Michael McAloran, The Zero Eye

Michael McAloran’s The Zero Eye (Oneiros Books, 2014) is poetry at possibly its most extreme in terms of disjunctiveness of language and the violence of its themes and vision. Certain influences suggest themselves — Lautréamont, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, the pessimism and some of the techniques of Beckett. Writer of the introduction to the book, Aad de Gids, adds Malcom Lowry and Céline to the list. But McAloran takes these possible influences to their limits and adds in further doses of apocalyptic terror, paranoia, and desperation. 

The Zero Eye is the poetic equivalent of early Einstürzende Neubauten. Here is a sample of McAloran’s writing, from a section called “the hang(ed) light”: “. . .detritus collapse/ wrung light of all that ever was/ spoke no no not sung neither/ claim or not/ a broken jaw of acrid tears/ sedimentary skull lights/ ache without speech/ from a gouge of absent colourings/ ache without sound/ . . .” This is a panorama of destruction, modeling in words the struggle to represent what apparently cannot even be really represented or fully transmitted — there is the sense in these lines of the futility of expression and the horror of human beings’ isolation from each other.

Compared to Rimbaud, the personality of the speaker, the I, is less apparent, but there is the titular “eye” in certain pieces here, which acts as a sort of symbol or stand-in (I think) for the speaker or at least the vision of the poet. It is at once “the roving eye” (one that is “clear” and “wishful” as well as “bleeding” and “silenced,” “roving in the darkness of I”) and “the zero eye” (far more negative, “voidal,” “obsolete,” a “nullity”). Ultimately this book seems an expression of both a sort of personal pain and the process of interrogating (and I think here of “interrogation” not only in the academic sense of problematizing an idea, but also metaphorically say a jail-cell interrogation, the aggression and harshness of that) the language which always seems unable to encompass it — McAloran ends with the realization or paradoxical assertion that “this is not [even] a text. . .” The Zero Eye is not for the faint of heart and requires a certain kind of readerly discipline. But it has a visceral effect and is unlike just about anything anyone is writing today.

Paige Taggart, The Ice Poems

photo by Jes Shimek (http://www.jesleestudios.com/), from the DoubleCross Press site

Paige Taggart’s The Ice Poems (DoubleCross Press, 2012) is a sharply constructed little chapbook with letterpress covers that sparkle subtly, imitating the quality of ice itself. The physical package (designed by Jeff Peterson) is a fitting complement to a quite excellent series of poems by Taggart, poems which often subvert syntactical expectations to dazzling, sometimes dizzying, effect. Initially dense and hard to penetrate, these untitled pieces soon shine through with a little bit of work on the reader’s part (at least, that’s how it was for me). They are never literal but succeed by layering themes and ideas throughout the course of the series, relying on repetition and juxtaposition to make their meaning(s).

Once I got into Taggart’s method — about halfway through my first reading of it — the poems really began to come across for me, and I then immediately went back and reread the whole thing. When poems are able to give you that intangible inward buzz via their own inherent aesthetic effects, just by reading the words themselves on the page, you know there’s something worthwhile going on. This was one of my favorite sections:

offensive myth in chronological order

can’t take baby wait

outside a twine ball unwinds down the sidewalk

ancestry is hereditary

the bridge is tied under the water // in rain snow melted on sidewalk showing nothing had come before // backwards becoming undone // by the none other than escape

So what does it mean? Does there even have to be easily identifiable meaning all the time? I don’t think so, but again I can see themes here — in the case of this excerpt, of the influence of the past on our individual lives, of families, of disconnection, of personal transformation. I like the sudden, brief static image (“in rain snow melted on sidewalk”) amid poems that overwhelmingly function kinetically. By this I mean that it’s the quality of the language itself, its disruptions, and at times outright oddness that seem to move these poems forward — rather than basing them on Poundian snapshots — and so when one such snapshot does appear, it stands out effectively.

Though we would probably call this poetry “avant-garde” in some way, I think Taggart works less in the tradition that leads from Pound to Language Poetry (though her language-play does occasionally recall something of Stein), and instead gestures toward the methods of Dadaism and Surrealism. For example, the line “we have an inside of another us” suggests a cut-up of something like “we have another inside of us” (though of course I’m speculating here), while “the face of the mountain lapped up my mind into a whirlpool // birds outside crystallized into imaginary migrations // an eggshell in times of my mouth grew weary // an egg in the snow // . . .” puts me in mind of Joyce Mansour or Charles Henri Ford, more so than of, say, Susan Howe (which is not a value judgment; I love Susan Howe).

One difference between what Taggart does and what Language Poetry typically does, is that emotional resonances are very much to the fore in Taggart’s writing, and the “lyric I,” if obscured, remains very much present. In a recent online interview, she said of another poem of hers,

This particular poem was written with extreme clarity and written all in one sitting from beginning to end and it was all TRUTH > memory forming thought to gain better clarity about the present . . . sometimes I write in pursuit of pure language, love, and want to impact my emotions into a vessel that can ride like a philosophical seahorse, and this was definably that kind of moment.

I think something similar is going on in The Ice Poems, where emotions are suggested in mystifying metaphors and weird veers of thought and grammar: “I fell entirely through the ice // swim and sank into invisible patterns / pulled from inside my memory bed // it was thick // it was crowded with me” — yes, this is good stuff.

But perhaps my impulse always to contextualize or situate a work in a tradition is unnecessary. It is also enough to see Taggart’s work as engaging on its own terms, or as part of its own scene — Taggart is prominent among a particular group of poets based in New York City, specifically Brooklyn, and maybe in some way she reflects the zeitgeist of that informal circle (and I wholeheartedly affirm the idea of groups of poet-friends). In any case, as someone who is not part of the same social group but who comes at Taggart’s work as an interested reader and poet, I’ll end by simply saying that The Ice Poems appealed to my own particular tastes, and for whatever it’s worth I very much recommend them.

Reading at Duquesne Univ. 12/4

I will be reading poetry, along with fiction writer and poet Karen Lillis, for Duquesne University’s Coffee House Reading Series on Thursday, Dec. 4, at 7 p.m. in the Barnes & Noble Café (ground floor of the Power Center).
Duquesne’s media services did a little story on us, here.  If you’re in Pgh, I’ll see you at the reading.

Poem at District Lit

My poem “Uptown” appears in District Lit:

http://districtlit.com/post/101277496886/uptown-by-michael-s-begnal

Poem in Spiral Orb

My poem “Homage to Muriel Rukeyser” appears [here] at the online journal Spiral Orb, issue 9. This journal is particularly interesting for its intertextual and eco-poetic aspects. Spiral Orb describes itself this way:

How systems (a poem-system, an eco-system, a human-construct-system like a state or a country, a solar-system, a web-system, a circulatory system, etc.) organize themselves (and are organized) is of great interest. This systems focus may be considered a permaculture poetics. The lyric cross-pollinates the experimental.

Sections (words, phrases, lines) of each poem published in Spiral Orb are embedded with hyperlinks to other poems in Spiral Orb. A composite poem including a fragment from each piece in Spiral Orb serves as the entry piece and table of contents. Hence, Spiral Orb is an experiment in juxtaposition, interrelationships, and intertextuality. Each poem stands on its own, but is also illuminated by its links. Anticipate the poems making contact with one another in an odd and perfect manner.

Aside from myself, this issue includes work from Maleea Acker, Amy Ash & Callista Buchen, Stephen Collis, Dina El Dessouky, Betsy Fagin, Barbara Henning, Elizabeth Kelley Bowman, Lucia LoTempio, Paige Menton, Sabine Miller, Jessica Reed, Chris Turnbull, Linda Umans, Erin Renee Wahl, Steve Willey, and Sarah Ann Winn.

My thanks to editor Eric Magrane.

Two Early Poems

Two early poems of mine appear at an online journal called Walking Is Still Honest [here]. The poems are “Black Flag” (on the band of that name) and “American Cities,” and they were first published in a book that Six Gallery Press put out back in 2003, called The Lakes of Coma.

This whole page of poets, edited by John Thomas Menesini, is good!

Craig Bernier Book Launch, 11/8

I’ll be warming up the crowd for Craig Bernier’s book launch.  If you’re in Pittsburgh on November 8, please come out — Craig is a really good prose-fiction writer.
Here’s the official wording:

Celebrate the launch of Craig Bernier’s award winning collection of short fiction Your Life Idyllic (Black Lawrence Press) with a reading and party at East End BookExchange, Pittsburgh, November 8th, 2014, 7-9 pm. Special guest readers Heather McNaugher and Michael S. Begnal.

Poem in The Otter

My poem “Homage to Haniel Long” appears [here] in the current (October-November 2014) issue of The Otter (an arm of Overpass Books).

Goodby, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry

I know I’m tooting my own horn here, but I just recently realized that John Goodby’s chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry gets into my time in Ireland and editing of The Burning Bush journal, for example: “. . .Begnal, shaped by Beat, African-American, and New York School poetry, had arrived in Ireland in the late 1990s and was shocked by the staidness of its poetic culture. . .” (626).  I’ve always admired Goodby’s study Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History (2000), so it’s an honor to be part of this more recent work.

The Oxford book is rather expensive, but probably worth it.  The relevant page is also on Google Books, here.

Yes Scotland

Two James Liddy Books

A little late, but I just realized that two James Liddy books I have a connection with were highlighted by Syracuse University Press for Pride Month (June) — Honeysuckle,Honeyjuice: A Tribute to James Liddy, an anthology that I edited; and I Only Know That I Love Strength in My Friends and Greatness, a poetry collection of Liddy’s that I wrote the Afterword for. Both published by Arlen House and distributed by Syracuse UP.

On Seamus Heaney

A few days ago I linked an article by Kevin Kiely, on Seamus Heaney (here), on social media.  I quickly realized that not a lot of people like Kiely’s criticism these days.  I had not actually read much from Kiely in recent years, but remembered him as the editor of the poetry page at the magazine Books Ireland, where he published me in the late 1990s. Apparently since then he has annoyed many.  (Here is one reaction, by Patrick Cotter.)

That said, my accompanying comment to my posting of the link was this: “While I have thought Heaney is/was very good at what he did at times, I have to say, I agree with a lot of this.”  And I stand by that.  Not all of the Kiely piece is fair — e.g. lines like “He became everybody’s favourite, famous Séamus. Everyséamus” and “Heaney’s wife Marie Heaney, née Devlin sister of Barry Devlin of Horslips, ensured an easy entrée to RTÉ’s arts programming,” and I’ve seen some accuse him (Kiely) of sour grapes.  I can’t say what his motivation in writing the article was, but it appears to fit a recent pattern.  But when he notes that “The preoccupation with bogs was all-enveloping as [Heaney] turned to bog corpses, skeletons and bones — all safely distancing him from the sectarian Troubles whose heinous burials of course find no resonance in Heaney.  At base, Heaney is a poet of nostalgia for home, hearth, turf fire, hen-house and bicycle,” I have to agree.  Actually, I would say that there is perhaps resonance with issues of the Troubles in some of the bog-body poems, but always designed in a quiet, oblique way, so as to upset no one’s sensibilities.

Many like this about Heaney, of course, his bog and farm metaphors, and that is fine, but it’s not something that especially appeals to me, all in all.  And the latter point (“At base, Heaney is a poet of nostalgia for home, hearth, turf fire. . .”), whatever you might think of Kiely, is little different than the one I made early on as editor of The Burning Bush (circa 1999), and other commentators made in the same journal.  I might have been partly motivated by youthful (or at least still somewhat youthful) brashness, but also it’s also not that far away from Thomas Kinsella’s scathing comment in The Dual Tradition (1995): “Heaney has dealt with some experiences of growing up Catholic in a Protestant Unionist Six Counties.  The impression is of carefulness, fulfilling the established expectations — as one might expect from a member of the underprivileged class managing a successful exit.”  For me, Kinsella was always a much sharper, more intense poet.

However, I mean what I said about Heaney being often undeniably being very, very good, whether one agrees with his stance or politics or not.  And my understanding is that he was a wonderful and affable person.  And I certainly have no wish to speak ill of the dead.  But there can ultimately be no sacred cows in poetry.  Every poet’s body of work is going to be up for criticism, alive or dead (and that is if we’re lucky).  And at the same time, every reviewer is liable to have his or her own ethos/credibility queried, as Kiely’s deserves to be.  So I guess I am saying that while I can’t speak for Kiely, some of his points are worth considering in this particular instance; they are not even especially new.

I revert to what the poet James Liddy wrote of Heaney in his collection I Only Know That I Love Strength in My Friends and Greatness (Arlen House, 2003), while both were still alive:

. . . I look askance at Irish contemporaries, I slap the current laureate’s wrist for his reservations, “waywardness and eccentric beliefs”. What is missing from Seamus: he learned from everyone except Yeats, the teacher of religious studies. No Sutras or Gospels up his sleeves, Seamus can be a dull writer. Waywardness in muse-pursuit cannot be eccentric, look at the punk spray on Pegasus’s wing. Those astral marshals, Yeats and Wilde, blitzed us for ever, punks not the Dublin tinsel crowd in the paddock.

The quote “waywardness and eccentric beliefs” comes from Heaney’s essay on Yeats in his prose book Preoccupations (1980).  Heaney there defends Yeats as an artist, but what Liddy notes above is Heaney’s distance from Yeats, admiring Yeats yet still characterizing him as “wayward and eccentric.”  Liddy suggests that being wayward and eccentric is in fact the basic condition of the artist, a condition that Heaney himself does not seem to approach. 

I’m not here going to judge whether anyone is or is not a true artist, but on a subjective level I am more sympathetic to Liddy’s bohemian (“muse-pursuit,” “punk”) vision of art, and Kinsella’s form and Republicanism.

Shannon Ward, Blood Creek

A 24-page chapbook, Shannon Camlin Ward’s Blood Creek (Longleaf Press, 2013) is a strong debut collection of poems with often intense subject matter and images.  I will say that I am friends with the author, and went to school with her, so I don’t claim to be objective — but I like that intensity, for example in “Her New Father”:

When he looks at her, his retinas flash

the peculiar flame of the predatory eye caught in the beams

of headlights in tall grass by a country road

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

One day soon, she’ll steal his truck,

rip the poems from his lips, drive South.

It’s interesting that in this poem, the step-father, a seemingly despised figure, nonetheless speaks in poetry, which the speaker will co-opt for her own purposes as artist.

The collection’s opener, “Directions,” an imperative-mood prose-poem, functions both as an ars poetica and a road narrative through the underside of America.  Molestation and abuse recur as themes throughout, or hints of these at least, but the speakers in Ward’s poems never wallow in victimhood but rather seem to gain the upper hand in their particular situations through sheer perseverance, ingenuity, and strength.

The ekphrastic/tribute poem to the Mexican American artist Carlos Almaraz yokes Ward’s work to his ecstatic, urban “dizziness” and suggests a new phase of development.  Wherever this poet goes next, her taut lines — often long lines — and skill for finding the precise, necessary word will undoubtedly stand her in good stead.  In the meantime, you would not go wrong to pick up Blood Creek.  Along with its vigorous poems, it’s a very nicely produced little volume.

Poem in Cobalt Baseball Issue

My poem “At the Grave of Josh Gibson” is included in Cobalt’s 2014 Baseball Issue. The whole issue can be read or downloaded as a PDF, here:

http://www.cobaltreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Cobalt-Baseball-2014.pdf

Spectrism

Reading the history of 20th-century poetry, especially of avant-garde poetry, one naturally tends to hear a lot about Ezra Pound and Imagism, and his involvement with the slightly later (and slightly cockamamie) movement Vorticism. There is also Marinetti’s Futurism, and perhaps Chorism even gets a mention once in a while — but few write or talk much about Spectrism anymore. However, the Spectrists were a major force beginning in 1916 with the publication of their anthology Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments, by the movement’s originators Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish. This volume, comprising a manifesto and poems, is available in its entirety online, here:

http://ecclesiastes911.net/spectra/spectra.html

Soon after it appeared, a third poet, Elijah Hay, joined the Spectrist ranks and the three contributed further work to a special “Spectric School” issue (Jan. 1917) of the little magazine Others, edited by Alfred Kreymborg, also available in its entirety online, at the Modernist Journals Project, here:

http://www.modjourn.org/render.php?id=1309195059404251&view=mjp_object

This is an excerpt from the Spectric manifesto, signed by Anne Knish, but with contributions from Morgan:

An explanation of the term “Spectric” will indicate something of the nature of the technique which it describes. “Spectric” has, in this connection, three separate but closely related meanings. In the first place, it speaks, to the mind, of that process of diffraction by which are disarticulated the several colored and other rays of which light is composed. It indicates our feeling that the theme of a poem is to be regarded as a prism, upon which the colorless white light of infinite existence falls and is broken up into glowing, beautiful, and intelligible hues. In its second sense, the term Spectric relates to the reflex vibrations of physical sight, and suggests the luminous appearance which is seen after exposure of the eye to intense light, and, by analogy, the after-colors of the poet’s initial vision. In its third sense, Spectric connotes the overtones, adumbrations, or spectres which for the poet haunt all objects both of the seen and the unseen world,— those shadowy projections, sometimes grotesque, which, hovering around the real, give to the real its full ideal significance and its poetic worth.

One will note the clear difference between these ideas and Imagism, with its dictum of “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective,” etc. Consciously working against such direct treatment, Knish explains that “If the Spectrist wishes to describe a landscape, he will not attempt a map, but will put down those winged emotions, those fantastic analogies, which the real scene awakens in his own mind.”

Here is an example of a Spectrist poem, Morgan’s “Opus 41”:

Spectres came dancing up the wind,

Trailing down the long grass,

Shooting high, undisciplined,

To join the sun and see you pass. . .

The colors of the pointed glass.

Under a willow-maze you went

Unsaddened . . . But a violet beam

Fell on the white face, backward bent,

Of a body in a stream.

Into the sun you came again,

With sun-red light your feet were shod. . .

And round you stood a ring of feathered men

With naked arms acknowledging a god.

Indigo-birds, and squirrels on a tree

And orioles flashed in and out. . .

The yellow outline of Eurydice

Waited for Orpheus in a black redoubt.

With a beaded fern you waved away a gnat. . .

And maidens, hung with vivid beads of green,

One of them bearing in her arms an orange cat,

Held palms about a queen.

Then you were lost to sight

And locking trees became the clouds of you,

Till you emerged, the moon upon your shoulder, and the night

Bloomed blue.

(It should be said that while Morgan often utilizes rhyme, the others, Knish and Hay, tend toward free verse.)

Spectrism “officially” ended in 1918, with the little matter of it being a “hoax.” It turned out that Emanuel Morgan was the poet Witter Bynner, that Knish was Arthur Davison Ficke, and that Hay was Majorie Allen Seiffert — all three well-known poets in the early modernist period. But whatever about that, I personally think (for what it’s worth) that there is much in Spectrism that is useful, and it would be interesting to see what other contemporary poets could do with it.

Incidentally, like Pound, Witter Bynner translated Li Po and other Tang-dynasty Chinese poets. Here is Bynner on a trip to Japan in 1917, during the height of the Spectrist ferment:

Books & Shovels

The poet Jeremiah Walton, founder of Nostrovia! Poetry, is starting Books & Shovels, a nonprofit traveling bookstore and publisher, to be launched at the 2014 NYC Poetry Festival (Governor’s Island, July 26-27).  He and other poets will be living out of the Books & Shovels vehicle as they travel, starting in NYC, and following the east coast of the U.S. south.  From there, they intend to head along the south coast towards the west coast, organizing open mics, distributing books and broadsides, and bringing poetry to the masses.

It sounds like a great idea to me, and they’ll also have a couple of my books, I think.

To get things going, Walton has an Indie-Go-Go campaign which you can donate to.  Part of the mission statement there reads, “Books & Shovels is a nonprofit traveling bookstore and publisher.  We distribute street books, chapbooks, paintings, graffiti, cds, records, zines, anything that exhibits passion and creativity.  We are Passion Activists that believe living is more valuable than just making a living.  We mesh grass roots promotions, such as street performing, street art, and D.I.Y. open mics, with opportunities of the 21st century; blogging, internet poetry, and ezines.  Backing this project will help broaden the artistic community, promote passionate living, and encourage dreaming.  This will make a difference in the lives of all people, not just artists.”

The link is here:

 https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/traveling-bookstore-poetry-to-the-masses

“Uptown 2”

As I am told that Wake: Great Lakes Thought & Culture will soon go off-line, I am posting the webpage for my poem “Uptown 2” (part of a longer Pittsburgh series titled “The Muddy Banks”) here now so that it remains available.  Part of this piece (the second half of the poem, beginning with the line “I bring news”) is my translation of an anonymous 9th-century Irish (Gaelic) poem beginning “Scél lemm duib. . .”

“Uptown 2” was originally published by Wake: Great Lakes Thought & Culture, a publication of Grand Valley State University, on January 14, 2013.  As of this posting date, it is still online at this URL: 

http://www.wakegreatlakes.org/content/poetry/michael-s-begnal-uptown-2

Review of Michael Flatt, Absent Receiver

Michael Flatt’s Absent Receiver (Springgun Press, 2013) is an intriguing long poem series, coming to 70 pages or so (including the couple pages of notes, which read almost like poem snippets themselves).  Alternating between crisp moments of imaged insight and surrealistic word-play, Flatt’s work limns contemporary life deeply felt.  Rather than attempt to directly describe, he anatomizes the method of perception through language.  For example, on page 8 (there are no individual titles for pieces within the collection), he writes,

until it has a name

it cannot be your reference point.

until a fractal grace leaves its trace

as water slips over a rock

smoke will inlay its message. . . .

I suppose at this point it is no longer revelatory to note that language is a medium and that we approach the world through its distorted lens, etc.  But I like the particular ways in which Flatt renders this notion, as in the quoted passage with its natural metaphors of water, rock, and smoke, and that “smoke” encodes a “message.”

At times, Flatt’s unexpected ways of presenting the ordinary can simply amaze: “grass,” he writes on p. 25, “is the earth on / green fire,” then reiterates/elaborates, “if you get down to it, it is. // with your hands down in it, it is.”  Other times, his exuberance is evident in the joie de vivre he clearly has for words, or therefore I suppose I should call it a joie des mots (incidentally, Flatt himself occasionally lapses into French and more than once references Apollinaire).  On p. 33 he creates a kind of acrostic out of the word “motherfucker” and gives us a palindrome on p. 43.  This is a poet who really seems to feel both his life and his medium, and wants us to too.  What more can we say to that than thanks for your work?

Formally, there are a number of things going on in this book.  I see something of Zukofsky here from time to time, in the aspects I’ve described above but also in small details like Flatt’s depiction of a neon sign — here “BOWLING / BOWLING / BOWLING” (with the alternating bold text simulating the sign’s flashing), which recalls the concretist version of the railroad-crossing sign in Zukofsky’s “4 Other Countries.”  The use of biographical material transmuted into avant-garde form reminds me a little of Bernadette Mayer.  On the page, the sort of center spine that runs through Absent Receiver like an axis, dividing parts of poems left and right, recalls a not-infrequent practice of CA Conrad (and what is Conrad really about if not, like Flatt, exuberance?).  But Flatt’s work does not come across as derivative — it is exemplary of its own moment and context.

And, one thing I think is particularly unique about this work is that it looks to rock music as an organizing principle.  We have seen poets do something similar with jazz (e.g., Baraka, Sanchez, Madhabuti), but not many that I know of have done this with rock (or punk; Flatt’s bio tells us that he has been the singer of a neo-hardcore band).  (I admit here that I have likewise incorporated rock/punk form into my own writing at times, which perhaps partly accounts for my especial interest in this.)  The book in fact begins with a mic-check (“check // check // check // check”) and there are pauses throughout for “(reverb)” or “(delay),” the features of guitars played through amplifiers.  Indeed, Flatt I think sees poetry as a kind of “amplification” of language — “the page is an amplifier / shaking the lamp beside my bed” (p. 47) — and on p. 50 he transliterates a particular style of guitar sound: “quote: // chugga chugga       chugga chugga. . . .”  Further metaphors of the mechanics of rock occur.  Flatt wants to create poetry that has the visceral effect of loud, electrified music and very often achieves this.

“[W]e’re sick of singing / the same song,” Flatt asserts as he builds toward the end of this collection (p. 55), and although he has antecedents, he sings a new one here.  Who hears it, though?  That is the big question implied in the book’s title, and on p. 65 he laments, “if signals were sent, // they weren’t received.”  Obliquely, this refers to romantic relationships (there are hints of this) or communication in general between people, and the static that is often involved.  But I think it also has to do with poetry as a form of communication.  Do we really know what anyone means by lines like “this swan’s down gown of a curtain / parting and I’m right back / inside the cricket’s womb” (p. 49)?  Maybe, or if not literally, then on other levels — of feeling and instinct.

Léirmheas de/Review of Ní Ghríofa

Cnuasach gearr dátheangach is ea Dordéan, do Chroí / A Hummingbird, your Heart (Smithereens Press, 2014) le Doireann Ní Ghríofa.  Is cosúil go bhfuil na dánta seo scríofa as Gaeilge i dtús báire agus ansin aistrithe ag an údar féin.  Is suimiúil an rud é nach ionann na bunleaganacha agus na haistriúcháin (sé sin le rá, thar na difríochtaí a bheadh ann in aon aistriúchán ar bith).  Mar shampla, sa teidealdhán, níl sé follasach sa leagan Béarla cé hé an duine a “sleep[s] in a tangled nest of wires” in “a plastic box” — cé gur cosúil go bhfuil an té sin san ospidéal.  Tá sí, lena croí mar dhordéan meafarach, idir beatha agus bás.  Duine aosta, b’fhéidir.  Ach sa leagan Gaeilge, is léir láithreach gur leanbh í: “An bhfanfaidh do dhordéan linn, a leanbh bán?”  Ceist mhór a tharraingíonn an léitheoir isteach.

As the poems in this collection appear to be loosely linked, it is clear that, unfortunately, the hummingbird, e.g. this baby’s heart, does in fact “seek the freedom of the skies.”  In the poem immediately following the above (“Swallows”), the speaker describes herself in the aftermath of this horrible event: “Stretched and stitched, / I lie empty, raw, alone / in the cold corridor of the hospital,” hope disappearing like swallows at sunset.  Thus, it quickly becomes known that death and grief are the overarching themes of this collection.  The poems in it rely heavily on metaphor (especially those of birds) and simile, as the speaker seeks solace in folklore (“Solace”) and poetry and art itself.  There is for example a short homage to Frida Kahlo, who lay “between life and death / . . . in her sickbed.”

Dán suntasach é “Crann” ina bhfuil an cainteoir amuigh sa bhforaois, tite in éadóchas, mar chineál Shuibhne Gealt: “Maisím mé féin le réalta reatha / idir ghéaga garbha.  Sáim mo chuid fréamhacha / i gcré na hóiche, súim súilíní drúchta.”  Sa bpíosa seo, tá gairis fuaime chun tosaigh — uaim agus comhfhuaim ghutaí.  De bharr nádúr na teangan, tá seo níos follasaí sa Ghaeilge, cé go ndéantar iarracht garmheastachán de a chruthú trí mheán an Bhéarla.  Agus éiriónn le Ní Ghríofa sa dá theanga, sa dán seo agus ar fud an leabhair.

Her attention to poetic craft is further emphasized in “Hagfish,” which is almost something like a short manifesto.  Here, she likens poets — female poets in particular — to “ancient snake sisters of the Delphic Sybil” and depicts them

devour[ing] rotting remains,

we scavenge on the strange,

stripping morsels of consonants

from crumbling corpses.

Again, soundplay is the fore, and this is a good example of it in an English version, where usually the Irish lends itself to this just slightly more readily.  Dordéan, do Chroí / A Hummingbird, your Heart ends with the short poem “Grandmother,” where death and new life meet (“Now I stand at your funeral, / newborn nestled into my neck”), and despite the gloomy circumstances there is some sense of hope realized after all.

Is file crógach tréitheach í Ní Ghríofa, agus is féidir an cnuasach iomlán seo a léamh ag an nasc thíos.

This collection can be read in its entirety, for free, here:

http://issuu.com/smithereens.press/docs/dord__n_do_chro___-_a_hummingbird_y/25?e=5699643/6215055

David Stone, The Crystal Prism

Cover art: Guido Vermeulen

David Stone’s new collection The Crystal Prism is published by Giant Steps Press. I wrote the Preface, which I reproduce below in hopes that it will spur you to consider buying the book itself:

http://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Prism-David-Stone/dp/1497352622/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398985053&sr=1-10

Preface

A new book from David Stone is a notable event. Stone’s poetry is anomalous. He is “experimental” in style but cannot be classified with any particular faction of the present avant-garde. In fact, his work is eminently accessible in that it often resembles straightforward prose. There is a subject, a verb, an object — the suggestion of some narrative. This is deceiving. Like in Samuel Beckett, the narrative never really quite happens. The false satisfaction of “closure” fails to come about. Stone’s art is realist in technique, in its construction, like Dalí’s paintings are realist in technique. It is the elements that Stone, like Dalí, renders, the unexpected juxtapositions he creates in his work, that lead to cognitive strangeness. Suddenly we notice that this is nowhere close to prose; it is always poetry (the short, enjambed lines should have given this away in the first place!), but poetry of a heretofore unimagined sort.

The Crystal Prism combines aspects of myth and history in a contemporary context. The Minotaur, Pegasus, Anubis are all here. What do they signify? Often death, or the ways that people deal with death, or the ways in which they seek to access the other world. But this is not some Romantic recapitulation of the old myths.  These are figures transported to twentieth- and twenty-first-century landscapes ravaged by war and thus transformed. Time and culture are blurred. A desolate Chicago in “Transportation” (and throughout this collection) at times bears a resemblance to Nazi concentration camps or Soviet gulags. A pterodactyl (an extinct species) in “Travelers” flies from Russia to New York City tenements, retracing the journey of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In poems like “The Jazz Mind” and “The Crystal Band,” the personage who listens to “jazz” (which oddly emphasizes woodwinds and xylophones and at times alludes to “the Danube”) seems actually to inhabit a dream-like land of the dead.

This is highly political poetry. It is (among other things) about the ways in which oppressors destroy culture and human feeling in order to impose their own rule. In “The Prism,” there are “Ordinary citizens arrested / in public places” — not very much different from what is happening today, if we observe the recent goings-on in Zuccotti Park, Taksim Park, Tahrir Square, etc. “The Kaliningrad Depository” highlights an analogous dynamic in the history of that city, which as a spoil of war was transformed from a center of culture into a toxic waste-infested fortress of unlivable concrete blocks. The poem “The Jackal” begins with the ominous lines, “In the shelled library. . . .” Stone in The Crystal Prism (and for that matter in all of his work) reflects the psychological position of the oppressed, but resists oppression by positing the values of art and knowledge. For example, in “The Vision of the Dunes,” though “capital ISMS,” a “chemical processing plant,” and a Holocaust survivor’s tattooed number all suggest the threat of ugliness and death, “The transposited earth / felt the fire / of Rothko’s huge, black canvas.” Now feel the fire of poetry.

New Work up at Bone Orchard Poetry

Roberto Matta, Sin título, 1942-43

I have some new work, part of a series, up at Bone Orchard Poetry, here:

http://www.boneorchardpoetry.blogspot.ie/2014/04/michael-s-begnal.html

Summer Poetry Workshop

 

I will be teaching an 8-week online poetry workshop this summer (beginning June) through Duquesne University. It is open to anyone anywhere (for a reasonable fee). Please consider enrolling in this non-credit course.

http://www.duq.edu/academics/degrees-and-programs/summer-programs/writers-workshop

Poetry Reading, April 13

This coming Sunday, April 13th, I will be reading some poetry at Amazing Books in downtown Pittsburgh.  Also reading are Kevin Finn, Renée Alberts, and if we’re lucky there will be a rare appearance by Che Elias.  It starts at 2pm, and it’s free.

Radio Tribute to Baraka

Shortly after Amiri Baraka’s death, the poet Keith Gaustad, who does a weekly radio show, had me call in to read a couple Baraka poems (on January 9th). The whole show is a nice tribute. I come on around the 33:30 minute mark and really get going around 38:30. There’s interesting distortion on the line, probably ’cause of my phone.

https://soundcloud.com/riverwestradio/17-00-00-burdock-radio-28

Ancestor Worship 2014

With “Pattie’s” Day being this Monday, cultural nationalists need to get this book:

Michael S. Begnal, Ancestor Worship:

http://salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=50&a=50

    or

http://www.amazon.com/Ancestor-Worship-Michael-Begnal/dp/1903392543