On Richard Swigg’s Quick, Said the Bird: Williams, Eliot, Moore, and the Spoken Word

A version of this review may appear in Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose issue 16, due out in early 2013.

       Now the music volleys through as in
       a lonely moment I hear it. Now it is all
       about me. The dance! The verb detaches itself
       seeking to become articulate    .

                           And I could not help thinking
                           of the wonders of the brain that
                           hears that music and of our
                           skill sometimes to record it

                                (W. C. Williams, "The Desert Music")

The title of Richard Swigg’s book, Quick, Said the Bird: Williams, Eliot, Moore, and the Spoken Word (University of Iowa Press, 2012), is a bit misleading because you might think this book will be about page poets (Williams, Eliot, and Moore) and stage poets (spoken word poets). I mean, don’t we nowadays consider W. C. Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Marianne Moore as page poets – that is poets we read on the page with the quiet voice in our head? And don’t we consider the spoken word poets (the stage poets) as all voice, body, and stage presentation? Isn’t that the dichotomy we find ourselves with in today’s poetry? save a few poets who are simultaneously page and stage poets, like T. S. Ellis, Sean Thomas Dougherty, and Rob Carney, among others. But what the stage poet has is vocalization that infects the body with meaning. Unfortunately, we lose that infection when we only read poems in our heads.

Swigg in Quick, Said the Bird reminds us of the importance of reading Williams, Eliot, and Moore aloud. In fact, Swigg seeks:

to render the speaking voice of the printed text – one that has to be deduced from the marks on the page, is constructed out loud, stays subject to the changing pace and the needs of breath-control, emphases, and enunciation, then possibly ends a verse sequence (an unfolding temporal sequence, not static fragments) in a way that is totally different from the beginning. It is an interpretation of lines by performance – a discovery of meaning’s unexpected contours by lips, tongue, and throat – that can often revise the mind’s interpretation of a poem that has been largely known through silent reading (xiv).

In fact, Swigg will put auditory importance above the text: “I find overall the surest way forward is to remain an independent vocal reader of the verse” (xv). So, while he will listen to the many recordings of Williams, Eliot, and Moore reading their poems and keep a “sympathetic yet critical relationship to the recordings,” he will put more emphasis on how he reads the poem, which I find a good move. I mean, I will at times listen to a poet read a poem of theirs, but I will use their readings more as possible way as to how to read the poem. Often, poets don’t read their own poems well for a variety of reasons. When I read another poet’s poem aloud, I can slow it down and dwell on a specific sound or set of sounds. I can focus on a rhythm or harmony. I can find more clarity in the sonic units and build to a more meaningful reading from those units. I can build a whole auditory experience from researching various voices. I think Swigg is doing something similar, too.

T. S. Eliot

In addition, the poet may change how he or she reads the poem. For instance:

By 1946, when he [Eliot] came to record The Waste Land  [. . .] [h]e had seemingly long forgotten what was once so immediate to him in the poem’s original daring resonances when he first read the poem to friends in June 1922. Then “He sang it & chanted it[,] rhythmed it,” says Virgina Woolf, intimating the vocal variety and energy which characterize (without the singing) Eliot’s virtually unknown and only recently published recording of the poem at Columbia University in 1933 (38-9).

Plus, by Swigg reading it aloud, he can pick up nuances. For instance:

The “garret” clinks out the bones’ fright merely, “Rattled by the rat‘s foot only, year by year”: a line of such resurgent confidence, as one reads it aloud, that this “I” can truly be said, with the poem’s time sense rhymingly redeemed from emptiness, to have outlasted “year to year” what once spread from “ear to ear” as a wintry chuckle (44).

We can’t hear that nuance from silently reading in our head

In Quick, Said the Bird, Swigg focuses on Williams short-lined verse (and at the end he briefly addresses Williams’ longer poems with the ”triadic layouts”), Eliot’s The Waste Land and other poems but not The Four Quartets (which I find to be Eliot’s most musical poetry, especially the first page and a half which melt me), and Moore’s poetry from before 1940 to remind us that poetry needs to be read aloud:

So, though the poetic text is not an over-rigid score, and though Moore, Eliot, and Williams can play the voice against “typographic dispositions,” the read-aloud words on the page provide the clue not just to the intonation but to the vital forward movement of the poem, by syntax or sequential impetus: what I describe in this book, together with other acoustic features, by the language of metrics, rhyme, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, aspirates, syllabic emphases, and speech-sounds, as well as by a wider linguistic portrayal that invokes cries, whispers, leaps, thrusts, sinking, resurgences, lingerings, or rapped-out curtness (xvi).

William Carlos Williams

He also spends considerable time revealing harmonies in these poets’ poems, especially of Williams, whose voice we usually consider to be “short-line bursts of breath,” and he explores the subtle harmonies of Moore. I’m grateful for these moments, because harmony is my favorite aspect of poetry because of how it sounds in the ear and how it can yoke together words or images on an unanticipated level to draw together disparate items and find a commonplace for them. Harmonies are another level of discursiveness the poet can use. It’s another way for the poet to leap.

Marianne Moore

Swigg makes us hear how Williams has a “brash speech style” (2), how with Eliot’s voice you get the sound of an insecure self who almost wants to hide from the voices of the public, yet whose voice is what holds the fragments together in The Waste Land, and how Moore’s voice becomes almost like a bridge between the two but with the extra dimension:

to what has so far been largely discussed as voices, “personages” or “some good characters” [. . . ] whether in the form of outgoing address, dialogue, or solitary speech, with the effect of syntax, sentences, rhyme or non-rhyme, conventional metrics, or word-blocking balancings. Moore’s example takes us further to governing frame which holds such effects together; for what discussion of William’s short-line poems has only indicated, and what is to become more explicitly important in the treatment of Eliot’s later verse-paragraphs – visual containment cramming acoustic variety inside itself to the point of spillage – is the tension which Moore makes central. If Eliot and Williams are dislocated from their native scene, and seek a way back to newly occupiable ground, Moore, another foreigner in her own country – rejecting those who would reject her style of speech – brings into play the figures and multitudes of a sounded world which now is hers alone, and no others (16-17).

However, Swigg does not compare which poet is better musically, but he does set them “side by side as vocalists to whom we actually listen” (118). As a result, Swigg enables us to hear the effects and how each poet’s use of sounds adds to the meanings and densities of their poems.

While he talks about sounds, Swigg also intermittently explores how each poet is an American poet while estranged to it. For him, Moore “projects outwards the thrust, agilities, and surprises of a unique speaking voice” (28), Williams is the more native, and Eliot:

by going further from a homeland then Williams and Moore in their own necessary distancings, Eliot, for all the emotional cost, is then most intently native – not by harking back to American shores, as in the Boston “nighttown” sequence of the draft, “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” but, as in the first lines of “The Burial of the Dead,” by feeling his way into unspecified ground with the divining care shown by Williams. The latter’s nameless plants “enter the new world naked” but Eliot can name his shoots when, by a participial probing of dormancies –

                                                   breeding
       Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
       Memory and desire, stirring
       Dull roots with spring rain

– he begets a shift of season and pace. Time is on the move, like the seaward river later in the poem. With the pulse of such currents, Eliot sounds out the rhythms and resources, the pluralities and singularities, that now, at risk of overflow – yet vitally so – enter the speech of The Waste Land (36-7).

I find this book significant because I can’t recall such an undertaking in devoting a study to the sounds of poetry. Sometimes you get a brief paragraph or two or maybe a chapter in a book, or maybe you’ll find an essay here and there, but a whole book devoted to the sounds in poetry is rare and delightful.

While reading this I hoped for a longer book that accompanied more poets, but then I thought Swigg was correct in choosing these poets because, as mentioned above, we tend to treat Williams, Eliot, and Moore as textually cerebral and as poets we only read in our heads. In Quick, Said the Bird, Swigg lifts Williams, Eliot, and Moore off the page and makes us hear them, and hear them unlike we’ve heard them before. For this I give high praise and congratulations, and I live in envy for I wish I wrote this book or a similar one.

I think Richard Swigg’s Quick, Said the Bird should be read by anyone writing poetry today, especially page poets (save Linda Beirds because she’s got the most amazing and effective sounds, and Swigg, I’m sure, could write a book about the sounds in her poetry). I suggest that today’s page poets read it because it will help them hear things in a new way or unexpected ways. Mainly, Quick, Said the Bird will give today’s poets auditory effects to steal from. Because of this book, I now have so many great devices I can use to bring out new meanings, enhance meanings, or make meanings more entertaining in the poems I will write.

Swiggs’s auditory investigations should also be read by anyone studying, teaching, or preaching Modernism, and, most important, Quick, Said the Bird: Williams, Eliot, Moore, and the Spoken Word should be read by anyone who is not reading poetry aloud or who thinks it doesn’t need to be read aloud.//

I just thought to add this appropriate image I made the other day, which is a slight variant from Zukofsky’s “A12″:

Really, that sums up this book.//

On Amanda Auchter’s The Glass Crib

A version of this may appear in an upcoming issue of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics.

Zone 3 Press is a sneaky, awesome press. How many poets really know of this press? Zone 3 Press seems like it is flying under the radar. I mean, they only put out one or two titles each year, but, damn, each book is terrific. Copper Canyon, BOA, Graywolf, watch out. There’s another press delivering excellence, and Amanda Auchter‘s The Glass Crib is no exception.

So why the title The Glass Crib? Is it because it’s an intriguing image? Yes. Is it because it appears in the poems “The Threat” and “Offer It Up”? Yes. But it also occurs as an associative symbol. To me a glass crib sounds dangerous since it could shatter (and there are shattering glass images in the book). I mean, who would put their child in a glass crib? Though a glass crib also has a pristine feel about it, too. With the glass crib, you also get the feeling of a safe place for a baby – a crib – which is juxtaposed with the danger of glass and the sterility of being behind glass. When I first thumbed through these pages, I thought the book was going to be about being an adopted child, which it is in part. As an adopted child, I could relate to those glass-crib feelings, but can’t we all? Aren’t those the feelings an adopted child would have? The feeling of being in a safe place but among strangers. And when with strangers, don’t you feel a bit scrutinized and when in glass, perhaps, the child feels like a lab rat. This leads to the second side of the symbol – a glass crib is like a fish tank or a place to put hamsters or lab rats, but it’s not a place for a baby. An animal, yes. A baby, no. The glass crib image and the associations I just shared are the feelings and tones Auchter’s collection of poems present. That is, Auchter presents us with the delicacy and hopefulness that are present with pregnancy, birth, babies, and young children, and the terror and tragedy that can accompany the birth and or death of a young child. This book is about sorrow, pain, loss, and ascension.

The Glass Crib begins with the tender poem “Annunciation,” which is about the hope that accompanies pregnancy:

                                               My skin

   stretched and torn into the shape
   of a child's arm or a foot, and then

   a mouth, an eye. His incredible blue
   breath.

The following five poems, however, present a  harsh tone that is aimed at the vodka-drinking birthmother who accidentally conceived the author. The shift begins slowly in the opening lines of second poem, “Possible Beginning”:

   My birthmother unties the strings of her bikini top

   on a striped beach towel, lights her cigarette,
   flicks her ashes into the muddy Gulf.

                                  When she wakes
   the next morning, brown skinned, hungover

   in bed with a man who brings her aspirin,
   tomato juice, his fingers to her lips,

   I am still the sand grain stuck inside her
   from the day before

This is how we are introduced to the birthmother. At first, the scene seems benign and innocent – a young lady is sunbathing and smoking cigarettes. Then it slowly turns. The birthmother has brown skin, which means she’s in the sun a lot, and she’s hungover, which means she drank a lot. Ok. That’s fine I suppose. But the more the detail the poem reveals the less benign this birthmother becomes, and then we learn that she is pregnant in the wonderful image “I am still the sand grain stuck insider her leg / from the day before.” This pregnancy is reinforced later with:

   the possible beginning of fingernails

   nostrils, knees. Of her name
   called over and over, his breath,

   her body on fire, the idea

   of face and knuckle, the small mouth
   she will push away.

The harshness and anger towards the birthmother grows, and then in “Gospel of the Unplanned Child,” we read a dialogue between the mother and the unborn child:

   You said I want my body back.
   I said your body is my body.
   You said I'll kill you with the stairs.
   You said I'll kill you I'll kill you.
   I said I'm still here.
   You said please don't tell –
   I told with my soccer kick.
   I told with my umbilical cord.

A few poems later in “Elegy with Photograph in Hand,” it seems the author will forgive the birthmother:

                                     inside

   my mouth runs the hemline of your teeth
   the thread of your pink tongue rising from
   my throat, or that whenever I catch myself

   singing, I owe all the notes to you.

This forgiveness, however, is short lived, if it is forgiveness at all as the tone of the final lines may not be in line with the actual sentiment. The harsh feelings and anger towards her birthmother continue in the following poems. Until we learn that the author is unable to bear children.

The first part of section “I. Possible Beginning” is to set up an anger at the irresponsibility of her birthmother and the accidental pregnancy, the vodka drinking during the pregnancy, and the attempt to kill the fetus. Then we get the irony of the author not being able to have a baby, and she would probably be a very caring mother, too, given all of her past experiences. All the author has been through creates a pain from absence, as expressed in “Tether”:

         How much we give up for this
unnameable thing: love without

face, without name. Love, a nest filled with bone, umbilicus,
             fingernails. Affliction.

The next section, “II. Without,” jumps from the careless mother and the baby that can never be conceived to the loss of siblings. In the second section we get some horrific images of car accidents and loss and death of siblings, such as this scene from “False Memory Syndrome”:

         Some days,

           there was an empty road, gravel, often

   rain. She forgets
        if the car was moving toward her
   or away, headlights or taillights, her face

       thrown through the wind-

                     shield, her body

       in the damp country field.

That’s a terrific line break in the middle with “wind- / shield.” Usually, I’m against line breaks on word breaks. They tend to be weak and not well thought out or more of a distraction than an enhancement. But here, I feel and get it. The lady is thrown through the wind as she flies out of her car to the “damp country field.” It’s like a movie accident. And then the line break to “shield.” Wham. When you read “shield,” you can see and feel and hear her slamming into the windshield. The impact is real. The causality, however, is a off. She should crash into the windshield, then fly through the wind to the “damp country field.” But this experience worked for me on the first readings. I wasn’t distracted. I was into it. (By the way, here is an instance of shattering glass – the glass crib breaking. This accident will also be revisited later in the book.)

There’s also the poem “Pyx,” which seems like the burial of an unborn child. Well, it did until I looked up “Pyx.” A pyx is is a small round container used in the Catholic churches to carry the consecrated host, or Eucharist, to the sick or invalid or to those who are unable to come to a church in order to receive Holy Communion. Even after you know what a pyx is, the scene is touching. And that’s what I like about these poems – they are emotionally involved. It’s hard to write directly about an experience and be emotional without being cheesy, overly sentimental, deliberately pulling the emotional cords, or just being down right clichéd, deliberate, and over the top. But Auchter succeeds. I envy that. I want to take classes with her to learn how to get genuine emotions into a poem instead of intellectualized emotions.

Saint Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne

And it’s around here, where the running start begins to gain momentum from the leap from section “II. Without” to the section “III. Bring Splendor.” The leap from section II, which I see as an extension of section “I. Possible Beginning,” to section III is the leap from pain to the belief or acceptance in God. It’s as if the first two sections were a test by God. The leap is like The Confessions of St. Augustine. The leap, however, requires knowledge of some saints. But before I get to those saints, let’s get back to the running momentum, which also occurs in the beginning of section III.

I’m thinking specifically of the poem “Offer It Up,” which feels like it was the first poem written in the collection. The main moments in first two sections of The Glass Crib recur here. In fact, after reading “Offer It Up,” I feel like the first two sections were written in order to fill in all the spaces in this poem. While I like this poem, especially where it is placed, it doesn’t seem like it can stand on its own. It’s seems elliptical without the other poems. This may be why it is one of the few poems in the collection that wasn’t previously published in a journal. But here, in section III, it sings and it acts as a catapult into the following poems. The poem ends:

      For my sister who almost died,
   my brother that did. That each time I felt

   the loss of a letter or a person, I could
   strike
              my knees to the floor

   and give it all back to the God
       who asked me to bear it.

After these lines, the poems move to the saints that I mentioned above, some of whom are incorruptible saints. In fact, without a knowledge of these saints, you might get confused as to why there are the poems for these saints. I know I did, but I also knew based on the strong poems the preceded that there was a reason for the switch from the personal to the saints, from the secular to the religious. So why the leap? Is it because the previous sections were a test from God? Yes, in part. But really it’s about who the saints are and what they did. Once you know, you’ll see the similarities between them and the experiences of the first two sections. Many of these saints had difficult childhoods and witnessed the death of siblings and/or had poor relationships with their parents. I won’t point out all the parallels due to page limitations (which cost money to print [donations please]), but I’ll point out the main ones for each saint.

Saint Agatha

St. Agatha gave her life to God and would not have sex with any man, including the powerful Quintan, who then arrested her and put her in a whore house and then a jail. Her final prayer was:

Lord, my Creator, you have always protected me from the cradle. You have taken me from the love of the world and given me patience to suffer. Receive my soul.

Now if that doesn’t sum up the author’s experiences, I don’t know what does. St. Agatha’s breasts were also cutoff.

Saint Cecilia

St. Cecilia is the first incorruptible saint. She refused sex with her husband on her wedding night because she was devoted to an angel who would appear if she were baptized. When she was finally baptized, the angel appeared with flaming wings and holding two crowns of roses and lilies. After the husband witnessed this, he was converted to Christianity. When the Romans tried to change her ways, they tried by drowning her in her bath, but this failed and so did the beheading. This parallels the baptism scene in “Limbo for the Miscarry” and, more importantly, the experiences in “Gospel of the Drowned Twin.”

Saint Catherine of Alexandria

The Catherine Wheel, which is the title of one of the poems in section “III. Bring Splendor,” is named after St. Catherine of Alexandria. The Catherine Wheel was a middle-age torture device that tore apart the legs and arms and then was lifted for vultures, crows, and whatever else to eat the living body. The death, obviously, was very painful and slow, and it was quite popular entertainment. Catherine was killed on one of these wheels in the 4^th century by the Roman Emperor Maxentius. This saint seems to parallel the experience in “Pyx” as well as her brother’s death or her sister surviving a car accident and more specifically in “Gospel of the Organ Donor” and to some extent in “The Thundering” and the final poems of section “II. Without.”

Saint Catherine of Sienna

Giacomo di Benincasa and a forty-year-old Lapa (who already had 22 children) gave birth to twins during the Black Death era. One daughter was St. Catherine of Siena and the other was Giovana. The latter, raised by a wet nurse, died, but Catherine, who was raised by her mother, Lapa, lived a more healthy life. At age five or six, she had a vision of a smiling Jesus Christ who blessed her. A year later she vowed herself to chastity, and when her parents forced her to marry she refused and fasted, and during times of trouble she would build a cell within her mind from which she could never flee. She lived her life trying to reject her family. Later Jesus told her to live a more public life in the world. This has parallels with the 42-year-old mother in “Poem for the Adoptive Mother” and the sister in “Without” and other poems.

Saint Bernadette

St. Bernadette is also an incorruptible saint. Of her parents’ five children, she was the only one to survive infancy. Bernadette had visions of the Virgin Mary and repeated her words, including when Mary told Bernadette that she would not find happiness in this world but would find it in the next world. I see parallels to a number of places with this saint but especially in these lines from “Visiting Hour”:

                                this is how 

                       dying is, my breath 

        slipping under
   everywhere at once – see the balloon 

   you brought, how it lifts and sags,
   this is what I've become 

              on the other side.

Saint Theresa

St. Theresa is another incorruptible saint. She ran away from home at age seven with her brother in order to find martyrdom. She too had visions of Christ and angels. In one vision, an angel drove the fiery point of lance through her, or as she said:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.

The story of St. Theresa has close parallels to “The Half-Brother” and especially with the final five lines of “Poem for the Adoptive Mother”:

   How when you said to me years later, "I knew
   when I saw you," I want to think of myself

   reaching for your bright mouth,
   your turquoise necklace,

   everything I could get my hands on.

Where I said “catapult” before in reference to “Offer It Up,” I should have said centripetal force as the poems have gone full circle from “Annunciation” to the secular world back to the religious world and launched off:

   To which the air fills
   with living, with sugar,

   with reviviscence. Go forth beauty, birds

   of blossoms, sweetness. Made of sky,
   bring stingers, the form of tongues

   of fire, bring dawn over stones, over
   the awakened heart. Bring splendor,

   the last rising breath. Every question
   of death, a desire:

   go forth a field, a dizzying cloud.

I know I mentioned there are some religious poems in here, but don’t run in fear. They are done well, and they aren’t specifically religious but have religious content. What I said of emotion above can be said of religion in these poems too. In the poems in Amanda Auchter‘s The Glass Crib, your mind will be moved as well as your heart, soul, and spirit, and what else could you want from poems?//

On Joanne Diaz’s The Lessons

A version of this may appear in an upcoming issue of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics.

What immediately turned me on to Joanne Diaz‘s The Lessons (Silverfish Review Press, 2011) was when I read the opening poem “Granada” on Verse Daily on June 3. I fell in love with the poem. I tweeted and made a Facebook post that read something like, “This #poem explodes at the end. What a terrific poem” Here it is:

   Granada 

   To be so far from oxtail stew, sardines
   in garlic sauce, blood oranges in pails
   along the avenida, midday heat
   wetting necks and wrists; to be so stuck
   in stone-thick ice and clouds and recall
   the pomegranate we shared, its hardened peel,
   the translucent membrane gently parting
   seed from luscious crimson seed, albedo
   soft beneath bald rind, acid juice
   running down our fingers, knuckles, palms,
   the mild chap of our lips from mist and flesh;
   so far away from that, and still
   the tangy thought of pomegranates
   crowning coats-of-arms and fortress gates
   like beating hearts prepared to detonate
   their countless seeds across Granada,
   ancient town of strangled rivers
   and nameless bones in every desert hill...
   In Spain, said Lorca, the dead are more alive
   than any other place on earth. Imagine, then,
   the excavation of his unmarked grave
   like the quick pull on a grenade's pin,
   and the sound that secrets make
   as they return from that other world
   of teeth and blood and fire.

The poems in The Lessons are juicy. I love the way the poems feel in my mouth. I enjoy all the details in the poems. Who says you can’t write poems with details anymore? Well, you can, and Diaz shows us how.

But there’s more than detail to these poems. There is wonderful leaping and yoking together of different images and events. For instance, the poem “Violin” is a poem about the life of a violin from when it was both “horse and tree” to the sounds it makes and how it “almost pulls itself / apart, longing for what it was”. The poem does this for nine unrhymed couplets. The poem could end after the ninth couplet, and it would be a fine poem, but then there’s the leap the poem makes from the ninth couplet to the tenth. The leap does what good poems often do – it uses the particular to illuminate something in humanity. Here are the last two couplets to show what you I mean:

   [. . . ] A violin almost pulls itself
   apart, longing for what it was, not unlike

   my father as he stood by the open mailbox
   reading my brother's first letter home.

And there’s a whole other story in that last couplet. Where is his son? At war? In the Peace Corps? Working abroad as a doctor in some small underprivileged village somewhere? And then the mind after the poem is done is trying to build more of a story into that last couplet. But the important thing is the violin and father relationship. The yoking of the two. The use of the violin to understand the father. The violin helps us understand what it’s like for the father to get that first letter. And this feeling is communicated well and well before it’s understood.

There’s something else going on in that leap, too. The poem leaps from being lyrical to being narrative. (By narrative I mean a poem that moves through time and that has causality. By lyrical I mean a poem that exists without time or is a vertical moment in time or is a deliberate focus on an item or a thing. W. C. Williams and George Oppen are often lyrical.)

This jump from lyrical to narrative in a poem happens a number of times in The Lessons. For instance, “Love Poem”:

   Love Poem

   I was the warmth that lifted
   from your pilled sheets, the glow
   of Sebastian in the picture book
   of saints, the moon gliding
   through the window beside your bed.

   I was the clock in your kitchen
   waiting to catch you in my gears.
   In the TV, I was the blue tube
   that saw your sadness run as silt
   down a mountain. I was the rush
   in the vein of every oak leaf
   that crowded your window.

   I was the drift of you before your edges
   twisted into a man. The swing
   of your loose pant cuff. The joint
   in the threshold; the rusted cart
   behind the house. You sensed

   a visitor, but how can I say
   that I was the one who curled
   the wallpaper and held the model
   airplane in its place? That it was I
   late at night, running in the current
   of your clock radio, searching
   the seashell of your ear?

In this poem, you see all these vertical moments in time – “I was . . . .” In the the last stanza, we get a bit of narrative:

   [. . .] That it was I
   late at night, running in the current
   of your clock radio, searching
   the seashell of your ear?

The leaps are my favorite occasions in The Lessons. I’m not sure if I’ve encountered that type of leaping before or at least noticed it before, but this time I did. I really enjoy its effects.

The Lessons is Joanne Diaz’s first book. It won the 2009 Gerald Cable Book Award. As a I said, The Lessons is juicy with details – like a good Spanish Tempranillo. It’s juicy in every lyric, narrative, and lyric-leaping-to-narrative poem. In fact, this would be a good book to use in a creative writing poetry workshop, you know, to show and teach students how to use details and how effective details are in creating emotions and engagement and in stimulating the imagination.

Often during The Lessons I feel like Ms. Griffin in Diaz’s poem “The Griffin.” When Ms. Griffin reads George Herbert’s poem “The Collar,” “she nearly left the prison of her body.” I don’t think I left the prison of my body, but I certainly forgot it existed. And that’s a lesson – good poetry is a momentary stay against confusion, and there are many momentary stays in Joanne Diaz’s first collection of poems, The Lessons.

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NB

I wish to thank Silverfish Review Press for providing such a detailed and narrative filled colophon about the Jenson typeface. I wish more publishers would do this.//

Another Review of Redactions Issue 13

Redactions is a living pulsing entity that enthusiastically embraces its mission.

The Review Review and one of its editors, Jenny Moore, sure had a good time with Redactions: Poetry & Poetics issue 13.

The review begins:

It’s all poetry all the time in Redactions, coming out of Brockport, New York every nine months. The journal doesn’t stop at printing a smorgasbord of poems; a solid third of its pages are devoted to poetry reviews and essays on poetry. Altogether it’s a well-curated package . . . . Editor Tom Holmes is clearly devoted to his journal, which has been around for at least nine years, and Redactions charmed me quickly.

I like the last sentence best because it’s insightful and true . . . I am devoted.

The review continues to say good things about the poems and pointed out some specific poems, like Lucille Lang Day’s “Journeys,” Star Coulbrooke’s “Sky’s the Limit,” and Veronica Kornberg’s “Five Mothers Consider Cunt” (“a sentimental favorite” for Moore.)

And then Moore got to the Poetics section of the journal, and said this:

When I moved into the reviews and essays that make up the last third of the journal, I had concerns that the prose might be intimidating or soporific – but these fears were short-lived. The prose was informal, insightful, and opinionated. Reading some of the pieces felt more like talking with a poet who reads and thinks about poetry than it did to reading yet another academic essay or analytical review.

Again, I like the last sentence, and I’m glad she picked up on that because that’s what I strive for when I write my reviews and hope those that review books for Redactions do the same. So success.

And the review even said some fine things about the cover.

So that’s another favorable review for Redactions: Poetry & Poetics issue 13. It’s success couldn’t have been had without all the poets who contributed and guest editor Sarah Freligh.

Thank you Jenny Moore and The Review Review for such a good read of the journal.//