28º bright sun, light breeze in the upper branches

Ruin by Cynthia Cruz is a book I first requested through ILL last fall. After I’d read just the first few poems, I knew it was a book I needed to own. This second read through proved that buying the book was the right choice. After I’d read the book once, I turned to the back cover to learn more about Cruz and also happened to read the blurbs. Blurbs don’t usually influence me to read a book, but these two really do capture the book well. “This is not a book about peacocks in twilight nor should it be read in the parlor,” begins Thomas Lux. And Reginald Shepherd writes of the “landscape of fates and fatal hungers, nightmares and dangerous desires, in which enchantment and terror are so intimate that they become one.” These blurbs are nearly poems themselves and apt descriptors of a book with a main theme of ruin and destruction.

Nearly all of the poems in Cruz’ collection contain a first-person speaker, and that speaker emerges out of the reality of a working-class family with an alcoholic mother and a brother who ends up dead due to some kind of gun violence. In fact, as I read the poems, I was reminded thematically of Beth Bachmann’s Temper. Cruz’ book threads through the destruction of a nuclear family, although there is even more mystery in the narrative than there was in Bachmann’s book.

Common images throughout the book include: horses, death, destruction, falcons, guns, a boat, the speaker hiding, and weeds, to name a few. Given that the poems are all compact bursts of language, I appreciated the weaving of key images throughout. In this interview for Poems Out Loud, Cruz states that when she writes she is “trying to make musical-language machines out of beauty and pain.” I have to say, she succeeds in doing so!

Here are two examples. I’ll copy the complete poems as they are short.

Twelve in Yellow-Weed at the Edge

Then, the police arrive–they don’t find me.
I’m disguised as a boy in a champagne wig
And hid inside the gold rattle of a warm Appalachia wind.
Beneath the trash of willow, I am. The sorrow
Of trailer parks and carnie uncles. The poor
Girl’s underworld, a weedy thing. The night,
With its kingdom of lanterns and awful blue lark.
How we waited, how we hid
Like wolves, in the revolving question of a field.

Sparks, Nevada

In the middle of the night, father
Brought me a falcon.

By morning, it ripped the wire and flew the hill
Into the highway.

When they found me in that car
My sleeve stemmed in blood,

I didn’t know what it was
I was trying to kill.

I saw a craft of orphans steaming down the river.
They were dressed in white and silent as a seance.

It was then I spoke to the bird.

Already God is shaking his black seed
Back into me.

Support a Poet/Poetry: Buy or Borrow a Copy of this Book Today
Ruin
Cynthia Cruz
Alice James Books, 2006

45º melting and mud, a sun I’d rather do without

Lucille Clifton did not drive, and that was a gift to me. In 1994, Clifton spent a week at my undergrad alma mater, the College of St. Benedict, as poet-in-residence. I had graduated the previous year, but my mentor, S. Mara Faulkner, arranged for me to return for the special workshop with Clifton and to attend all of the various readings and talks she gave. While I was there, I drove Clifton between the two campuses of CSB and St. John’s University, our brother school. Sixteen years later, I’ve never forgotten that week.

What I remember most is Clifton’s huge laugh and the smiles that extended clean up to her shining eyes. I was a very young poet, even for my already young age, not having experienced much of life yet. I’m a talker and a question-pesterer. Here was this older, wiser, amazing poet who never once lost patience with me. In fact, during one particular conversation exchanged at the bathroom sinks, I had my first encounter with a much more accomplished poet who spoke to me as an equal, regardless of my inexperience. I would go on to meet many other poets, especially in grad school, and far too many of them spoke down to me as a “lowly student.” Not this woman of generous spirit.

This is the inscription she made for me in The Book of Light:
For Sandy ~ Thanks for being here — Sister, Woman, Poet — Joy! Lucille Clifton 3/94″

I love Clifton’s poetry for its rawness, its compressed images, and its willingness to be vulnerable. Even with her passing, through her poems she will continue to inspire me and teach me about life at large because she exposed her one, unique life to the world.

One of my favorite poems:

here yet be dragons

so many languages have fallen
off of the edge of the world
into the dragon’s mouth. some

where there be monsters whose teeth
are sharp and sparkle with lost

people. lost poems. who
among us can imagine ourselves
unimagined? who

among us can speak with so fragile
tongue and remain proud?

Support a Poet/Poetry: Buy/Borrow a Copy of this Book Today
The Book of Light
Lucille Clifton
Copper Canyon Press, 1993

33º and a weak sun struggling to break through the solid white sky

Yet another Friday has arrived and with it the need this morning to draft a poem ASAP to meet my goal of a poem a week. I did draft what feels like a poem, but with less confidence than last week’s draft. Today’s poem arose from this photo that a friend sent to me of her japonica covered in ice. I have been watching a tangle of icicles outside my own window all week and went out to take a few pics of those (after I drafted).

I must admit that while I had jokingly emailed my friend that I was going to write a poem about her picture, when I cleared my desk this morning, I had no idea what I would write. I cast about and felt forlorn. Let me here admit that I received a rejection this week that cast me off track a bit. This rejection note included a specific reason the editor wasn’t accepting the poems, and usually that is encouraging to me, knowing how busy and over-worked editors are and knowing that someone took the time to try to help me make my poems better. However, this comment had to do with syntax and style and included a phrase that I live in fear of hearing about my own work. I freaked out. Luckily, I have two great poet friends who received my hysterical emails with gracious attention. It turns out that the group of poems I’d submitted happened to repeat a certain syntax that didn’t gel with this editor. My poet friends assured me that they would let me know if I ever really was doing the thing I feared, and I trust them.

Back to today. There I was, clean desk, classical music barely audible, fresh page, and nothing to say. I looked at my friend’s icy japonica. Nothing. So, I grabbed the top book on my to-read stack: Ruin by Cynthia Cruz. (I’ll be posting on this book soon!) I started reading. As I read, that editor’s voice echoed in my head and I was pulling apart Cruz’ syntax to try and unravel myself from the knot of misery I’d gotten into. I read and read. Finally, a few lines emerged and I put pen to paper, hesitantly. After a few minutes I had to set down the book and focus on the poem that was growing in my brain. It did not grow easily. There was a lot of reading aloud of the few lines I had and then sitting staring out at my now-familiar icicles.

Eventually, I found my way through the poem, letting it show me where it wanted to go. I did fall back on my comfort zone of couplets with longish lines, but I’m okay with that. They really force me to focus on each phrase and image. I need the white space for breathing. The entire time I was drafting, I was writing against the voice of the editor from that rejection slip. I think that’s a good thing. I don’t want to fall into a tired pattern of syntax, but I also don’t want to adjust my style because of one particular editor’s words. Don’t get me wrong; I do prefer to draft without those voices in my head, only allowing them in once the poem has gone to the revision stage, but this is the week I’ve had and these are the images and voices I have at hand today.

Conditions holding true: snow, slush, ice, temps hovering at the freezing mark

At the end of January, I wrote about receiving Kristen Orser’s chapbook Folded into Your Midwestern Thunderstorm from Greying Ghost Press. I ordered it impulsively, based on the title and this description on the press’ website:
“The midwest can be a lonely space to crawl. Heaps of junctions and front roads bordering corn but nobody else is on the road this afternoon. Folded Into Your Midwestern Thunderstorm is a thunder-slap meant for your cheek. There is a ferocity and a bite to these poems as ripe as the ‘Bells, bells, bells / resembling / the ferocity of print ribbon. Double / if you are the responder / my words gut.’ Kristen Orser shall reckon!”
The rest of the entry from January details the delightful production that Greying Ghost puts into its books.

I’ve just re-read the 15 poems in the collection after letting is sit for several days since the first read. To tell the truth, I struggled to match the book up to the first two sentences in the description above. These are poems of surrealism and language collage, and while there is a sense of desolation and silence between the speaker (first-person “I”) and the you addressed in almost every poem that felt very Midwestern to me, I did not find much in the way of landscape or other Midwestern icons. This troubled me on the first read.

I am happy to say that after accepting the fact of the poet’s vision being different from what I expected, I was able to see the craft in the poems and admire it. These are poems of ideas, but holding true to William Carlos Williams’ famous maxim, “no ideas but in things.” They also remind me of the leaps made in the poems of Wallace Stevens. And the things in these poems are lovely: ferns, canaries, cakes, bells, bones, tongues, and more than I can list here.

Orser has a true gift for titles, which become tiny poems in themselves. For example, here are a few morsels: “a disguise and cake, the thing we birthed and kept under wood,” “fever is the affirmative,” and “the whisper dictionary is in the antique cabinet.”

I also admire Orser’s use of white space. Perhaps the gaps and indentations do remind me of the Midwestern sense of space where the eye can gaze on and on before being interrupted by an image on the horizon. Also, kudos to Greying Ghost for being willing to print a poem with long lines perpendicular to the normal printing. However, due to this play with lines and white space, it is difficult to reproduce the poems properly here.

Here are some lines that resonated with my Midwestern side:

From “recently, the fence”

………………….Decidedly unsayable —
……………………………………………The mouth opens,
……………………………………………has limitation.

From “grab the ear”

In the wild region we don’t visit,
memories are shoestring
words like ping. Our desire

………………..is a flat
………………..bell.

All in all, I’m still completely happy to own this book and to have read Orser’s work. While our aesthetics might not thoroughly gel, the poems do contain wonderful language and just may push me to risk more in my own work.

Support a Poet / Poetry: Buy or Borrow a Copy of this Book
Folded Into Your Midwestern Thunderstorm
Greying Ghost Press, 2009

35º and a milky sky disguises the sun

This post is long, long overdue, and I send big apologies to blogger friend Kristin Berkey-Abbott, who graciously offered to swap her book, Whistling Past the Graveyard, for mine last fall. As the towering stack of to-read books grew, I lost track of things. In any case, I spent this morning rectifying the situation.

Kristin’s poems are startling for their matter-of-fact approach to the subject matter, how to maintain a spiritual/religious life in the 21st century rush and hustle. While the poems rise up out of serious meditation, they do not rely on overly philosophical language or images. For someone who does not practice an organized religion yet spends a lot of time thinking about the spiritual, like myself, this was refreshing. For example, the poem “Frog Flingings” ends this way:

Still, a prophet would come in handy in times like ours,
someone with a direct pipe to the divine,
someone who would deliver dictums, someone we could kill
when we didn’t like the message.

Wow. Talk about a killer last line!

In “Reformation Day” the modern mixes with the religious particularly well in the second stanza:

We pay alms as we must: electric bills,
pool chemicals, cool treats. We pay indulgences
when we can’t avoid it: the air conditioning repair
man, the pool expert who keeps the water pure,
men versed in mysteries we cannot hope to understand.

Not all of the poems have such religious tones. Several deal with the darkness of melancholia an depression. In “Running from the Plantation of Despair” the speaker takes on the voice of the slave to describe depression. The speaker states:

I’m an ocean away from my home, my happy
self, in a land where I can’t speak the language,
digest the food, or interpret the constellations.

I inhale the dust
of a million dashed dreams. I sink into a songless
sleep and wake to a day drained of color.
Gradually I forget my real name…

All in all, I appreciate the succinct nature of these poems and their willingness to ask difficult questions with clarity and grace.

Support a Poet/Poetry: Buy or Borrow a Copy of this Book Today!
Whistling Past the Graveyard
Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Pudding House, 2004