Thursday, April 6, 2023

Jordan Davis : on Noise

 

 

 

 

 

I was trying to figure out how to say something about my self-inflicted predicament (being a poet and eschewing institutional support, while refusing to give up on life goals typical of my economic background and social class). Having grown up in the New York School, I felt some pressure not to name names — or, I enjoyed the permission to try out using proper names in poems and learned quickly that I could say more of what I felt if I kept on the abstract side of town. But I needed the sensuous anxiety and reverie of the “I do” poets (I suppose the line “I do this I do that” is what gave John Ashbery the idea to say Frank O’Hara was always marrying the whole world — which is not something the authorities allow anymore, if they ever did).

The poems in Noise do try to have it both ways and as a result they sound to my ears a little frustrated, with gusts of exhilaration, and inescapable (almost unplaceable, I hope) sadness. Some of the ideas are practically foreign — do you remember phone companies promising the ideal immortality of “unlimited nights and weekends”? — and as for the “science section,” that’s another world now. I wanted to make sure all of the poems here stay off-center, old-fashioned, bordering on incoherent. Some wander across the border of coherence, tourists of unreadability. It’s a fun, slightly dangerous place. Noisy.

Wherever we go, though, as the deadpan classic “Buckaroo Banzai” put it, there we are. I’ve been worried about the tension between absolute aesthetic judgment and personal freedom to play, and how to even dream of having a democracy when everyone has to work every waking minute to afford to live. I think these poems go as far as I can stand toward the uninhabitable zone where responses to those problems are worked out, without turning into autobiography, or self-dramatization, or catastrophes of celebrity and righteousness. But that’s connoisseurship of myself and I better clam up before I give anybody the idea there’s a specific way I want to to read these poems. There is, of course, but the fun, and I use that word in the broadest sense, is in how you get there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jordan Davis’s [photo credit: Adalena Kavanagh, 2022] second collection, Shell Game, was published by Edge Books in 2018; his third book, Yeah, No, will be published by MadHat in 2023. Recent work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, The Canary, and American Poetry Review. A free broadside is also available from Benjamin Gantcher’s unbound books. He lives in Brooklyn and works in the financial services industry.

rob mclennan : Overland, by Natalie Eilbert

Overland, Natalie Eilbert
Copper Canyon Press, 2023

 

 

 

 

Green Bay, Wisconsin journalist and poet Natalie Eilbert’s third full-length poetry collection, following Swan Feast (Bloof Books, 2015) and Indictus (Noemi Press, 2018), is Overland (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). Through four numbered sections of lyric narratives, Overland explores an ecopoetic around the climate crisis, threading through the connective tissues of capitalism and poverty, police and state violence, and American gun culture. As the opening title poem offers: “I bite / into its lesions, the hard skin of poverty / so far removed it isn’t even the hand biting / the hand.” Her lyrics dismantle, pulling apart description and metaphor, mapping a landscape of America, speech and climate crisis, offering a direct line of narrative meditation, one that rolls along in a devastating and propulsive saunter, stepping one thought immediately after another. “What we do is we spend us.” she offers, as part of the poem “(EARTH), THE,” “I am not empty / of metaphor; I am tired of multitudes. / The indelible crush of leaves.” A bit further on, the poem adds: “I am not the promise / of forgetting. I merged regretfully / and I, too, missed the point.”

In terms of approach, Overland is a book-length essay on the climate crisis, articulated through direct and indirect statements, shaped through the poetic form of the first-person lyric narrative. Eilbert’s is a map of metaphoric lines, one that neither offers position nor direction but allows an articulation of boundary, offering means of how to directly approach. “I’ve forgotten how to live.” Eilbert writes, to open the poem “THE LAKE.” Further in the same piece, offering: “I watch, smoke pours from a window, night a green / mouth. My brothers have turned libertarian all of a sudden, // all night my mind bleeds through a screen, what / are your policies, what are your policies, what are.” This is a map of a landscape that tells you how to read it. It is interesting the ways in which she slips the names of influences through her poems, whether American poets Alice Notley or Louise Glück, their influence on her lines woven deep, only revealing themselves to those who may not have caught through the naming; caught, if one knows what to look for. “How is it,” she writes, as part of “LAND OF SWEET WATERS,” I come from Glück’s marshland without any of its blue lore?”

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Barbara Roether : on Wet Cement Press

 

 

 

 

Wet Cement Press grew out of one of those sarcastic suggestions that get thrown around when people who have known each other a long-time ride together in cars. “We should start a little press when you retire, our friends all have manuscripts, we should just publish them already.”  “Are you crazy? Why would I want to do that?” Because….  The idea of publishing was actually a pretty natural outgrowth of our writing lives,  as we all have experience in various aspects of the process already. I think that like many small presses Wet Cement comes from out of nowhere, but brings along everywhere we’ve ever been.

Thoreau Lovell, our publisher, was for many years an editor (with John High, Michelle Murphy, and others) of the Five Fingers Review. Michelle is also currently an editor at WCP.  Thoreau worked at the library at San Francisco State for many years, and was able to retire early-ish; only to quickly be ensnared in the labor of WCP. Thoreau really does the lion’s share of work, typesetting, layout, distribution; Michelle does our social media, and I chime in with editorial ideas, we also try to mix it up.

From 1989 to 1999 when Thoreau was working with Five Fingers, the review published a wide selection of San Francisco based experimental writers; along with an eclectic mix of international work. Published in 1990, Five Fingers Review Issue 8/9, Mapping Codes: A Collection of Writing from Moscow to San Francisco was a groundbreaking issue of translations and collaborations between Russian and American writers that reflected some of the first waves of post-Soviet writing. In 1994 Issue # 13, Children of the Cold War further explored some of the landscapes that those of us who came of age in the 1970’s were experiencing.

My own first experiences with publishing were at Turtle Island Foundation in the early 1980’s. The press was in a house in the Berkeley Hills that had been built for Jaime De Angulo, one of the first translators of native California stories, which Turtle Island had reissued. I worked in a closet under the stairs, where I hand packed each typed up order with cardboard and brown paper. Interesting people like Malcolm Margolin, or Ismael Reed, were always appearing on the deck.

Multi-culturalism was still a new idea then, and Bob and Eileen Callahan were publishing Zora Neale Hurston, and Lucia Berlin, as well as poets like Bernadette Mayer. I didn’t yet fully appreciate the scope of the work they were doing, but I fully understood the seriousness with which they approached the process. Later I went on to work in mainstream publishing in New York and at Harper Collins San Francisco, but my experience at Turtle Island where publishing was seen as a vital way to help shape an intellectual milieu was formative. The Callahan’s believed publishing was first and foremost; about furthering an idea, and taking a social stance. I don’t know if any of us believe books are doing that now, but I think they are doing other things. 

One of the things we are always hoping to do, and I think this grows from our backgrounds too, is to introduce different groups and points of view to each other.

Just after we started the press in 2018, I briefly moved from San Francisco to Asheville North Carolina and Thoreau came to visit. The discoveries we made in Appalachia, of deep intact regional literature, and the amazing writers we met whom we had never heard of, was I think a formative element for the press. It’s easy to think in the Bay Area that we’re in the middle of it all, but in a way, everyone thinks that. 

So, if we can bring the Southern blues haiku of Lenard D. Moore to Language poets in San Francisco we’re happy. If we can magnify the voices of children living in the Moscow subway to hipsters in Brooklyn, that’s good. And if we can find an artist in Australia bringing us a unique visual poetics of love and war, we want to show you. If we are going to publish a black man’s coming of age story, we want it to be one that changes what you think that story might be, and if we publish a Jewish poet’s memoir we want it to speak to the black man’s story. Many fine small presses support a cadre of like-minded writers who practice in dialogue with one another, but that’s not what we’re about. Our list is more like a network.

In part because we are “older” we have collectively read and listened to an enormous amount of experimental/literary writing. There are many excellent manuscripts we read, that simply seem like we’ve read them before.  So for us to really want to publish a collection of avant-garde poetry, for example, it needs to be language doing something we haven’t seen previously. Karen Donovan’s Monad+Monadnock, comes to mind. But what we want to publish at Wet Cement Press and WHY is a question we keep asking ourselves, and the why changes from time to time.

We are consistently interested in hybrid work, whether a visual hybrid or a hybrid of forms or voices. We like work with a visual aspect. With novels we like to hear about lives in places we’ve never been, or working- class lives (Anthony Schlagel’s My Dog Me for example). Unapologetically, we do sometimes publish our friends, who are of course excellent writers.

Despite the current norm, I’m not particularly interested in work centered on identity; or belonging. The quest to be part of some dominant culture, that many of us have never recognized as our culture to begin with, feels a little retrograde. As a former punk Buddhist, it’s hard for me to not think of identity as the illusion that’s always holding you back. Coincidentally the Buddhist strain in Wet Cement is sort of interesting.  We didn’t consciously mean it to happen, but it’s there; prominently in the works of John High, (Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper) but more subtly in several other books.

Our list as a whole is really the only good answer to what we are interested in publishing. We are open to change; we even think about changing our name.

We chose Wet Cement from a random list of name ideas we emailed each other one summer afternoon. We all loved the name at first, because it was sort of anti-pretentious and DIY. The design for our books was also consciously simple and stripped down; inspired by the French Editions Gallimard, and Pleiade, we settled on white paper wrappers with something good inside. Soon after we decided Wet Cement was a really terrible name for a press, and had our first identity crisis. At the time I argued for keeping the name, because something about the word cement, has its actual weight in memory. Holding onto, first-thought best thought, is still something that I think guides us.

We also had the idea that the press would put out books pretty quickly (we’ve since abandoned that) while the ideas were still fresh, while the cement was, so to speak, sill wet. The idea was not to be overly precious about the work, but to make a mark, the way you carve your name in the sidewalk on a whim, and maybe a lot of people walk by and see it, maybe the whim lasts a long time. That would be fun.

 

 

 

 

Barbara Roether writes and teaches in the SF Bay Area, though she has been known to move around. She is the author of a novel This Earth You’ll Come Back To and several small books of poetry. A collection of essays Reading in Place is forthcoming. She is an editor and co-founder with Thoreau Lovell of Wet Cement Press.

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

rob mclennan : Song & Dread, by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek

Song & Dread, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
Talonbooks, 2023

 

 

 

 

Referring to it in her acknowledgments as her “littlest-sister title of poems,” Kingston, Ontario-based poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s third full-length poetry title, following 100 Days (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2016) and A Is for Acholi (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2022), is Song & Dread (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023). I’m fascinated in how Okot Bitek’s book-length structures favour the extended sequence, and the cycle; composing individual poems that come together to form something far larger than the sum of their parts. The poems and poem of Song & Dread loops and swirls through language, song and thread, returning regularly to earlier points, allowing the structure of the extended sequence to propel that much further, forward. As editor Peter Midgley wrote as part of his foreword to the collection: “Otoniya Okot Bitek started writing these poems on March 14 – Pi Day. The first series of poems in Song & Dread – a set of fifty pi day poems – recounts the days of horror through repetition. Where her earlier collection, 100 Days, was a response to the one hundred days of the Rwandan genocide, here she considers a different killer: COVID-19 (“this thing,” she calls it). Song & Dread is a searingly honest response to the pandemic. We remain struck by the ever-increasing number of deaths, and by the futility of these days: the repetition, the repetitiveness. But most of all, as we read Song & Dread, we are struck by the author’s ability to make sense of the ordinary amid the extraordinary.”

pi day 6

as i was brushing my hair today
i remember the story about
hair as a vector in spreading the virus
about some people in wuhan
thinking about shaving off beards
about how we used to have our hair shaved off
as a sign of mourning

While “pi day” is a substantial element of the collection, as Midgley suggests, it is still less than half of the total work included in Song & Dread, sitting amid the first of the two sections of poems, and bookended by two shorter poems. The second section, itself, is constructed out of an equally-stretched section of shorter poems that cluster and gather, set in conversation and note-gathering, offering commentary and observation across a sketch-taking form that holds only what is important, essential, haunting and ethereal, as Okot Bitek continues to draw solid notes across this long trauma of pandemic. She writes on death, dread and loss, as the first part of the eleven-part sequence “before & after this city” reads:

there’s a dead a dread a bed full of monsters
a led tongue a lead tongue a church an address
at one church square a bear now dead now dread
now led away away into a circus a red ball
a trapeze artist at one church square a dog a log
many logs many many logs a forest a cathedral
now gone a dread again a dread again a dread

It is notable to see, unlike other Covid-era works I’ve seen over the past few months, from Nicholas Power’s chapbook ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Toronto ON: Gesture Press, 2020), Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (2020), Australian poet Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle (St. Lucia, Queensland: Hunter Publishers, 2021), Lillian Nećakovs il virus (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2021), Lisa Samuels’ Breach (Norwich England: Boiler House Press, 2021) and Nathanael O’Reilly’s BOULEVARD (Co. Tipperary, Ireland: Beir Bua Press, 2021), Song & Dread is infused not simply with a sense of isolation but one of real and substantive loss, as well as an attention to a population far too easily set aside. “for the rich / a dilemma,” the poem “pi day 36” begins, “the headline says / whether to quarantine with staff or do their own chores [.]” Through Okot Bitek, the pandemic doesn’t so much introduce trauma so much as it revealed. One that hears and sees and feels and understands those losses all around her, both immediately and culturally, especially within the realization that so many of those accumulated losses could have easily been prevented. “four new deaths yesterday / new deaths / deaths as a new / as news,” she writes, to open the poem “pi day 27,” “four brand new / as good / four deaths as good news as relief // all sixty-one dresses worn by villanelle / from killing eve [.]”

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com