Su Zi's Review of Father Tectonic by Robert Frede Kenter

When the Book Itself is Art

While the history of the artist book may have begun, as Wikipedia states, with illustrated manuscripts, and continued into our times with citations that include major art movements, discussions of art books contain two crucial elements: the object is a deliberate artistic creation, and the object is intended to function as a readable entity. Oftentimes, the experience of seeing an artist book might be in a restricted situation such as a museum, where the object itself is displayed but not touchable. Oftentimes, the lack of tactile interaction with the object lessens the experience of engaging with an artist book, as it is possible that the tactile experience is a significant part of experiencing the art. However, historical artifacts are fragile, and our experience of them must allow for respect and reverence to still the fingers’ lust to experience materials perhaps no longer available. Contemporary artist books are also rare, but still available, and any bibliophile with a personal library ought to include such entities in their collection.

Of the artist books available, one consistently delicious producer of artists books is Ethel, which reliably produces poetry chapbooks of extraordinary beauty. Typically, an edition of any book in their series will feature a cover involving physical collage that involves actual stitching, and editions tend to stay under one hundred copies. While it is true that many editions from the press are rightfully held in special collections, it is also possible to own a copy, to have one in hand, to touch the art.

In the case of a book called Father Tectonic, with text by Robert Frede Kenter, the book’s cover itself requires consideration: on a base of mylar, the work’s title and author have been printed, with the book’s cover image physically sewn to the mylar base...one can touch the delicacy of the threads rising above the smooth surface. The cover has additional stitching in varying colors of thread that form a grid column between the cover image and the spine, which is hand sewn—hand sewn in “toji”, a type of traditional Japanese binding where the stitching itself is a part of the aesthetic. Most stunning to this edition is a tiny pocket sewn on top of this collage, that contains a single yellow button. Thus, the book exists as a work of fiber art, as a kind of quilt, in that it is a sewn collage.

Artist books often contain text, and Kenter’s Father Tectonic is a full-length poetry work in and of itself.   The poems are muscular, with a maturity of voice that pleasures the ear. In “Milk River”, the poem opens with: “metal taste     methane/ his military   chest medallion” (16) and continues with irregularly lined stanzas that nonetheless have the fluidity of  speech. Kenter’s ear is impeccable here, with phrases such as “Ambling toward comatose” that are both macabre in semantics and lovely to the ear.

Experienced readers of poetry ought to take especial note of the poem “21 Investigations”, a long poem in sections that is the book’s physical centerpiece(pages21-30). The text here also employs irregular stanzas, numbered sections and the use of both italics and quotation marks, as well as open spacing with the text of the poem itself.  The sections vary in length, but each exists as a poem in itself, making the piece itself a quilt. The sort of quilt that Kenter is constructing contains some lovely fabric:

6

Mother when you came home from work

we went to the library

your black hair falling into your eyes

the light a certain quality of light

between maples and oaks the sidewalk

a vision through dusty glass windows. 

In the car your arthritic hand held the wheel

you read to me quietly as rain

falls between the cedars.  (24)

The emotional tone of love despite pain is a consistent element throughout this work. While the characters are recognizable as both specifics and symbols—a family—Kenter’s language mixes the violent or painful with language sensitivity. In this section above, each stanza functions on an assonant repetition: the o for “mother/home/work”, the  i for “library/eyes, light/ quality light/ sidewalk’ before the slant shift in “vision” to the sound of “arthritic hand”, the poem’s climax. Since this poem exists as an element in a poem series of twenty other sections, it is a poem within a poem, genre-bending in itself.

What we have thus at hand is an artistic consideration of no small weight, despite its  physical ability to fit into a simple mailing envelope. Given the temporal limitations on the availability of the object, it’s a wonder that art of such gravatas can be ordered and held at hand as prosaically as any kitchen subscription. That one can actually subscribe to the press and get such wonderful books for less than a pizza is a wonderment of our times.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

GAS Featured Poet: R. Bremner

 A four-time honoree in the Allen Ginsberg Awards, R. Bremner has been writing of incense, peppermints, and the color of time since the 1960s, in nine books/chapbooks, and hundreds of journals and anthologies including International Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, The Journal of Formal Poetry, Red Wheelbarrow, Oleander Review, seventeen jazz poems in Jerry Jazz Musician, and Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry. His eBook Mirrors, from Grandview University, is available free of cost from the author. Ron appeared in the legendary first issue of Passaic Review in 1979  along with Ginsberg, Laura Boss, and a plethora of sanguine young poets.

Mega

You have an ego the size of a small planet.

You have to win at everything.

But there is no assurance that you won’t end up in a spittoon.

Perhaps, depending upon your luck and the weather,

       you will even be a footnote to history.

You have a target on your face 

(or what remains of your face after the cosmetic procedures have worn off).

Dorian Grey reminds himself of your life.

Take nothing for granted, my buddy, my pal.

You have been the winner in wars

     in wives, in arguments, in poker, in stocks.

In real life. 

In the olden days it was enough.

“A glimpse of stocking was looked on

       as something shocking.” 

Today, your earnings, your wins, 

     are subject to “legal review”, 

     especially if others who’ve triumphed

     seek to assure their continued triumph.

 

Having a headline featuring your financial ruin

       is no enviable position. 

Those who are featured on the covers of magazines

      which pretend respectability and honor, and

      newspapers which twist and disparage the truth  

      eventually end up recycled or burned.

 When the picture of a disfigured Dorian Grey

        begins to appear familiar when you look in the mirror, 

        it’s time to hire a ghost writer.

Take nothing for granted, old pal,

       after your eyes have been yanked and sold for spare parts. 

Your heart, kidneys, liver, sold to the highest bidder. 

Your conscience, vote, opinion, beliefs — 

       kidnapped, and held for ransom. 

No more “good old days” for you

       unless decency and justice rear their beautiful heads.

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for decency and justice.

Not in this time and place.

By the numbers

1. Subcutaneous dreams ensconce sodden memories. Wishes from your secret self perpetuate themselves in a swollen cask, like a fine wine.

2. Push back the cuticles of daily subterfuge to find yourself lurking unawares.

3. The whole shebang wandered in search of freedom’s sarcophagus on the dawn of an era presumed to be darkened by the blood of the lamb, but actually consecrated to heights unimagined.

4. Your mental muscles move cautiously beyond the realm of sequestered innocence.

5. Your giving back the blue jeans you wore in yesteryear's triumphs collided with my memories of unsanctioned, filibustered gallons of hope and bliss.

6. Dubious explanations dominated our desires.

7. Curious endeavors cornered the market on contrived creativity.

her feet echo from wall to wall

her feet echo from wall to wall.

the quick air died at her back.

lost luster blew its whistle

in the whorl of her burdened ear.

all the night gave her was granite shadow.

the guise of the world 

could break her down, but 

with the weight of her grit and

the bulk of her heart

she turned back.

(A found poem. All lines taken from various poems in Sylvia Plath’s Colossus.)

GAS Featured Poet: Jim Murdoch

 

Jim Murdoch is a Scottish writer living in Cumbernauld. He's been writing for over fifty years and his list of rejections is voluminous but he keeps at it. He's written most things over the years--novels, stories, songs, even plays--but he thinks of himself primarily as a poet and is currently producing poems at an unpresented pace. There are worse things to be doing in your sixties.

The Curse of Dimensionality

  

…refers to the phenomena of strange/weird things happening as we try to analyse the data in high-dimensional spaces – Swapnil Vishwakarma

  

Poems exist on a page, in the air,

in many minds, as bags of words,

as symbols and ideas within ideas.

  

Poetry exists in five dimensions:

three spatial, one temporal and

one existential.

  

The first four are positional,

either/or or here or there

but meaning is contextual

  

so,

in layman's terms,

it depends.

  

Meanings are not are or are not.

Meanings only ever seem.

Meanings are spooky.

  

And don't get me started

on the observer effect.

  

  

It Takes a Minute To…

  

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago. – Jim Bishop

  

…get started,

make a first impression,

say the Lord’s prayer—twice,

listen to a third of ‘A Fifth of Beethoven,’

figure out where you are

     and what comes next,

make a cup of tea (to fortify yourself),

read a page of Being and Time

     and not understand it,

be silent (in remembrance),

find your feet/phone/groove/voice,

copy 40 words out of Moby Dick

     and maybe understand them,

be the hero,

let the truth sink in,

take out the trash,

water your plants,

feed next door’s cat,

travel 22,000 miles through space,

watch a couple of ads on TV,

ruin a perfectly good relationship

     and have plenty of time to regret it.

Habitus

  

We first make our habits, and then our habits make us 

– John Dryden

  

I see the old man at dawn most days—

mostly dawn, no later than daybreak—

with his plastic bag and downcast eyes.

  

He never picks up anything but sometimes,

sometimes he lingers—no, attends—

and I wonder if he might and he might.

  

He’s sad—sad-looking, at least—or maybe,

maybe I’ve got it all wrong and maybe,

just maybe, it’s the other way round.

  

He’s like a writer wandering about

with a dried-out pen in his pocket.

And no notebook.

  

Or I may be reading way too much

into that damn carrier bag.

 

GAS Featured Poet: Jonathan Hayes

 

Jonathan Hayes has edited and published Over the Transom a Bay Area literary journal for the past twenty-seven years. He has also taught poetry and published booklets for children in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. His most recent publications are Ghetto Sunshine & Other Poems 1997-2023, Mel C. Thompson Publishing, California, 2024 and Purposeful Accident, Holy&intoxicated Publications, England, 2022. Recent work has appeared in Unlikely Stories Six, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, LAdige Review, Haikuniverse, Cul-de-sac of Blood, Poetry Super Highway, and others. He lives with his wife and their cat in Oakland, California.

Mongolian Woman in a Box

 

In 1913, a Mongolian woman

was condemned to death for adultery

 

She was confined in a wooden crate

and left in a remote location to die 

in agony from starvation and exposure 

 

To prolong her torture and suffering 

a small hole was carved for her head 

to stick partially out allowing her

to beg for food or for water from 

a bowl on the ground next to the crate 

 

The bowl of water was not refilled

 

The photographer, Stéphane Passet, was on

an “Archives of the Planet” expedition

bankrolled by a philanthropist and came upon

the Mongolian woman in a box

 

He did not free her taking photos instead

presumably in empathy and as historical documentation

 

What was her name, her favorite color, did she have children, 

how old was she, did she have a soul, and did her soul escape 

when her body died, was the wooden crate burned with her body 

still inside, or was her body taken out?

 

History leaves the photograph

 

The Mongolian woman still trapped to death inside

 

 

 

The Red Grocery Cart

after WCW

 

so much relies

upon

 

a red grocery

cart

 

weathered w/ dirt

and scratches

 

beside a homeless

person

 

Su Zi's Review of BLACK LESBIAN IN WHITE AMERICA and Other Writings

 

What is it to hold a life in one’s hands in the form of a book, of a selected works of a writer, the entirety of their writing life nestled as comfortably in the hand as if holding the writer’s hand, ghostly as it might be, along this journey. Such seem to be the case of the Sinister Wisdom series Sapphic Classics, whose website lists a dozen titles, a dozen women’s lives memorialized, archived for readers beyond their own lifetimes. While any selected works of a deceased writer does offer up a life’s work in memento mori, the authors represented in this series might have otherwise been erased from our cultural conversations. A Siri overview defines sapphic classic as “influential works of literature featuring lesbian or sapphic relationships, themes and characters” and goes on to cite Radclyffe Hall and Rita Mae Brown. 

Once, it might have been that there were whole areas of scholarship devoted to the greater lights in sapphic studies, but such programs are under demolition now. There are those who feel these losses deeply, who hope to rebuild after the dark ages, and such series as this one will again become foundational. 

This life we have in hand is that of Anita Cornwell, Black Lesbian in White America and Other Writings (2025) and edited by Briona Simone Jones.  In the foreword, Jones describes Cornwell as

At a time when she was the only out black lesbian writing [...] in the 1950s, she named how pervasive sexism and homophobia were [...]; at a time when she was the only black lesbian in the women’s movement in the 1970s, she cited their antiblackness [...] ; at a time when she longed for connection [...] the chokehold of Christianity and the myopic belief [...]not only stifled their relation to each other, but also made the critique of black patriarchy inconceivable (9)

The text also has an introduction made by Cornwell in 1981 as the work was originally from another small press and is now held in estate. In that introduction, Cornwell mentions the central section of this work, and interview with Audre Lorde. It is quite possible that some readers ought to house this work for that alone.

Cornwell’s introduction also mentions the fourth section in the text Lament for Two Bamboozled Sisters wherein writing “The fate of the womyn [Cornwell’s spelling] may strike some as being too stark, but i think most will have to agree that that reality is still a possibility for all womyn in a patriarchal society regardless of race or class” (12). This sequence is told in a series of letters, first to Bonnie, with the closing of the sequence to Bonnie’s daughter Chrisse. The letters are an exhortation of love to a friend:

Consequently, for the sake of all those nameless silent Sisters who have been sacrificed on the altar of male supremacy throughout history, don’t let your life be added to the list [...]

We Sisters must save ourselves. The sisterhood is Powerful. So Power to the Sisterhood (141)

The letter sequence continues with a break-up letter of some detail that includes

“But I fail to understand why you think that racism of some white womyn should make me want to endure the blatant sexism of most black men. Or any men for that matter. Which is not that racism is any less evil than sexism[...] (145).

There is another letter to Bonnie, written while on the way to the visit and in response to a phone call. After this, the sequence has the two letters to Bonnie’s daughter, Chrissie:

“Your letter, coming as it did on the fourth anniversary of your mother’s death, has rendered my pen well-nigh immobile” (153)

The reader becomes aware of having been privy to an entire life told in six letters—a terrifying compression of our lived experiences—yet, if not for those letters, that life would be, yes, another of the “nameless, silent Sisters” about whom Cornwell says that “And I have been driven to the point of madness [...]when witnessing such human degradation” (141).  That the original publication dates of these pieces are from 1971-1977 speaks to a conversation now both a half a century ago and painfully contemporary.

While some readers might find Cornwell’s insistence on philosophical consistency and egalitarian rights to be uncomfortable, or the romances on the excepts from the autobiography to not be resonant to anyone in any dating scene, or even that the work would have otherwise been out of print and thus lacks contemporary market appeal, let us remember that lost books are lost lives. While Cornwell’s literary accomplishment is obvious in the letters section alone, the wide ranging nature of the work deserves an equally wide-ranging readership. 

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.