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Profile: Russell Atkins

6 May

Here In TheA 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

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Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan

29 Apr

We really just can’t get our fill of Scott McClanahan. You recall Layne’s review here at Vouched. I’ve got my own spin on the book up at Sundog Literature:

Crapalachia
Scott McClanahan
Two Dollar Radio
192p./$16

“Scott McClanahan is not fearful. He does not live in the shadow of death or shy away from the hazards of poverty. Sickness, mistakes, his origins, his past, his flawed memory — he does not yield to their threats. He takes them by the horns and gives them a bear hug. Crapalachia is a book that takes guts. It takes guts to have written it. It takes guts to read.” 

Read the rest at Sundog Literature.

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Gina Myers: Hold It Down

16 Apr

Hold_it_down_frontGina Myers’ second full-length collection of poems, Hold It Down (Coconut Books, 2013), centers itself around the two long poems “False Spring” and “Behind the R,” both of which explore the terrain of the speaker’s consciousness as she lives, works, and writes in a particular city.

I’ve written at length before about “False Spring” and its dual intent to “explore both the city of Saginaw, Michigan and a poetic consciousness that shifts with the seasons,” while simultaneously expanding its vision through our “modern information systems” so that it cannot be pigeonholed as “a placed-based text that estranges readers not from Saginaw or similar Michigan cities.” As such, I’d like to focus my attention on “Behind the R.”

In 1883, Emma Lazarus immortalized the Statue of Liberty in her sonnet “The New Colossus.” She envisioned the statue as a monument to “world-wide freedom” that welcomed the tired, poor, and huddled masses who yearned “to breathe free” in the United States and make a better life for themselves.

While Lady Liberty may have offered the promise of a better life for immigrants during the late-nineteenth century, the speaker of “Behind the R” views the statue much differently one hundred and fourteen years later:

still the abandoned streetcars at the end of Van Brunt
spider web windshield & slow rust
weeds bent through tracks
brick streets & eyes      cast to sea
over the      East River   sails & tugboats
water taxi tours past
the statue of liberty           dilapidated
factory
crumbling into the water
small town Brooklyn
or anywhere (31)

…

Behind the R the sun is setting
on the statue of liberty
a cruise liner dock three blocks
from the projects
wild dogs roam the streets (33)

The “dilapidated” images of Brooklyn with which Myers surrounds the statue suggest that the city, our country, and the ideals of liberty and freedom have begun “crumbling into the water,” both physically and psychically. We rust. We are overgrown with weeds. We are hounded by wild dogs. We are lost in our own streets.

And the deteriorating cityscape affects the speaker’s well-being. No more clearly does the poem make this apparent as when Myers writes: “Sometimes your environment makes you hate yourself” (39); and it would appear that the self-hatred manifests itself in a list of fears both common and bizarre:

fear of voids or empty spaces
fear of time travel
fear of waves or wave-like motions
fear of hearing good news
fear of swallowing or being eaten
fear of the knee bending backwards
fear of nihilism
fear of rain or of being rained on (24)

…

fear of picnics
fear of taking tests
fear of being buried alive or of cemeteries
fear of symmetry
fear of the color red
fear of being tickled by feathers
fear of writing in public (37)

…

fear of crosses or of crucifixes
fear of the figure 8
fear of the color blue
fear of crowded rooms
fear of empty rooms
fear of dizziness or whirlpools
fear of dining or dinner conversation (43)

Yes, there is no shortage of fears that the city and its ruins can induced within the speaker. Moreover, these fears might be “the very language” needed “to articulate our unfreedom” (20), thus eradicating our false belief in the freedom we think we experience.

The combination of unfreedom, fear, and a crumbling surroundings, though, begs the question: Where is the hope? If everything fails, what is to stop us from sliding into the very nihilism the speaker mentions in her list of fears? The answer the poem offers is to turn “a blind eye / to the newspaper stand” (45) and disengage from the narratives forwarded by mainstream media and the like.

Yet, in the previously reviewed “False Spring,” the speaker seeks to engage with broader social, cultural, political, and artistic communities in order connect with other people outside of the worn landscape of Michigan. So what is one to do? On the one hand, retreat offers the comfort of ignorance, but the loneliness of disengagement; on the other hand, participation provides community, but also a heightened and debilitating fear. Myers’ second book might not be able to solve this conundrum, but it does thrive on the tension produced from it: the push and pull of the speaker’s desire both to engage the world around her and withdraw into her art. The best solution the book might offer resides in the title: Hold It Down. And while you’re at it, take some deep breaths, maybe move to Atlanta, and revel in the knowledge that:

Not every day
can be a good day
but this [could be] one
of them, one
of the best days (98)

Yes, things can be difficult, but the hope that today could be one “of the best days” keeps us going; or, as Lazarus wrote in “The New Colossus,” there might be “wretched refuse” along our “teeming shore,” but we remain hopeful for a better future wherein we “lift [our] lamp beside the golden door!”

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Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan

28 Mar

At AWP last year I heard Scott McClanahan’s name and him reading for the first time. It was biblical. I talked about that here.

This year at AWP I saw Scott read again and after he was done, in the black and dirty gold haze of a basement bar he handed me this:
 crapalachia
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He swirled into the crowd after without comment, though I found him again and thanked him for the book. I’m sorry if I took away from the lovely quietness of how you gave me the book, Scott. I just don’t do well without saying Thank You, though you shouldn’t doubt this is a thank you as well.
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I saw scraps of what others have said about Crapalachia before reading it, which pretty much all said *This is about death* and yes, so much so. I’m introduced to Uncle Nathan then he dies. I’m introduced to Grandma Ruby then she dies. I’m introduced to Mrs. Powell and the girl in the pink dress and her mother and they all die, and so do Rhonda and Bill and Naked Joe but not where they need a grave. They fade out, or are cut out, from what happens, though we know they’ll need a grave sooner or later.
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And it’s not just the sadness or dirtiness of death, but also when it’s hilarious, when we try to overload it with meaning how it can flip us the bird:
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………“We’ll now release a dove which is a symbolic representation of Ruby’s soul flying home to heaven.”
………And so they opened up the bird box and nothing happened.
………We waited.
………And then this sleepy-looking dove just crawled out, except it didn’t even look like a dove really but just a fat pigeon that somebody had painted white.
………It had a look on its face like, What the fuck? Seriously, people. What the fuck? It’s way too old to be doing this today.
………So the Wallace and Wallace guy tried to shoo it but it wouldn’t shoo.
………So the preacher repeated:  “We’ll now release the dove.”
………The Wallace and Wallace guy shooed it again. Finally the dove shot high up into the air and out and over our heads, but instead of flying away it just landed on top of this chain-linked fence. And so the Wallace and Wallace guy tried shooting it again and everyone giggled and gathered around in a circle throwing up their arms and shouting “shoo-shoo” at the bird high above. I shouted, “Shoo.” We were all shooing.
………But it wouldn’t shoo.
………And so it was.
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Along with death Crapalachia doesn’t let you forget what it is to be poor. How Scott writes about Danese, West Virginia reads like a love letter to  living and feeling in a place designated by everywhere else to be a place to use poor people to get done what you don’t want to do, take risks you don’t want to take. There’s a beauty lacking all bullshit in loving these places without patronization.
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……….Then we read about how you build civilization. They built the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel by digging a big ass hole in the side of a mountain.  They used a bunch of poor people to dig it.  A poor person means either their skin was dark or their accents were thick.  That’s the best way to do anything–get a bunch of poor people to dig it. So they cut and cut into the mountain but there was a problem. They didn’t wet the dust from the cut limestone–so the men developed silicosis. The men started dying by the tens and then the twenties and then the hundreds and then–the thousands? Since they were poor the company just buried them. There was an investigation a few years later but no one cared. They were poor people.
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More history lessons about mine explosions and failed efforts at economic fairness in West Virginia punctuate the story, make sure you remember how little poor people seem to be given a shit about except to each other. The book is subtitled “a Biography of a Place” and Scott is forthcoming with West Virginian pockmarks and their origins, blemishes that seem unfairly inflicted rather than earned.
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Vital here is repetition of a biblical kind and degree. Who begat who begat who and us, right now, squished between begats and soon a dead name in a Deuteronomy being constantly revised and updated. And there are beautiful, prophetic exhortations beside piles of dogshit and mine explosions and photo albums of dead people, all the gross truth of lives that end.
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Toward the book’s conclusion, Scott talks about a flood resulting from a dam break that plowed through Buffalo Creek, West Virginia in 1972. The flood kills 125 people and afterward it’s not like anybody gets to start all over, like God could do jack shit to clean even this tiny part of the earth. Men still have to pull up the little girl in the pink dress buried in the mud and her mother’s corpse sitting under a tree, mouth filled with sand. And Scott’s last holy plea to us is not to forget and start over, but remember the names of the loved, with all the mud and sweetness and misery and they drag along behind them.
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Get Crapalachia here.

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Animal Bodies by David Courtright

11 Mar

Animal Bodies

Animal Bodies
David Courtright
Two Steps Press
p.39 / $7
Those brave enough to follow David Courtright into his wilderness will get lost — in the fur, in a fury of bees, in the rings of a tree trunk, in the downy comfort of petalled flowers, in a mess of fallen leaves. His poetry is suspended in something mythic and strange to us now – tangled between the flora and fauna, in the ether.

Read the rest of the review at Fanzine.

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SS Review: Poisonhorse by Brandi Wells

26 Feb

Poisonhorse

POISONHORSE by Brandi Wells

Nephew, 34 pgs., August 2012, $10

A literary eruption, is that a thing, if that’s a thing, it just happened over here, out comes a saddened–>tortured love cry, a near-epic struggle twisted forward and within and out of over a bitty 34 pages, the story of Poisonhorse shrieks, as the horse and the poison the narrator gives it and the bears and the rats and the lady in the cistern and etc. burrow their way into you, as you begin to see yourself as one of the severed heads in the bear’s belly, as what you thought to call love expands and then immediately bursts in your hands.

Check out pieces of Horse here and here. Get the Horse here.

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Selections: OTHER KINDS by Dylan Nice

18 Feb

other kinds dylan niceOther Kinds
Dylan Nice
120 pgs
Hobart
$10.95

“My people were loggers and truck drivers–people who didn’t trust success as much as struggle. My father wore flannel and drank beer from tall, white cans. He spoke with a slowness that suggested hardship.”

* * *

“Young girls in young outfits. The curve of something I couldn’t know. I got off the bus and went to the basement and watched television. I watched the other kinds of people in the world until I forgot about myself.”

* * *

“Lily looked at you hard when she laughed. She came to the plains from an eastern city to see the size of the weather, the long breaths of wind, the way you could see the rain well before you rode into it. The place I was from was just as empty but not as flat. It took me years to get used to having nothing on the horizon, nothing farther in the distance to mark time.”

* * *

“The road back into town wound steeply through the woods. She drove the car too fast, gunning the accelerator, slamming the brakes. She had no understanding of the mechanics at play and I said nothing about the panic I felt. My father once told me that wet leaves can be like ice. Up ahead, a maple had shed its leaves thickly over a curve, and when her wheels hit, they kicked out. I hit my head, and the dash collapsed on my shin. She woke up to smoke that turned out to be her air bag’s dust. Mine didn’t go off.

She pulled at my shirt and screamed when the bloodied part of my face slumped toward her. I heard it from a great distance.”

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A Review: I Take Back The Sponge Cake by Loren Erdrich and Sierra Nelson (Rose Metal Press)

11 Feb
Image

I Take Back The Sponge Cake
by Loren Erdich and Sierra Nelson
Rose Metal Press, $14.95

The worst Single-Sentence Review ever: Reading this is my experience, says so on the cover, also, it’s an adventure, says that too on the cover, so what more could I want from poetry–adventure that’s all mine.

Seriously, that’s what the joint force of Loren Erdrich and Sierra Nelson have done in “I Take Back The Sponge Cake”: they’ve created a slim little escape for us all.

Erdrich’s sketches plop us beside strange beings and inside wacky stills. Faces with eyes dazed and elsewhere. Lots of bodies, chunks of them smeared. Outlines and borders of these bodies and objects incomplete and scratched. All like grainy ghosts overlooking you as you pass.

Nelson’s poems wiggle into the weird dark clouds expanding over it all, drifting down to surround. The “I” wrangled by ineptitude and aloneness. From the poem titles, like the brilliant “An Orchestra Built For You,” to the individual lines, like the poem of the same title as the ending, “Your small ears are necessary/to my/day,” the “you” shifting in and out of focus, you being invited, you as a part of this (strange) party.

And the word pairs and weighted sentences toss you back into the frantic wonderment of childhood, interacting with art, finding new, surprising language wherever you go.

This is how it goes—A small poem, an ink and watercolor drawing, a sentence with a blank and a homophonic word pair choice, a thunderoll to another page.

Example sentence: “The ________ of him in bed.” Example word pair for that sentence: size/sighs. Choose wisely: the word you choose dictates the next poem/image you consume.

The word pairs are almost begging you to choose the less-obvious, more poetic of the word pair. Or maybe they are both the poetic, nestled in the cracks between the drawing and the poem.

Why it may not create the biggest adventure, the act of choosing, of making one’s own meaning with the sentences, the consequence of where it takes you, and the fact it’s all yours, or so it seems, is a rattling device.

For everyone, the book starts with “You Will Go Back Again,” a short initial push off the blocks, but also an omen of the nature of the journey and where you must go to get it all.

Warning: You’ll never get through it all, at least not following the choices, this thing has its own scratched path.

As the authors explained in the introduction, AND WERE TOTALLY RIGHT, the art and the poems don’t explain each other, but they act as a “dynamic conversation when viewed together.”

Like in “Pseudomorph,” a poem that seems to be about an octopus/squid (beginning like “Releasing a false body/my shadow emerges and//I am all/stun,//while she is all/a body//a dark/slipped off”) but the accompanying drawing slices that connection into the journey’s physical presence–two bodies, arms around each other’s shoulders, one shaded, one not. Meaning is the cart you ride in through the art/poems.

In “Sponge Cake,” there’s a strange creature of sponge cake-like consistency, who seems to be on the beach, who seems to be on the beach with his paws over a fallen human-ish body, and then the poem ends: “More and more I forget to put messages in/to the bottles I keep/throwing out to see.”

That’s what I love so much about this book, how the art isn’t merely an accessory, how the choose-your-own-adventure part isn’t a gimmick, they’re all crucial boards on the bridge we’re crossing, this beautiful thing “invoking a process of inquiry,” as the authors also correctly say in their introduction.

Proof? How about “Glutter?” Featuring the same illustration as the cover—this disembodied, bright blue-eyed rabbit head—this poem simply reading “Do you think of me first as a girl—/or do you think of me first as a skeleton girl?” And no adventure choice, just a bunch of white space and the italicized sentence that says “The vessel soon became a ______.”

This is the shining truth of this book, the hallmark flag: it is what’s inside that matters most (that old thing revived!), the possible meanings and connections, our tilted head in consideration of if this head was ever even attached, if this hand really belongs to a body.

Go check this book out, now, please.

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A Collision of Urgency and Infinity

26 Jan

Chloefront

Legs Get Led Astray
Chloe Caldwell
168 pgs.
Future Tense Books
$13.50

Legs Get Led Astray caused such an intense reaction, I considered walking to the title address of one essay, Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable (156 India Street), at well past two o’clock a.m. on an empty stomach and a bottle of wine. I finished the collection soon after, straight through.

I recommend you sift through however many books necessary until you find the most relevant one and read it. I recommend you read a book straight through whenever possible. I recommend you read Legs Get Led Astray (when said seemingly appropriate time comes).

As a line, every line was a hot iron and as a collection, the collection made me feel young and old and vulnerable (“Life felt gargantuan.”). These essays drove my desire to give myself wholly to myself. Like a hangnail that won’t be ripped off without some blood, Legs Get Led Astray prepares for just the right amount of regrowth.

This Is What They Say by M. Bartley Seigel: A Review

14 Jan

TIWTS

This Is What They Say
by M. Bartley Seigel
Typecast Publishing, 63 pgs., $16

Indiana’s blue top plopped six inches of snow on my little town, the day after Christmas. Already, this place is isolated, by poverty and drug use, by its flyover-ness and Midwestern desolation. Add in this big ugly hunk of winter slush and we fall farther away.

And in this isolation is where I find my admiration the most for M. Bartley Seigel’s poems from This Is What They Say. Here he has conjured up remarkable songs to represent the people’s experience, these people stuck in the “middle of nowhere,” these people trapped by their fear and their unluck, their spot in life and their hardships. The book, dedicated to the people and places of Montcalm County, Michigan, delivers itself as accounts from the collective We, the We who both exposes its hardships and hides just enough of its vulnerability to continue on—“Love is another word for we-the-people.”

Like in the poem on page 16, that begins with the realization that “sometimes we open our mouths and our fathers and mothers crawl up from out of our throats.” And when such happens so removed from the larger world, when you are Other, when the sun reaches you less, that crawling up, especially from an abusive father or plagued mother, can create serious dents in the self, until the self too is lost in the place, left to “misread the nature of our wounds and woundings…We imagine ourselves the kind of people who don’t lie or steal or break hearts or bones.”

This book resonates with me, has settled into a special place in my heart, because of its reminder of the place I’m from, that little speck of Indiana called Elwood, covered in meth and poverty, neglected kids and rowdy hearts. Yet, like the folks and places in this book, there’s a miraculous hope, a never-give-totally-up attitude. As the lack of daylight sucks away my outdoor time, I’ve been bundling up and heading out into the cold streets. Walking past memories and seeing new ones formed in the distance, I’m often confronted by what Siegel has seen—“The sun sets and in the distance dogs begin to bark. A child is lost. Something is forgotten and left behind, like distance, like time, like avoidance, like denial. A grave is dug.”

This book is a brilliant reminder that every action is dictated by an emotion, acknowledged or nah, and in these poems the emotions are loud and clear—the doubt and lust, the fear and the glimmers of hope. “We guard our cabinets of curiosities like our lives depend on it because our lives depend on it.” That’s the most striking part of this book, more than the difficulties and desolation, but the hope, the search for love in the dark. Because in the end, despite and because of all this, “meanwhile, we endure.”

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