Jim Elledge's H: The Eclipse and the Sun

Jim Elledge's new book, H, is an unnerving, insightful, always surprising prose poem portrait of outsider artist Henry Darger.

I wasn't prepared to live in the spaces Elledge created. Darger's work, indeed Darger, has always disturbed me and my tendency was to look away from his art and life. Elledge's portrait of him is challenging and, at times, beautiful. It isn't often that a book of documentary poetry shakes me like this; A. Van Jordan's M.A.C.N.O.L.I.A. (which also uses the "Dictionary Entry" prose poem form, though not exclusively as here), Lavonne Adams' Through the Glorieta Pass, Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq's Ophelia, and Nicole Cooley's The Afflicted Girls are a few others.

The power of these poems rises as much from the careful language of Elledge and the conjured presence of Darger as it does from the biographical details the poet has included. In the opening poem, "Algebra," Elledge gives us an introduction to the disturbing images employed and altered by Darger, and he invites us into Darger's "linguistics of watercolor and crayons." He also warns the reader of what is required to enter Darger's world and vision, to "hear" Darger's art: "You can hear it as clear as can be, if you don't let the screams from the butchery get in your way."

Though much of the language used in the poems is stark and stripped (something which adds to an imprisoning, claustrophobic feeling for the reader), Elledge also uses moments of rhyme and repetition to his advantage and creates rooms in the house of the book where time is blurred and the old Darger is fused with the boy who suffered at the hands of his abusers (arguably individuals who took sexual advantage of the young Darger and a repressed society that created and fostered abusers while punishing the victims of abuse). At times the poems take on a terrifying nursery rhyme life where the aging Darger and the child are inseparable: "When H flops down at his table to trace, retrace, and trace again the little girls and boys he clips out of magazines and newspapers, he ignores their clothes (not pose). Dresses and skirts and blouses and trousers and shirts disappear, even socks and shoes."

These are not poems for the timid, nor will the brave reader find a safe place to settle their minds. Should the reader grieve for Darger, the victim of molestation,  or fear him, a possible pedophile (if only in his mind and art)? Was Darger a would-be-savior or a would-be-predator? Should we try to understand Darger or turn our heads in disgust? Where is the line between saint and madman? Where is the line between the horror Darger confronted and the horror the reader might have confronted in his own life? Part of the book's brilliance is that there are no easy answers "here on the sidewalk where that stud The Unseen leans against a lamppost, on-lookers hold sparklers and shift their weight one foot to the other. In the sticky dark (not park), you can barely breathe, the humidity close as a stranger's palm across your mouth. It keeps you from crying out. It makes you take it like a man. Not H's hand. Someone else's."

Elledge has created an unforgettable book of poetry about an unforgettable man who longed for divine ecstasy while mired in his own darkness and the darkness we create every single day in our too often judgmental and repressive world. Elledge does not free Darger completely, but he frees Darger just enough for us to encounter him in all of his mangled complexity and pathetic beauty. It is not an easy book, but it is a necessary book.

Hearing Voices: Women Versing Life presents Lavonne J. Adams and Historical Poetry

Hearing Voices: Women Versing Life presents Lavonne J. Adams and Historical Poetry

The Poetry of Necessity: Pam Uschuk's Wild in the Plaza of Memory

Wild in the Plaza of Memory lives up to its title. With these poems, Uschuk has opened a public space where all things, all encounters--both beautiful and dreadful--are not only possible, they are inevitable. In this plaza of poetry, the poet moves effortlessly in time and space, addresses the living and conjures the dead, confesses personal losses publicly and public losses intimately.

The collection opens with a an ode to Lorca. It could be said that it takes bravery (some would say, wrongly, hubris) to evoke this poet. Certainly, other poets who have conjured him--directly or indirectly--have been alternately praised and dressed down for it. This said, I can think of more than a few poets who have summoned his ghost successfully (Malena Morling and Virgil Suarez come immediately to mind). Pam Uschuk is now among them:

                                some nights you fly through the window,

                                the eye of a hawk on fire,

                                black gaze gone to blood, gone

                                to the ropey bones of moonlight,

                                to the guitars laughing in the blue pines,

                                to the wet bulls of passion,

                                to the weft of love abandoned

                                to oiled rifles in an olive grove

                                on a sunny day before I was born. Did

                                they so fear the delicacy of your hands?

This ode, like so many of her poems, is part ornate tapestry of deep image, part protest poem. The poet rarely leaves the realm of public discourse, or activism, even when she is at her most personal and intimate. There is always a sense of wonder and awe in her images, and often a sense of outrage at injustice in her assertions. 

This is also part of her bravery. It could be argued that there is a current, poetic aesthetic  which often embraces and values language play, sonics, and anything deemed to be "new" (often a manufactured, confounding, mystery, as opposed to the everyday mystery of the human experience which has never been completely translated or transferred by words) over the sincere poem, the urgent poem, the direct poem--and most damning of all to many critics--the emotional poem that, in its wounded fury, attempts to confront social, political, and environmental injustices. Many of the these critics ignore the fact that some of the poets they hold in highest regard were poets of public--as well as private--discourse. Lorca's "Dawn in New York," is one obvious example. There are numerous others. Strange that poems of "pop culture" are also currently embraced, while poems of protest are often not.  

Uschuck addresses the contemporary world, but, like Whitman, does not avoid the emotional, the dramatic, the rapturous, or the wide world. In the wild plaza of her poetry, students are murdered in Tehran and the poet responds with sincere anguish:

                                Say the students know they could die

                                but demonstrate because silence stings

                                deeper than a interrogator's electric cord.

                                Say a poet powers on a computer, half a world away

                                and blasts  toad-sized letters of longing

                                into cyber space, and the lonely air bursts.

What Uschuk has done with this book is something that could bring poetry back into the hands of the non-poet. She, as Szymborska did before her, questions poetry's place in the world, and, also like Szymborska, gives us an answer. In her poem, "Who Today Needs Poetry," she writes:

                                not a belt unbuckling or the snap of the triggering

                                device on the homemade bomb about

                                to blow in a Kabul market, not the black widow's web

                                spun to catch wings for her children while we sleep, not

                                the blue burka slipping over a mother's head,

                                not a father's prayer rug clotted

                                with his son's blood. No, not any of these.

                                Not these.

Daniel Nathan Terry

March 27, 2012

To purchase this title: http://www.wingspress.com/book.cfm/141/Wild-in-the-Plaza-of-Memory/Pam-Uschuk/

A Confessional Reading List for 2011: Winnie the Pooh, Comp Texts, and Kristin Bock

Crape Myrtles in Snow by Benjamin Billingsley (18"x24" monotype)

It's been a good but difficult year. Since my first post, I've gone from unemployed to, arguably, over-employed, and I am grateful. This said, the schedule of the past several months left little time for reading, writing, cycling, or submitting (unless you count submitting to exhaustion now and again). The result was a 12 pound weight gain (now vanquished) and a much better understanding of what it means to be a working teacher and poet. Despite the difficult start, I love my jobs and my life.

Although I did not manage to read much that wasn't for school, I did squeeze in some marvelous reads here and there. Some books were published this year (some by friends old, new and cyber) and some were published many years ago by beloved strangers (and have been re-read often over the past few years and months), but all of them helped me through a year of learning and losing (Margo and Kathy, you are much missed).

Here are a few of the texts in no particular order:

A Book of Luminous Things edited by Czeslaw Milosz
Prodigal: Variations by Ed Madden
The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris
Mad for Meat by Kevin Simmonds
Cloisters by Kristin Bock
Astoria by Malena Morling
The Circus Poems by Alex Grant
The Collected Ted Hughes
In the Shadow of the Mountain by Lavonne J. Adams
Collective Brightness edited by Kevin Simmonds (and yes, I have two poems in the anthology)
Please by Jericho Brown
...hide behind me... by Jason Mott
Then, Something by Patricia Fargnoli
The Collected Sylvia Plath
The Great Enigma by Tomas Transtromer
The Collected Millay by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Poet Lore
New South
Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
Other Voices, Other Rooms Truman Capote
BICYCLING Magazine
Assaracus Magazine (with a big shout out to the poem "Late Testament" by Ron Mohring)
Cellophane by Maria Arana
The Lady Matador's Hotel by Cristina Garcia
90 Miles by Virgil Suarez
My Life as Adam by Bryan Borland
The First Risk by Charles Jensen
The Selected Eugenio Montale
The Collected Wislawa Szymborska


Okay, maybe I did read quite a bit, but I still have a huge stack of new books waiting for me. Good life.

Cheers and luck to you for the new year,
Daniel

Ed Madden’s Prodigal: Variations

Ed Madden’s Prodigal: Variations

Lethe Press, Inc. 2011. ISBN: 1-59021-340-8

This morning a fire was slowly dying in Onslow County to the north of Wilmington. It had, in two days, consumed some 4,000 acres and though it was miles away, the air reeked of smoke. Cycling was out of the question—as was walking the dogs or even sitting in the garden with the last of the camellias. I don’t like spending mornings indoors, even when I’m writing. I like it even less when I’m not. And I like it even less than that when I am not writing and I’m worried about the state of the world or about someone who for one reason or another has found a place in my heart.

            Suffice it to say that this morning did not begin with much promise.

            So, I turned to the stacks of must-read and must-reread poetry books around the house. Some of them are gifts (several from generous publishers) and some I have purchased over the past few months and years. And so I passed the hours with poets—new and familiar (Ed Madden, Patricia Fargnoli, Eduardo C. Corral, Ron Mohring, Dan Vera, Jason Mott, Kristin Bock, Lavonne J. Adams and others). Outside, the smoke was clearing, but the sky remained gray until sunset. Inside, it was a day of poetry. Inside, it was whatever weather the poets conjured in my hands.
            Ed Madden is a poet who can conjure weather like few others—weather of the land and of the heart. His landscapes are his confessions. In “Rite at sunset” from his shattering and beautiful new book, Prodigal: Variations, Madden writes:

           

            Look east: a dark and empty sky.

            Look west: the place that was home.

            Take the envelopes of seeds,

            expired and dry, from the shed.

            Scatter them like empty prayers.

            Blame the earth, blame the sky.   

His lines are clean and spare, his language precise and simple, and yet there is no detail missing—or rather, what details are missing become an absence which is felt as strongly as any presence.

            But then, this book is a book of absences which are felt more keenly than most presences. In the speaker’s case, it is the chosen absence of a father which drives many of the poems and it is this absence which gives the book its title. That said, this is not simply a book about one father or about one son—it is a book about the distances between men. Some of them are wide and seemingly impossible to bridge and yet somehow marking the body:

           

            A certain man had two sons.

           

            They are the empty chairs at the table.

            They are the dust on the bedpost.

            They are the scar on the brow.

And at times this distance is bridged in other lands, through other bodies, through impossible transformations as it is in “Dream Fathers”:

           

                                                            The bridge’s end

            may veer; each night I go someplace else,

           

            dark cypress swamp on either side.

            One night my father is the driver and the car.

            He opens up the door of his side,

            and I climb in. I cross the bridge again,

            riding in the body of my father.

Heartbreaking, honest, and above all, human—Madden’s poems move beyond parable and biography, beyond father and son. These poems are for anyone who has ever been haunted by what should have been but found solace in the hope of what could be, as he does at the end of the poem, “Prayer”:

                                                after I have said

            what I need to say to my father, whatever

            that may be then, and on that morning on the lake,

            may I be on the dock with my beloved,

            tossing bits of biscuit to the fish, rising

            from the green depths like memories—and

            across the lake the sound of two geese

            calling to one another.

           

*To purchase this title, order it from your local indie (ISBN provided above) or online at: http://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Variations-Ed-Madden/dp/1590213408/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1301105076&sr=8-1

Welcome to eel-grass.

What you will find on eel-grass:

reviews of books I love and admire. I don't pretend to be unbiased. You will find books by friends, heroines, and relative strangers. You will find books that are new and ones that are old. You will, I'll bet, find me rambling off topic about birds, gardens, cycling, and visual art from time to time.

What you will not find:

negative reviews--there are enough people out there to tell you what and who you shouldn't read. I am not a critic, only a poet and lover of poetry, and my opinion is just that--my opinion. And if a book doesn't speak to me, I don't assume the fault is with the book--I simply put it down. Perhaps it will speak to me later, perhaps not, but I will not blame it for its silence here.

Best,
Daniel Nathan Terry