles, then explodes.

            A carp flies on the embankment

            bleathing air.  Everything’s

            waiting to be caught.

            What happens when gods copulate?  Zeus took Europa by force: war, violence. and love.  This book is such a layered experience that I cannot hope to cover its pleasures in a single review.  Some parts of it need to be read with Google close by, but the lyricism, the jokes, the characterizations, the nightclub, the robots’ love affair.  All demand reading and rereading.  Taurus is certainly well worth the The New American Poetry Prize conferred on it last year.  Paul Nemser will be featured at the Brookline Public Library Poetry Reading February 16, 2014.  Next week.  It’s a not miss.

Crossroads Poems by Jean Dany Joachim

Jean Dany Joachim

Review by Lo Galluccio




Crossroads
Poems
by Jean Dany Joachim
Copyright Jean Dany Joachim 2013
125 pages

It is a lovely book, an approachable book, a heartwarming book: Jean Dany Joachim's newly released "Crossroads"/Chimenkwaze with poems in both Creole and English.  I was privileged to hear Jean Dany read from this book at the Cambridge Public Library's new auditorium space a week or so ago.  And while he read his son Danyson was always in his arms or at his feet wanting to be near him.  Jean Dany's son is clearly the apple of his eye and that somehow just amplifies how soulful and wonderful his book and his vision are. Jean Dany's mantra or slogan is "Life is Good."  And for a man who hails from a country where dictatorship and disasters have struck hard and wrought their damages, this is fairly remarkable.   In fact,  he said that though he has lived in the United States about 15 years,  he almost always writes about Haiti.  What astounds me about Jean Dany's work is that it is clear and simple without ever being trite.  Very few poets can render the give and take of the heart, of life and death, of nature, of friendships as transparently and as truthfully as he does.  Open to any page in this book and you will be delighted by how easily and profoundly Jean Dany captures things.  In "Formula for a Poem" he writes:

    'if you can't write a poem
    Write anyway
    Pay no attention to your pen
    Write the title
    Read the title
    Pay no attention to the page."
                                                          p 21

He makes it seem like a magic trick, one that should require little effort, a simple equation of just a few things.    He is saying, "Do not be self-conscious about it."  And he isn't.  In the poem "The Old Hat' he writes:
    "I have seen the birth of dreams
    I have seen a thousand paths
    And seen cathedrals
    I am the shadow they seek no more
    I'm the one they take no more out...
    They call me the old hat."
In this way he breathes new life into that cliche or familiar saying, "old hat."   The old hat'
is an old soul who has traveled deep and broad.   It is a clever turn of the phrase, though
Jean Dany is careful never to over-emphasize or become too elaborate.   Sometimes he
pens a three stanza short poem, as in "Dinner:"
    "My bowl of rice
    Laughs at me
    And the walls too.
   
    Yet I know of some
    Who feel just like me
    At a candlelight feast
   
    I squeeze my pain
    And laugh back."

It seems like a Zen koan or a riddle, a wonderful twist.   Hardly ever is the writer all alone
in his observations; more often he includes the reader, or makes universal what his own
experience might be. 
In "Sorrow" he writes:
"It's raining in my heart
But my eyes show no sign of it
I feel it deep in my guts..."
Many of his poems are dedicated to a specific person, as if he is writing to communicate to a special friend.   In "Don't Look Into My Heart" he writes:
"Don't look into my face
to  tell me you saw my heart

I am just as  i am
In a bet with life
And I am not willing to lose
My joys, my sottows
Do not own my face
I do not feel it when I am hurt
And when I give a good kick to life
I also feel it."

One of my favorite poems is "Death" in which he uses butterflies to designate the mystery
of our passing.  He writes:
"Butterflies of death
do not feel the cold
Butterflies of death need no key
A snall white butterfly
A colorless one
A butterfly of death
That breaks my heart forever."
Instead of choosing an obvioulsy dark or sinister metaphor or sign, like a scorpion or a rat, Joachim chooses a light and whimsical creature to signify death.  And this turns our presumptions upside down.  Death still breaks his heart, but it is not so heavy or painful. And I like that.  It is an interesting relief.  Death is almost fragile and emphemeral.

Other fine poems are "A Love Letter" and "Desire" and "A River calls your Name."
Though he is rarely explictly political, the poem "After the 48 Hours Ultimatum Speech
Before the Invasion of Iraq, by G.W. Bush. President of the United States." he writes:
"While our leaders rise  up to gods, and
Our soldiers to glorious barbarians
Here, I will stand searching for that little spot on the sky
Where God might be --Let's hope that He is watching."

There is much to be gained in reading this extraordinary book.  It is like drinking from a clear
spring of water.   There is so much hope underlying what is primal, what is upheaval, what is uncontrollable.  There is so much love for our humanity and such respect for the  mystery of existence.    It is a book you will want to refer to again and again. 

Jean Dany Joachim is the 2nd Poet Populist of Cambridge
He teached at Bunker Hill Community College and runs
a poetry series in Cambridge.


***** Lo Galluccio is the Populist Poet of Cambridge, Mass.

Women Musicians Network 17th annual concert, March 5th

-- Lucy Holstedt, my neighbor and friend on School St. in Somerville puts on this great musical event in Boston every year. Here is an article by her husband Kirk Etherton, who also helps with this festive occasion....

Women Musicians Network

17th annual concert, March 5th

 BY KIRK ETHERTON

            Once a year, there's a once-in-lifetime show. This year, it's Wed., March 5th.  The focus—as always—will be on Berklee women students and their bands from around the world. Just make sure you're at the Berklee Performance Center, prepared to be surprised and amazed. 

            This year's WMN concert features 12 original acts. They range from Latin jazz and cabaret pop, to electronic, Middle Eastern, and big band. Something for everyone—or everything for everyone, perhaps, given the consistently high level of originality and musicianship. The WMN show is always extremely diverse, but never at the expense of quality. (Note: men are not excluded; you'll see plenty of very fine, non-female musicians.)

      Somerville resident Prof. Lucy Holstedt is WMN co-founder, faculty advisor, and always-engaging concert host. Co-directing the show once again (and also leading a performance of her Balkan Choir) is Prof. Christiane Karam.

Women Musicians Network

17th Annual Concert, 2014

Wed., March 5th, 8:15 - 10:00 pm

Berklee Performance Center

136 Mass. Ave., Boston

TICKETS: www.berklee.edu/BPC

$8 in advance, $12 at the door

 Box Office: 617.266.7455

Newton Free Library Poetry Series: Lee, Twomey, and Bergman. 7PM Tuesday Feb. 11, 2014

An Artful Biography, Susan Cheever’s e. e. cummings: a life

An Artful Biography, Susan Cheever’s  e. e. cummings: a life


by Michael Todd Steffen


Princeton poet Richard P. Blackmur called the deliberately humbled language and typographical appearance of E. E. Cummings’s poetry “baby talk,” biographer Susan Cheever tells us in her Preface
to e. e. cummings: a life. One critic simply wondered what was wrong with this poet. Cheever defends:

Nothing was wrong with Cummings—or with Duchamp or Stravinski or Joyce,
for that matter. All were trying to slow down the inexorable rush of the world,
to force people to notice their own lives. In the twenty-first century, that rush
has now reached Force Five; we are all inundated with information and given
no time to wonder what it means or where it comes from. Access without
understanding and facts without context have become our daily diet (p. xii).

One of the few excuses Cheever makes for the new biography, other than her convincing admiration, a love that is felt throughout the book, Cheever’s is a powerful argument – “we are all inundated with information and given no time to wonder what it means” – for the timeliness of her book to reconsiderthe life and work of the modernist generation’s “beloved heretic.”

In previous books, Cheever has sketched and traced the lives of such emblematic Americans as Louisa May Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, AA founder Bill Wilson, including a memoir of her father the well-known author John Cheever. The new Cummings biography demonstrates not just a little experience and know-how with the genre, so well digested in its scope of Cummings’s life.

While the book is ample with details and inside looks at the highlights (and shadowy interludes) of the poet’s life (his first encounter with Keats, the tragic drowning of Rex the family dog at Silver Lake, his father’s appeals to the White House to obtain his son’s release from incarceration in France during WWI), Cheever’s narrative avoids getting mired down in itemizations. Sidestepping a tedious linear timeline, the author uses touchstone events and moments, special locales, relationships and inspirations as topical starting points from which to build context and dip into particulars. This orchestration of the biography reads at an informative brisk pace and feeds our curiosity, paragraph by paragraph, chapter to chapter, to want to read on.

His idyllic childhood at 104 Irving Street “separating cerebral Cambridge and orchidaceous Somerville,” the family’s rural summer house at Joy Farm in New Hampshire, Cummings’s rebellious days at Harvard when he took to drinking, frequenting night clubs and began to write poetry, all of these set up the polarities of the poet’s young life between its solid foundation in a family of “Harvard royalty” and the individual notions and pain that drove the young man to rebel against that foundation as he began to make his individual way.

Paris and World War I, Cummings’s apartment at Patchin Place in Greenwich Village, his love affairs including two difficult marriages and a daughter the poet did not raise, interspersed with cameo tete-a-tete’s with many famous writers and intellectuals, and the mellow, introspective last years guide Cheever’s narrative through the mature life of the established poet.

Building background and context to bring out the importance of events nuances Cheever’s narratives with insight. A major shift in attitudes was taking place at Harvard when Cummings enrolled in 1911. This shift was indicative of national as well as international trends.

[T]he old Harvard had been run with the aristocratic liberal rigor of Charles William Eliot…a populist democrat in an elitist world who believed that any man [or woman] could be educated by reading a five-foot shelf of classics…
     When Cummings got to Harvard two years after Eliot stepped down, the institution was slowly and painfully giving way to the…the conservative, anti-Semitic, racist aegis of A. Lawrence Lowell, a Brahmin’s Brahmin [pp. 30 – 1].

As Cheever portrays the external changes of the world around the young Cummings, she deftly traces the poet’s internal labor to find an authentic response, his struggle “to reshape the triangle between the reader, the writer, and the subject of the poem” [p. xi]. Adopting a Keatsian credo “of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination,” the young Cummings developed his odd mixture of individual humility and sarcastic, resentful defiance against the colossal powers (social, financial, military) that dominate and inspire fear.

Cheever draws the illustrative parallels and differences between Ezra Pound and Cummings, kindred spirits in buoyant defiance. Pound’s poetry was to exert profound influences on Cummings’s technical experiments to find his signature, the lower-case i. It is paradoxical that a sensibility so antithetical to the dehumanization of modern technology would come to invent his trademark thanks to the mechanics of type print, then newly available to the individual on the typewriter. One of the legacies Cummings left to poetry has its stamp in typographical idiosyncrasies. Readers cannot help but be reminded of him every time we spot even an ampersand or a phrase or line in the upper case.

It is a stroke of serendipity, in the way of personal observation, that Cheever’s new biography is being released the same month as Joan Houlihan’s Ay, the second book in a narrative sequence that employs a devised English language out of semiotic emphases, creating effects reminiscent of Cummings:

    Us nest a fine weather long
    between the heat of kin
    the least of us in huts built round with stones…    [The Us, p. 3]

40 years ago James Merrill made elaborate use of type on page to mirror his communications via the alphabet on the oui-ja board with the other world in his epic trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover:

    LONG B4 THE FORTUNATE CONJUNCTION
    (David’s and mine) ALLOWED ME TO GET THRU
    MAY I SAY WEVE HAD OUR EYES ON U    [Section E, The Book of Ephraim]


Far from being the aim of whaling in a ponderous authoritative biography, the achievement of Susan Cheever in e. e. cummings: a life will be as the best gateway biography, accessible, enlightening and  enjoyable to initiates in Cummings scholarship and lore, fresh with insights and I think appropriate authorial sympathy for her subject, as a witness to the cultivation of humanists and the humanities in our increasingly programmatic culture.
     Vitally, also, Cheever reminds us why it is important for readers of poetry to be familiar with the challenges of a poet’s life and the illumination that life brings to us. Cummings was well aware of the burden and gift of his inspiration, as one of his famous Harvard lectures intimates:

    I am someone who humbly and proudly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries…
    that ‘an artist, a man, a failure’ is no mere whenfully accreting mechanism, but a givingly
    eternal complexity…whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony
    is to grow.


e. e. cummings: a life
ISBN: 9780307379979
by Susan Cheever
is available through Pantheon Books
February 11, 2014
for $26.95
Contact: Josefine Kals, 212-572-2565, jkals@randomhouse.com

reduced to joy by Mark Nepo

reduced to joy

by Mark Nepo

Viva Editions

Berkeley, California

Copyright © 2013  by Mark Nepo

153 pages, softbound, $15.95

ISBN: 978-1-936740-57-4

Vera Pavlova was born in Moscow. She graduated from the Gnessin Academy, specializing in the history of music, and is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, four opera librettos, and lyrics to two cantatas. Her works have been translated into eighteen languages

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Some of Mark Nepo’s poems begin with what could be a riddle or a philosophical pursuit. In “Coming Out” the first four lines set you thinking, what is he saying?

While there is much to do

we are not here to do.

Under the want to problem-solve

is the need to being-solve.

“Near The Light” has a three line initial stanza:  I’m saved by what is timeless./Can taste it though it fills no cup./Can feel it though it can’t be seen.

Many of the poems, however, are personal. Nepo talks about saving his puppy from drowning, a dead friend who may have died with secrets, about nature and other topics.  The poems are mostly about him, though justifiably as he is a long term survivor of a rare form of lymphoma.  His survival has had an immense impact on his poetry, as has his forty plus year career in poetry, health and spirituality.

Yes the poems are about him, and are written by him in a way that makes you not only like him, but admire him for his survival and his bravery.  But that’s not what he wants from you or me.  I believe what he wants is for us – the readers – to learn from this book of poetry as in the poem “Behind The Thunder”

I keep looking for one more teacher,

only to find that fish learn from water

and birds learn from sky.

If you want to learn about the sea,

it helps to be at sea.

If you want to learn about compassion,

it helps to be in love.

If you want to learn about healing,

it helps to know of suffering.

The strong live in the storm

without worshipping the storm.

Wise words from a poet who has suffered, has lived in the storm and lives to tell us in some 147 pages how to be better to ourselves and others. Oh, the road is not easy, but heading in the right direction is a start.

_______________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer for Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Street Press)

Author,  Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva Press)

Author, Fire Tongue (forthcoming, Cervena Barva Press)

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review Online Poetry Journal

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthologies 7& 8

Publisher, Muddy River Books

Broken Lines: The Art & Craft of Poetry, by Judith Skillman

 


Broken Lines: The Art & Craft of Poetry, by Judith Skillman. San Pedro, CA: Lummox Press, 2013. vi and 182 pp., Glossary, Works Cited, Author Bios, Contributor Bios, About the Author. $19.95 paper.

            All contemporary poets have confronted the taunting statements: free verse is not poetry--it has no rhyme, no meter. It's simply prose cut up with line breaks. And beginning poets may also wonder: Where should I break the line? And how do I achieve a sense of rhythm without rhyme and meter? How do I get started?  How do I organize a manuscript?

            Since 1988 Judith Skillman's successful career writing and publishing poetry gives her valuable and varied experience on the subject to answer those questions.  She has published 15 well-received collections of poems, and her next volume The Phoenix: New & Selected Poems 2007-2013 will be available early in 2014.  So she has "been there," and she understands the problems of an aspiring writer.  Broken Lines is not a textbook, but in the author's words, "my personal take on ways and means that may assist both aspiring and experienced poets to up their game."

            The author's "personal take" is entirely approachable.  Her style is conversational, colloquial, and elegant in the sense that the writing is easily understandable because the ideas and suggestions are stated clearly, logically, concisely with good sense and no clutter.  This book would be equally helpful to an individual working alone or as a supplement to a class of aspiring poets in a workshop.

            Obviously, Judith Skillman does not intend her book to be an all-encompassing guide to writing poetry. She has chosen to focus on the most immediate questions aspiring poets have--a discussion and guidelines for line breaks, how to vary structure in the context of free verse, search for the ars poetica poem, and steps required to facilitate the act of coming out of the closet.  Her work is "rife" with examples that come in the form of successful poems, personal examples, quotations from other writers, and interviews pertinent to the subject under discussion.  She includes strategies to support one's motivation, to fight against the feelings of isolation, and suggestions of ways to broaden ones base of what to write about.

            Broken Lines is divided into 5 sections, each packed with helpful points supported by examples.  Section 1 "Letting Go & Getting On" includes such topics as finding one's subject to write about, breaking the lines, enjambment, caesura, associative writing, form and content, condensing and being concise, revising. Section 2 "Giving Writer's Block the Boot" starts by suggesting that one can overcome angst by putting one's feelings into an ars poetica poem, includes 20 ideas for writing a poem with accompanying example poems,  ends with 7 suggestions for "Putting it All Together: Your Voice, Your Vision," and  a section on writing the occasional poem.  Section 3 "The Spark: Collaboration and Inspiration" presents the idea that subject matter and enrichment of one's writing can come through collaboration with other artists and gives examples of collaboration with a photographer, textile artist, visual artist, memoir writer, and includes an interview that discusses inspiration.  Section 4 "Your Poetry Manuscript" discusses manuscript

evolution--how to discover and develop a theme, how to order the manuscript, epigraphs, and creating front and back matter. And the final Section 5 "Maintaining Motivation" lists resources, ways writers can continue to write in the face of  publisher rejections, marketing strategies, 20 tips for giving a poetry reading, and what to do if one feels the plateau has been reached.

            Judith Skillman offers an astonishingly original take on the "How-to" book

on creative writing.  Her practical ideas, suggestions and valuable examples make Broken Lines: the Art & Craft of Poetry a valuable handbook for any writer of poetry.  The reader will come away encouraged, with a head full of information, ideas to implement, and with the recognition of the true poem by its effect.  Judith Skillman writes: "The best poems are those that go through you like a bullet train.  They are made of words and plain English, but they leave you wondering what went by."  This book will certainly help the aspiring writer compose poems that will leave their readers "wondering what went by."

                                   

 ****Bonny Barry Sanders’ reviews, articles, and poems have appeared in Birmingham Review, Blueline, Chattahoochee Review, Connecticut Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Ibbetson Street, Florida Review, The Louisiana Review, The Sow’s Ear, South Dakota Review, South Carolina Review and many other literary journals.  Her first book of poems is entitled Touching Shadows.   She is working on her second collection.  She lives with her husband in Jacksonville, FL.