On 16 March, Matt Hart read at the 54th installment of the Nick Demske-curated BONK! performance series in Racine, WI. Hart, although promoting his new book Debacle Debacle (H_NGM_N B__KS, 2013), read selections from all five of his collections. In the below video, Hart reads his poem “My Wife on Vicodin Kissing,” from his fourth book Wolf Face (H_NGM_N B__KS, 2010):
In early March, Futurepoem released Dana Ward’s second full-length collection of poetry, The Crisis of Infinite Worlds. On 28 March, Ward visited Case Western Reserve University to perform his work for the Poets of Ohio reading series. The first piece he read, “Our Songs,” can be streamed below:
On Friday 10 May, Corey Zeller, Jeff Alessandrelli, and Joe Hall descended upon Akron, OH and read their poems for The Big Big Mess Reading Series. Below are a few videos from the event:
Corey Zeller reads from his recently released full-length Man Vs. Sky (Yes Yes Books, 2013):
Jeff Alessandrelli reads from recently released chapbook People are Places are Places are People (Imaginary Friend Press, 2013):
Joe Hall reads from his recently released full-length Devotional Poems (Black Ocean, 2013):
In March of this year, Factory Hollow Press, which is the publishing imprint of Flying Object, released Rachel B. Glaser’s Moods and Seth Landman’s Sign You Were Mistaken. Both books are the debut collections for each poet (although Publishing Genius released the short story collection Pee on Water by Glaser a few years ago).
Glaser’s Moods thrives on humor and pop culture references that remind one of the early writing by New York School poets, such as Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery. Take, for instance, the following excerpt from the poem “Thanksgiving didn’t happen”:
we can say Jesus existed
he was he good looking, charismatic
and once did a magic trickif we still hate the cat tomorrow
let’s tie him to the trackswhen we all smoked catnip together, I lied
I did feel differentsomething else I didn’t tell you was
when I was in the WNBA
I had a very poor shooting streak and couldn’t admit it
I’d miss a three-point attempt
and pretend it was an ally-oop
“Where were you Swoops?! The ball was there,” I’d say,
“But where the hell were you?” (14)
A bit later in the same poem, after a digression concerning Julia Roberts and a series of humorous observations about but seemingly inane subject matter, Glaser invokes the poem’s title and completes its fragmented syntax:
Thanksgiving didn’t happen how they said
all it was, was two Indian boys
who shared some deer meat with two Pilgrim girls
and (big surprise)
their families freaked out
the girls got sent to boarding school
the boys were sent into the woods to “think” (15)
The references and humor, which spares no one, continues throughout the remainder of the collection at a furious pace, making for a quick and enjoyable read.
Landman’s Sign You Were Mistaken works as a counterpoint to Moods, at least to the extent that is a more meditative collection that forces a reader to slow down as they maneuver through the oftentimes irregular (or at least circuitous) syntax. For example, the poem “Story” begins with the following lines:
A very small train in silhouette is
a terrible way to travel is
to go back. (30)
Not only does this brief excerpt ruminate upon the nature of travel, but it does so in a manner that collapses two syntactic units into one another. In other words, the lines concatenate the sentences “A very small train in silhouette is a terrible way to travel” and “A terrible way to travel is to go back,” linking the two through their common phrase.
In other instances, such as in the “Hunt,” the poems produce a sinuous syntax through a series of qualifying phrases offset by excessive comma use:
That
with this gaze I fix no word
in orbit is given, is gone,
like shape, melting into
twilight. (41)
The poem “Merry Christmas” follows a similar pattern:
Say you took it,
a lantern, twinkling once, more,
so long in the night
of spite and thunder.
But there was now, alive
for good, no sign of
spring, and yet there was
a pleasant chance
to think, and I sprang to do it. (48)
These syntactical techniques require readers to examine the relationships between words more closely, thus forcing us to consider more thoroughly the meditations within each poem.
While you wait for your copies of Factory Hollow Press’s new books to arrive in the mail, check out Glaser’s portrait paintings of NBA players and Landman’s musing on Fantasy Basketball.
For the final installment of the Poets of Ohio reading series on 18 April, Cleveland-native Sarah Gridley read from her new collection Loom (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013). Below is a video clip the event wherein Gridley reads her poem “Charcoal”:
After spending several years away from Ohio (in states such as Massachusetts, Montana, and Maine), Gridley returned to Cleveland a few years ago. In an interview with Joshua Marie Wilkinson (which originally appeared in the Denver Quarterly in 2010 and re-published last year in The Volta), Gridley had the following to say about her birth city:
How does one develop what Eliot calls “tender kinship for the face of the earth” when one’s childhood takes place in a part of the earth like Cleveland? This is what’s striking to me about being back here: despite the many ugly things about Cleveland, the severity of its physical and socio-economic decay, I find there is in me a habit of the blood, a sweet habit of the blood, that responds positively and lovingly to being here.
Through the sensory channels of memory, my lived experience at present finds weird communion with my lived experience from childhood. The native things, the snow, the rain, the winds, the thunder boomers and magnolias, the grime, winter’s flat gray light, the boarded up buildings, the ethereal, silver-leaf interior of Severance Hall, towering horse-chestnuts with blooms like candles, gloomy Lake Erie, the gentle Cuyahoga valley, downtown’s meager skyline—the good, the bad, and the ugly all flow through my blood creating a sense of loyalty and obligation that’s difficult to explain.
It is not that Cleveland doesn’t offer places of natural and manmade beauty; it is that you cannot possibly take them for granted. The scars of industry are livid here: they are, you might say, part of the city’s shame and its hope, its catalyst for re-direction and renovation. On a positive note: the Cuyahoga catching on fire did lead to the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, and the creation of the EPA (today, as cautionary reminder and/or badge of shame penance, Great Lakes Brewing Company makes a pale ale called “Burning River”). Today, there are a number of organizations and institutions working collaboratively to improve both economic and environmental sustainability, most notably, Green City Blue Lake, The Cleveland Foundation, and Cleveland Botanical Gardens.
These new online mag, Matter Monthly, just catapulted its first issue into the world. In their introduction (manifesto!), the editors conclude by describing their aim as such:
Matter is space where visual artists, poets, and writers of all genders, races, and ethnicities can contribute work without first bleeding it of subjectivity and criticality (whether of social and financial institutions, the other, or ourselves). We hope what transpires will be an evolving forum for desired change, humor, and provocative art that transcends the false binary between politics and aesthetics, as well as lyric, language and conceptual antimonies based on perceived inabilities of those discourses (musical prosody, semiotic play, and formalist abstraction, in turns), for structural critique.
In these first pages, the kickstart is proper to this. We are given poems and prose and art that collapses timidity and frankly feels like one of the rawest, most oomphed issues of an online mag I’ve read. Very much stoked about future issues pushing this aim.
EXAMPLES:
from “How My Existentially Problematic Novel Unfolds” by Kyle McCord:
Your heart maybe many bears
beating their bike chains
and tire irons together.
I can’t prove otherwise.
This is a democracy,
so it’s your word against
my science. My science
against this feeling that we are
often not alone when we are
often alone, I fear.
We are taking out the garbage
into the desolation
of some suburb,
but we don’t want this
in particular.
I ruin everything with my wanting.
from “Party Time” by Lina ramona Vitkauskas
The juice of solidarity
has become sour! We seeWoolly Mama models
of the newest clams,throw out two dummy
dollars for everything cancer-cleaned, lick the film to reveal
our bones. Beneath the swells ofour nation’s un-tuned harpsichord,
the war is constantly constant.
A few months ago, I spoke with the conceptual poet, poetry scholar, and experimental musician Tom Orange about poets who currently live and write in the state of Ohio. Through the course of our discussion, Orange mentioned the little known poet, dramatist, and musician Russell Atkins. Born in Cleveland in 1926, Atkins still resides in the city today.
Orange also mentioned that he recently wrote an essay for a forthcoming anthology showcasing the poetry of Atkins. The collection, titled Russell Atkins: On the Life and Work of a 20th Century American Master and edited by Michael Dumanis and Kevin Prufer, will be released later this year on Pleiades Press as part of their Unsung Masters Series. The series puts out one new collection a year that contains work by, and five-to-six essays about, a neglected American poet or fiction writer. In addition to Atkins’ own writing, the book will feature essays by Aldon Nielsen, Tom Orange, Evie Shockley, Sean Singer, and Tyrone Williams.
In an anticipation of the collection, I found a relatively inexpensive version of Atkins’ 1976 full-length Here In The (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) at an online book retailer. The author’s bio in the back of the book states that he was “one of the first concrete poets in the country and an innovator in poetic drama”; moreover, established poets such as Langston Hughes and Marianne Moore read his poems and championed his work. But more than the literary mythos surrounding the author, I found the book compelling because of the strange and beautiful voice within. Take, for instance, the second stanza of the poem “School Demolition”:
so silently
about the rooms
the autopsy
begins—
the moon coroner
working
late (29)
This brief and enigmatic image offers us a vision of moonlight slicing through an abandon school that’s being readied for demolition. The moon transforms into a coroner, the building a body, and the city a morgue. To this extent, Atkins addresses the decay of a once great city and foretells the Rust Belt’s continual decline as a result of the difficult economic effects of moving our country’s manufacturing and industrial jobs overseas.
Everywhere through Here In The, the poet surveys the city, its residents, and surroundings, noting how even traditionally beatific images, such as a sunset, can transform into something less gorgeous in the crumbling urban cityscapes. For example, section six of “Irritable Songs” reads in its entirety:
horror of sunset stealths
through the boughs of birch:
sunk in a sigh the whole nauseous red:
the sun’s hideous liquid
fills gutters frantic
the twigs at the window—
away goes through the air,
old cans abject by-ways whimper
—the night sky’s
at its death-fall (27)
Of course, in these “hideous” and “abject” images, Atkins creates a singular, Cleveland-based beauty in his language and the sounds it produces. Yes, while his content focuses on the death of a city, he enlivens that very same material through his poetic technique. Through an aestheticized vision of Cleveland, then, perhaps writers and artists living here (and other cities along the Great Lakes) can find an answer to the manner in which we engage our troubled city: acknowledging its decline, but doing so in a way that honors its inherent beauty.
For more information on Russell Atkins, visit his page at Deep Cleveland or read his work at the Eclipse archive.
continual decline
Thanks so much to everyone who followed along during April for Vouched’s celebration of National Poetry Month. Here’s a round-up of all the posts (even some non-poetry goodness thrown in for extra oomph, right!?) throughout the month.
S.E. Smith Spotlight at Coldfront
Dossiers: Poetry & Ohio, Mary Biddinger
Awful Interview with Winston Ward
M.G. Martin Greying Ghost Pamphlet
Vomit Express by Allen Ginsberg
Single-Sentence Saturday: Alexis Orgera
Heather Christle at Better Magazine
Dossiers: Poetry & Ohio, Frank Giampietro
Awful Interview with Gina Myers (redux)
NOÖ Journal and Vouched Books Collaboration
Awful Interview with Cristen Conger
Single-Sentence Saturday: Randall Jarrell
Awful Interview with John Carroll
Awful Interview with Jayne O’Connor
Canarium Books preview at The Collagist
Single-Sentence Saturday: Dean Young
Note Pinned To The Back Of A Dress by Aubrey Lenahan
The Chapbooks of Jeff Alessandrelli
Single-Sentence Saturday: Heather Christle
Dzanc Poetry Prize Announcement
Dossier: Poetry & Ohio, Cathy Wagner
Coming from Matt Hart’s fourth book Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless, where his howling is loudest, his heart as ruckus, this fella typing expected more of that same oomph with his fifth book, Debacle Debacle. Once one gets so loud, it’s so hard to turn it down.
Yet, Hart turned it down and turned it up remarkably at once. These new poems eat and regurgitate thought in a whole new way. As Adam Fell says in his blurb of the book, these new poems have “a burning domesticity, an anxiousness.” As you’ll hear in these poems recorded below, there’s a beautiful new tone that exists in these poems. “The essential recognition is of sameness and difference. And these two together make thoughtfulness Pleasure,” as Hart says in the title poem “Debacle Debacle.”
Wow, right? Pick up the book from H_NGM_N Books now.
On Tuesday, April 23 in Akron, OH, Glenn Shaheen and James Tadd Adcox rolled through town for their recent Great Lakes region book tour. The writers teamed up with the local poets and co-hosts of The Big Big Mess Reading Series, Alexis Pope and Mike Krutel. Hosted by the artists that run Rubber City Noise Cave, all four readers put on lively performances, excerpts of which can be found below.
Here is Alexis Pope reading her poem “I Think I Would Die”:
Here is Mike Krutel reading his poem “Physical Cliff”:
Here is Glenn Shaheen reading his poem “Predatory”:
And, finally, here is James Tadd Adcox reading from his “Scientic Method” series:
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