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of Allen Ginsberg:
a narrative poem
by Edward Sanders
Overlook, 2000, 2009

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Ed Sanders was a follower of Allen Ginsberg, and later a close friend, and he’s in a nice position to sketch what amounts to a fast-reading highlight-reel of the poet’s “blizzard fame,” The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg. Sanders has done a number of histories and biographies in verse, and this one follows their form: his crooked lines wind democratically down the center of the page (as with speed readers, who track their eyes down the center of the page alone). It makes for a fleet, often eerily contemporary story. The problems of Allen’s world are also ours:

Over his shoulder the bard heard the iron clacks
of Reagan’s stern-wheel’d chariot.

Reagan showed the kind of robotic persistence
that democrats often lack:

He tried in ‘68, ping!
He tried in ‘72, ping!
He tried in ‘76, ping!
and then in 1980, he won the nomination!

Carter swung to the right on domestic issues
He refused to support Senator Edward Kennedy’s

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This is harder to do than it looks; Sanders is strict with himself. And after reading so many poets who demand the reader suborn and second-guess himself, I found it a pleasure to spend a few hours with an ex-beatnik, still living the dream, who wants to communicate surely and unpretentiously. Sanders makes his verse with a mind to light his subject and not his style (but style is there — that “swung” keeps the lines dancing).

Ginsberg’s grandfather fled the pogroms for Newark in the 1880s, and there gave birth to the well-regarded poet Louis. Louis later married Naomi Livergant, a revolutionary and a lunatic who looms as large in her son Allen’s life as any figure, real or poetical. As Naomi moved into and out of sanatoriums, her son “The slender & nervous sixteen-year-old / took the ferry from Hoboken to Manhattan,” where he met, “young Republican Jack Kerouac,” and down “by th’ / west side docks, / they caressed one another.” Burroughs shambles onto the scene, but those mythic post-Columbia, pre-San Francisco years pass in a few pages and Ginsberg writes Howl and finds fame (”He was interested in experimenting in W.C. Williams’ / triadic line / or indented tercets / combined with Jack Kerouac’s long-breathed lines”), and by now we are only up to page 31. Though Ginsberg would continue to write interesting stuff — and though he didn’t lack for talent — the literary man becomes fast entangled with the political activist/celebrity/publicist (There he is with the Dalai Lama! Now he’s purring on John Lennon’s lap! Now he’s founding a Buddhist University! Bob Dylan’s his hero, they’re touring together!)

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To Ginsburg’s credit, he used his platform almost entirely for good, and he always helped his friends — getting their books published, finding them grants, cooking them dinner — and if some of the causes he embraced late in life were not thought-out, at least he was honest about what mattered, even at the end.

He was lucky in Sanders’ friendship, and while this long poem is far from a definitive biography (or poetical analysis), it’s a thoughtful, fun, and admirably loving book.

– John Cotter

Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs
Ellen Kennedy
Muumuu House, 2009

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“I want to have sex with you.”

“Thank you. I want to have sex with you also.”

These opening lines to Kennedy’s “I Like Every Time We Have Sex” represent one side of the dichotomy that Kennedy sets up throughout Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs between a private and public ethics. In personal or private moments, like the one above, Kennedy’s speakers relentlessly exhibit a kind of binary—ones and zeros—type honesty. They actually have the kinds of conversations we only have in our heads. For this reason, at least under Kennedy’s spell, Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs feels like one of the purest examples of how to be good to one another, a contemporary collection of first-person parables.

While Kennedy’s speakers are as honest and sympathetic in public moments, in a social context, their honesty and sympathy appears anarchic, as if the world isn’t set up to handle this kind of pure goodness. “I am glad you would have sex with in me in public. I agree that it doesn’t hurt anyone. I wanted to have sex with you in the handicapped bathroom at EPCOT when we shoplifted the Alice in Wonderland dress.” And it’s true, or at least it feels true in this book. It wouldn’t hurt anyone. But in order to be good to one another, to give each other the things we want to when we want to, Kennedy convincingly makes it seem that we have to disregard social mores.

There are no real consequences in Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs, at least not for those who, say, break the law. For a certain kind of reader, I would imagine, this could seem too idealistic or childish. For them, the book might not contain enough of the real world, even though the things of the real world pervade—smoothies, weed, grocery stores, the subway, grandmothers, etc. But if you are won over by Kennedy and her contagious syntax, as I was, the book is a moving lament of the disconnect between how we want to treat each other and how the world wants us to treat each other.

— Chris Tonelli

Bluets
Maggie Nelson
Wave Books, 2009

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets starts with its worst sentence: “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” I am suspicious of this sentence; I find it contrived. Everything else about the book I love.

Bluets, which is a prose-poetry hybrid (or, arguably, an essay), is written as a series of numbered “propositions,” like a treatise, and draws heavily from a list of sources cited in the back, including Wittgenstein and Goethe. (Nelson’s work may appeal to fans of Jenny Boully.) The book has three main subjects or themes: the philosophy of color; the analysis of a past romantic relationship; and the ostensible love affair (an emotional affair? unrequited?) with the color blue.

The third is often foregrounded, but it’s the least interesting of the three, or perhaps I should say the most annoying. But one can get around that by rejecting that first line as disingenuous and taking the “love” object for what it really is—an object of obsession. Or, more properly, displaced obsession, since the speaker increasingly seems to be focusing on blue as a way of avoiding the more difficult subjects of depression and loss. (I say “speaker” in deference to the common wisdom that the “narrator” of a poem is not identical to its author, but the speaker in this book does make frequent reference to the act of authoring it.)

The path toward this recognition—that the speaker-author is afraid that if she writes about her real subject, the words will supersede her actual experience, the way a childhood photo “replaces the memory it aimed to preserve”—is both fascinating and beautiful. It’s an inquiry into the very nature of color—a purely subjective experience that nonetheless falls under the purview of science—as well as a catalogue of the cultural uses of blue, in books, in pornography, in music. Nelson can write a lovely lyric line (“a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette”; “an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire”) but doesn’t stake her claim in metaphors and images. Bluets is built from ideas and questions: Why has so little been made of the “female gaze”? How long is one permitted to be “blue” before they must admit their life is simply ruined? (The consensus among her friends is seven years.)

These ideas and references serve as a string of jumping-off points for self-reflection and realization:

177. Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.

I never feel satisfied with poetry that is wholly cerebral or wholly emotional, so I love that Maggie Nelson’s writing gives me a philosophy fix along with a hit of the Romantic sublime.

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–Elisa Gabbert

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Each of the editors of Open Letters Ocean’s Twelve release has a fairly herculean labor to perform. Fiction Editor Sam Sacks has to contend with a general populace that reads mostly talk show-endorsed pap when it gets around to reading anything at all; London Editor Bryn Haworth has a city of 14 million souls to sort out; Political Editor Greg Waldmann writes to a world that’s more politically polarized than ever in its history. But even so, perhaps none of that editorial company has a harder task before him than Poetry Editor John Cotter, who must be wary not only of the worst excesses of his craft’s practitioners but also the peculiar contortions of that craft’s so-called critics.

Those contortions have long been a source of sport for the TLS’’s J.C. in the NB column, and the squib in the 24 April issue is delightful enough to quote in full:

Poetry babble is a tool of measurement used to gauge the relations between poetry as it appears on the page and the critical comments on the back of the book. In certain cases, the gulf separating the two can be wide indeed. Classical babbleologists point to Lisa Jarnot’s book Ring of Fire, which includes many lines like “ding dong/ dug dirt/ ditch dib/ chimp chore”, and others such as “Anomalous circus events in the great outer planets”. Readers wondering if they should read Ring of Fire pondered Patrick Pritchett’s endorsement: “Rising on wave after wave of near endless iteration, like a linguistic Mandelbrot set, they arrive in the long moment after loss as the signature and enactment of an initiation”.

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Few precedents are as clear, but John Goodby’s uncaged sea

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(Waterloo Press), which has seventy-four pages of verse like this -

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stimulates John Hartley Williams to emulate Mr Pritchett: “What can one say of such a ‘tusked ramshackling’ work? All I could say after reading it was: ‘like dramatic sea I hve been a ball of lakes’”. Nothing could be more certain of a place in the annals of babbleology. Experts are also fascinated by the case of Brian Teare, author of Sight Map (University of California). His four-page poem “To Be Two” proceeds as follows:

I ask the barometer falling, Fahrenheit as it

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charts [    ] disappearing: what fact

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is [

]. [                ]

Having memorized those last two lines, we turned to Jane Mead for illumination: “In many cases spoken from a Cartesian epistemological ground zero, these poems reach with urgency and passion toward a knowledge both impossible and necessary”. Ms Mead and Mr Williams have been invited to the NB Poetry Babble Conference. Anthropologists will have a chance to study them to see if their speech bears any relation to their writing.

Cotter would no doubt read that passage with a good-natured smile of resignation – such poets are asking to be misunderstood, after all, and such critics might not quite be aware of the nonsense they’re writing. Those of us who’ve been fortunate enough to experience John’s devotion to preaching the gospel of poetry know that it isn’t shaken by such silliness. Instead, he pulls down a volume (or, as often as not, simply recites from memory) and pulls listeners into the wonder and the unsettling coercion of the world’s most personal art.

And more to the point where rascals like J.C. are concerned, he also writes poetry criticism entirely free of nonsense. So take a pass on the Poetry Babble Conference this year and instead read Cotter here, here, and here. If he doesn’t slip right past your school-taught reservations about poetry and get you wanting to read it all afresh, then your yheart must be made of [             ].

Steve Donoghue

Open Letters is proud to congratulate contributor Matthew Klane on the publication of his first full-length book, B_____Meditations [1-54]. Available now from Stockport Flats, B is a meditation on the interconnectedness of the increasingly Americanized world, its wars, broken elections, and commercialized geography. The country of B_____Meditations is “Massachechnya.” It’s T-o-p-e-k-a, “where Burroughs is buried / a hundred thousand more / still ticking but trapped.” It’s “Oregon, Smithereens,” a collection of a hundred fragmented and interconnected poems (or one long poem in fragments) like:

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The Entrance full movie These two haiku are characteristic of the book, appearing beside one another on a page bisected twice with small discrete lines (as though viewed through a rifle sight). Two companion haiku (”Career Martyrs” and “MacArthur’s Tokyo a.k.a.”) ride the page space above them. This is Klane’s word art: visual poetry as frantic and inter-slashed as the world it meditates on.

Matthew Klane has long been a friend of Open Letters and we were delighted to feature excerpts from Being Che in August 2008. Matthew’s own hand-sewn chapbooks are available through his website (just drop him a line). A hypertext presentation of the Meister-Reich Experiments is online at House Press, and excerpts from Sorrow Songs at Otoliths. You can get your own copy of the explosive B____Meditations here.

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History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had–
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.
Abel was finished; death is not remote,
a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,
his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,
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his baby crying all night like a new machine.
As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,
the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter’s moon ascends–
a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,
my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull’s no-nose–
O there’s a terrifying innocence in my face
drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.

“History”

Robert Lowell (1 March 1917- 12 September 1977)

Much like the micro-reviews readers can find in abundance on the Open Letters blog, often some of the best, tightest writing in the venerable London Times Literary Supplement will be found in the short “In Brief” reviews collected at the back of every issue. Case in point: the 13 February TLS The Thirty Nine Steps movie contains a review by the redoubtable Ben Morgan (don’t know him at all, but how can somebody with a name like Ben Morgan not

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be redoubtable? It’s so … Welsh) of Edmund White’s biography of the enigmatic Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud, The Double Life of a Rebel

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The X Files movies Morgan knows he has very little space in which to make his points, so he makes them with brisk economy, concluding, fittingly enough, with a comment on some of the side-effects of White’s own brevity (The Double Life of a Rebel is less than 200 pages long):

There are costs to White’s coolness. The awkward, besotted Verlaine, who left his wife for Rimbaud, often emerges more vividly than the boy himself. On the other hand, the book’s achievement is to write a Life which illuminates the work without reducing it to oblique self-revelation. Instead it gives the life the shape of the art, a fittingly Decadent agenda.

Of course, there’s still something to be said for the long review – where would Open Letters be without them, after all? – and readers curious to know more about White’s book can turn to our amazing first-annual Poetry Issue and read a full-length examination of Rimbaud, The Double Life of a Rebel, handled by our own enigmantic freelancer Gaston Frontenac. Alternately, readers curious to know more about White’s book could simply, as the kids say, “man up” and read the damn thing, which is, as mentioned, less than 200 pages and so is unlikely to, you know, kill you or anything. Just a thought.

Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House
Tin House Books
2008

In Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, Portland’s Tin House Books has released an enticing anthology of contemporary poetry: It’s got one of those nice paperback covers with page-marking flaps, proclaiming contents by hip young poets like Matthea Harvey and hip old poets like James Tate. A flip through the TOC reveals many more of the former (the Dickmans, Alex Lemon) and latter (Rae Armantrout, Lorca).

It’s a “diverse” mix of contributors, across age, gender, and country of origin — but are the poems themselves wide-ranging, in style and tone? Not exactly. I love many of the poems included here, but if I have a complaint about the book — and this of course is to be expected from a collection of poems chosen by an editorial staff with a unified vision — it’s that most of the poets have very similar sensibilities. They write first-person lyrics that make emotional appeals and tonally exhibit a kind of exuberance which is often pleasing but, after too many poems in a row, a little annoying. If I have two complaints, my other is that Satellite Convulsions feels a bit overproduced, almost smug in its slickness — much like Tin House itself. As in, where do they get off with their huge budgets?

But surely this second is a complaint only an editor of a less well-endowed journal would make, and as a reviewer, I tend to search for potential faults. Approaching the anthology as a reader I find it highly likable. I’m happy to have in my possession Olena Kalytiak Davis’s wonderful, sex-drenched sonnets that first appeared in Tin House in 2006 (this from “Francesca Can Too Stop Thinking about Sex, Reflect upon Her Position in Poetry, Write a Real Sonnet.”):

i apologize, i offer no excuse:
but, poet, though you have right to scold
it was high-souled you who made my mouth hold
what it held and tell what it told: a truce …

Another inclusion that mixes high and low language to delightful effect is Darcie Dennigan’s “City of Gods,” which opens with the line “Thistly Augustine, disser of the shy world, I cannot consider your city” and ends thusly:

Hey god in the window, god of loneliness, god of smelly spaces
stacked with newspapers, god of walks home from the L before the light ends,
if I ask you to please turn my sooty camisole into wings
and me into an industrial moth, I am asking to be man-made—
I don’t want to be this girl anymore.

Other highlights in the collection include Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Long Queen” and Bruce Smith’s “Devotion: Medea.”

If a few of Tin House’s selections bore or irritate (like Sharon Olds’ line “I feel as if I’m like / a teenage boy in love” — seriously?) most are well worth reading and reading again.

– Elisa Gabbert

As most people in the literary world hoped (and as at least one – Open Letters Poetry Editor John Cotter, naturally – predicted), the publication of the definitive Jack Spicer poetry volume, My Vocabulary Did This To Me, is doing wonders for the posthumous shape of the poet’s fame. Indeed, among the more discerning venues, something of a Spicer renaissance is well under way. By all accounts, Spicer could be a prickly, difficult person, and it’s by no means certain he would have approved of all the acclaim My Vocabulary Did This To Me is creating – but the genre of poetry is the better for that fuss, as a swelling chorus of appreciation continues to grow.

Erik Davis, in a pithy and intensely intelligent essay for Bookforum, adds another voice to that chorus, writing:

Spicer wanted to make poetry a “collage of the real,” an ambition that linked him to West Coast visual artists like Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, and George Herms, bohemian bricoleurs who created their assemblages from junk, pop culture, and oracular fragments. Rather than practicing some version of the cut-up, Spicer achieves the visceral sense of poetic collage through the intense and sometimes claustrophobic materiality of his language.

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In our current issue, January’s Poetry extravaganza, Jared White’s instant-classic piece, “Jack Spicer on Mars,” does its share to help the renaissance along. Click over and read what White has to say, then give yourself a treat and feast on the rest of the banquet we’ve prepared for you! And, as always, feel free to leave us your thoughts in the comments fields.

State of the Union
Eds. Joshua Beckman and Matthew Zapruder
Wave Books, 2008

There are many things I like about the new political anthology from Wave Books, State of the Union. I like its size–very manageable at just over 100 pages–and I like almost all of the poets represented within–old favorites like John Ashbery and James Tate alongside new favorites like Matthea Harvey and Tao Lin. I also like its dedication: all royalties for the book will be donated to a nonprofit organization that benefits poor and homeless veterans.

But there are a few things I don’t like about it. Some of these poems seem only superficially political, as though to serve a conscience-easing function for the writer and the reader (and the publisher, I suppose); including the word “war” in a poem, as the second piece in the collection, Nick Flynn’s “Imagination” does, isn’t necessarily going to make me feel anything, be it indignation or rage or complicity. And complaining about the president (”i’m so happy i’m suicidal, like a psilosybin trip that’s moved in for good and his name is george bush,” writes Garrett Caples) may convince me you have good political sense, but it doesn’t convince me you’re a good poet.

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Many of the best poems in this collection come at their subject a little more obliquely, but are more fully realized as poems, by virtue of being emotionally complex and provoking more than one thought (e.g., War is bad or The government sucks)–I don’t read poetry to find assertions I already believe to be true (that’s what the Internet is for).

One of my favorite poems in State of the Union is “Forgiveness” by Mathias Svalina, an early-career poet (unlike most of the authors here, he has yet to publish a full-length book). Svalina’s poem manages to be both funny and tragic and contains no platitudes. I felt the last stanza exactly where I was supposed to:

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If you see a photograph
of a murdered girl
you will forever after
wear her teeth as a
necklace for your throat.
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Another poem I liked was “Covenant of Sticks” by Dan Chelotti:

there is a hunger when I go birdwatching:
I want to yell, do something you fucking bird,

do something that isn’t flying, feeding, landing.
Why don’t you explode? Why aren’t you the bomb

that I want you to be?

Chelotti’s risk lies in admitting an animal appetite for destruction (Mary Ruefle’s poem proclaims, “We should try to be more like animals / and less like them at the same time”), and this opens the poem up to far more nuance than simply stating the obvious, that destruction is bad.

–Elisa Gabbert
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