1. evoke dreams
The Northerners by Benjamin Niespodziany is “an ekphrastic sequence written while watching the Dutch film De Noorderlingen (1992) directed by Alex van Warmerdam.” I haven’t seen the film, but I enjoyed this sequence very much. I did the same sort of thing while watching Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and it’s published in Kiki, my poetry book with Chaudiere Books (now with Invisible Publishing). I love the minimalism of this sequence, the fragments, and the fact that some of the poems “appeared as daydreams written on post-it notes.” There’s a fairy tale quality to the sequence. There are evocative lines, such as “He houses the dark” when writing about someone called “the forester” from the film I would think. You know how your dreams seem completely logical while you’re dreaming? I felt that here. Like I was dreaming too.
2. mesmerize through accumulatory sentences
In Yesterday’s Tigers by Mayan Godmaire, the sentences start out small and build into complex images and structures. I delighted in these poems, some were haibun, I believe. I loved the call to the senses. I don’t know about you but since the pandemic, my world has been increasingly reduced to screens, so I welcome any opportunity to engage with the senses. I enjoyed the way occasional sentences in French appeared. Switching languages in a poem changes its rhythm and pace. I love the way Persephone is linked throughout and to the land. The lines in italics come from Jim Morrison songs and Proust’s Du Côté de Chez Swann and work well with the text. I’d like to read more of Godmaire’s writing.
3. play with geometry
Andrew Brenza Geometric Mantra is intriguing. Brenza works with and against the grid in these digital visual poems. Some of the words are readable and some are not. He begins with a maze at the start of a sentence, followed by mirages and mirror images. The work shifts into distortions and breakages as the mirror breaks into shards of reflections becoming kaleidoscopic and fading. There is an error to remember, darkness and snow, letters that meander and link or bunch together like magnetic fuzzy iron filings in a magnetic field experiment. There is a sad sea. I can read each one of these poems and my mind begins to wander too, taking me all over the place from Eurydice’s broken mirror (once more a Cocteau reference) to the suicide by drowning of Virginia Woolf, to this odd little toy I had as a child that used a magnet to collect filings beneath a plastic sheet…None of this was the author’s intent, but as a writer, I always want my work to lead outward and inward. So it’s a compliment. I know these were probably great fun to make.
Katie O’Brien’s Micro Moonlights plays with musical notation in a similar way. Some of the titles come from or were inspired by Beethoven. This work also plays with the grid, here the sheet of music, sometimes horizontal or vertical or at a slant, and the notes, sometimes repeated, sometimes dancing off the sheet, sometimes layered into a tower of song, to reference Leonard Cohen for my own entertainment, or a big tangled up pile of cacophony. I would like to hear these played on a piano.
4. make me ache with envy
In Less Dream N.W. Lea makes poems that ripple across my lake of loneliness, as his work always does for me. They quietly sing flaw. Everything at Once is a mantra that I’ll keep on my wall. There’s something so humble about this work, yet it also astonishes with these unique lines that feel like truths for me. “the blackbirds in the bare maple/are little adorable portals/into Void. [from Void].
Jason Christie’s Bridges and burn is a thoughtful, humorous and sometimes wry sequence that plays with the contradictions between the natural world and the human world as we try to survive late capitalism. It’s been the subject of much of Christie’s work especially his most recent and brilliant collection, Cursed Objects (Coach House Books, 2019. “In the meantime, the tree grows like a graphic expression of a kind of rough music performed by the ants.” Hell yeah.
THE OCEANDWELLER by Saeed Tavanaee Marvi and translated by Khashayar Mohammadi is a gorgeous work. “bitter nights had sedimented underneath our nails”
There is acacia entering a kitchen window, white like a bride. There is a downpour, two telephone conversations mingled. There is pain: “its strange / how pain resembles words / if inspected from close range / its as if words are constructed by pain” – “hide your wings”
I love that above/ground press publishes translations, not something I’ve seen too often in the micropress universe. I appreciated being introduced to Saeed Tavanaee Marvi’s work, which I would likely never have read because I don’t speak Farsi.
5. have me leaping around
JoAnna Novak’s Knife with Oral Greed opens with an epigraph from Anne Sexton’s poem, Hansel and Gretel from Sexton’s Transformations, which I hadn’t heard about before and will now read.
Knife with Oral Greed is a great title, by the way, and perhaps refers to an ancient Finnish tale, Kullervo, based on a very shallow Google search. Makes me think of Freudian analysis – orality.
This is a minimal sequence, spare of colour (white, red, silver), with unusual words like “tessarae,”: tessarae are small, cut stones used in mosaics as early as the third or fourth century. A “cuchillo” is a Spanish word for knife. I do not know what a “peach leo” is but I like it.
I am enamored by all the textures in this sequence: wax, silk, silver, oil, foam, white flowers, cake, snakes, wine, flypaper…
There’s a small American perfumery called “For Strange Women,” I have only learned about this month. The descriptions of the perfumes were so enticing, I had to purchase a solid perfume called Fireside Story. This work is well-written and strange, and that is a compliment. It feels like a dream. There are some reversals where objects perform actions that I’ve seen in some Canadian contemporary surrealist-ish poetry.
Looking at Novak’s site, I notice Noirmania, a poetry collection that is described by Johannes Göransson, author of The Sugar Book describes as “part hellish fashion shoot, part necroglamorous memoir, part grotesque diorama.” I’m intrigued. I feel like this intensity that is described is restrained in Knife with Oral Greed, but it’s there, beneath the skin, in the veins…
And of course, I have to look up Göransson, who is a poet, translator, professor and editor. I immediately follow him on Twitter. I liked his use of “necroglamorous.” This leads me to this fantastic poem published on Poetry Daily, “Summer (excerpt) which blends English with another language that I don’t know so I can’t name it and is heavy with texture and intense too. Then I go to his site and read a bit from an interview he did where he’s quoted as saying he wants to drown in poetry. I adore this. That’s what I’m here for.
